One of the biggest struggles that a business owner has to deal with is the fact that you often have to deal with more things at once than any human being couple possible be expected to handle. You’re often expected to focus on your employees and your customers, your business’s long and short-term goals, and just about everything else all at once without ever taking a break.
Of course, it hardly takes a genius to realize that this is a pretty untenable way to run a business. If you try to do this, then it’s pretty likely that you’re just going to end up making mistakes and burning out before too long. Because of this it only makes sense the best thing to do as a business owner is to prioritize. This is a great idea, but it does bring with it some issues. The main one being that you’re only human, and that means that you have biases and preferences just like anyone else. Because of this, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to end up focussing on certain things more than others.
Unfortunately, you can’t always guarantee that the things that you’re going to focus on are going to be more important than the things that you neglect, only that your attention will probably go towards the things that you’re more interested in. With that in mind, here are some the aspects of your business that you can afford to neglect.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure is one of those things that man business owners struggle with because it’s much easier to pay attention to when it’s not there than when it is. A functioning businesses infrastructure should essentially be invisible. It’s the sort of thing that should function behind the scenes and allow all of the elements of your business to run smoothly.
However, that’s not always the case. You need to make sure that you’re paying close attention to your infrastructure at all times, even when everything seems fine. Hire a dedicated IT team to focus on it and provide them things like AWS monitoring tools so that they are well-equipped to take care of any issues that might appear. It’s crucial that you don’t just think about elements of your business like this when they aren’t working. It’s much harder to fix a problem with infrastructure than it is to prevent it.
Employee care
The worst assumption that you can make as a business owner is that your employees are always happy. Sure, you pay them a fair wage at the end of every month, but you can’t always be sure that that’s going to be enough to keep them engaged and motivated to give your business their best work. You need to make an effort to support and care for your employees. Reward and recognize great work, listen to them when they have issues or concerns, and make sure that you’re as flexible as possible with them. Giving your employees a degree of freedom allows them to feel much more dynamically involved with the business, rather than feeling like just another cog in the machine.
Customer satisfaction
Most businesses sink a lot of time, resources, and money into their marketing strategies. This is, of course, incredibly important. Bringing in new customers is the way that your business can grow and expand in the future. However, the one mistake that far too many businesses make is that they focus on bringing in new customers at the expense of the ones that they already have. If you’re neglecting to offer care to your existing customers, then they are much more likely to be drawn away by special offers from your competitors.
Even things as simple as checking in to see how they are getting on with your product, or offering simple loyalty bonuses and discounts can go a long way to holding onto long standing customers. Showing them that they are valued is incredibly simple and easy, but it can have an incredibly positive impact on your business as a whole.
Recognizing that you have biases that impact the way in which you relate to your business and then working to avoid them is incredibly important. Sure, there are always going to parts of your business that require more work than others in order to get the most out of them. But if you’re focussing on a few things to the detriment of everything else, then your business is going to be totally unbalanced and will likely end up falling apart entirely.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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