Don’t Go it Alone: The Mistake your Small Business Can’t Afford to Make
Traditional concepts of best business practice have changed significantly when it comes to small businesses. Not only are small businesses now an essential element of most growing economies and therefore ripe for governmental support, the way in which they are perceived in society has greatly improved. Owners, founders and employees of small businesses are now applauded for their ingenuity and creativity, often having found unique solutions to long-term problems that no one had previously thought to address. Start-ups and niche markets can be extremely lucrative, especially with easy access to vastly more global markets. The reality is now that you can reach a much wider audience, much faster, so your product or service automatically has a much larger customer base. This shift, or realisation, isn’t just about how we view small businesses, it has also transformed how we manage them.
Bucking the trend
Previously, many organisations, both large and small, would consider secrecy to be paramount to their success and prioritise fierce protection of their processes and operations. This sentiment has definitely evolved in the age of innovation, technology and international communications. That isn’t to say companies shouldn’t keep things secret, obviously sharing USPs or exciting ideas isn’t the wisest idea, but being more open could be far more beneficial to your business than you might think.
Small business might lead the charge on visionary concepts, but they also face stiff competition and a fight for scarce resources. Savvy owners or managers will be evolved enough to embrace the idea that external sources might be able to assist in a multitude of ways. Every business will face challenges, missteps or crisis situations and solutions might not always be readily available. Imagine the possibilities you might have for improving your business’s performance and readiness if you had a wider net of experience to draw from?
Collaborative Networking (a.k.a networking isn’t a dirty word)
At Identify Action we work with individual companies on crafting the essential steps to a brighter financial future, namely their strategy, processes and measures. Even for the smallest of businesses, these elements are vital to keeping things on track, both in terms of productivity and the bottom line. One of the ways in which we can improve how effective this can be is to conduct it in a public workshop forum; automatically creating a collaborative environment that significantly enriches the training.
Wondering how? Have a think about the last time you might have struggled with a recipe or some DIY; you might even have reached out to someone you know who had done that task before to ask them how they got on. Perhaps they gave you a piece of advice that enabled you to cook a delicious feast or get that tool to work properly? By sharing experiences, we can grow our collective knowledge and therefore make smarter decisions about how to make things work for us; that is exactly how it can also work for your small business.
Benefits for your small business
Spending time with a group of like-minded persons discussing the essential frameworks of any small business, in an environment that encourages the free exchange of ideas, provides a unique opportunity to share, support and learn from others. As well, it provides a potential platform to discover vital solutions, perhaps previously unconsidered, that could transform the way your company operates for the better. Imagine the possibilities of being able to hear about other small businesses’ experiences with HR, procurement, procedures and operations? You could discover new methods that could help, pitfalls to avoid and fixes that could be absolute lifesavers. Remember, just because your company is small, or you feel like you are alone, it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from others or that their experiences can’t be valuable to your strategic evolution.
The next step
At the Identify Action Workshop, you will not only be given vital outlines and tools on how to process map your business and create essential structures for growth, but you will have unique access to similar institutions as you collectively share best practices and offer multiple points of view. Listening to the real-life scenarios and experiences of others, as well as sharing your own, helps everyone to engage more with the overarching knowledge and tools being provided, as well as significantly improving retention amongst participants and therefore aiding in the successful implementation of practices outlined. This is the type of innovative technique that combines integrated collaboration with expert knowledge, so that you can get the most out of your enrollment, the highest return on your investment and the best results for your company.
If you would like to get expert advice on aligning your company’s strategy to business processes and performance that will continually drive improvements and profitability, get in touch with Identify Action at https://identifyaction.com/ or via email on action@identifyaction.com.
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