How to streamline your business operations and unlock greater profit

RUNNING a small business in South Africa particularly these days comes with its own set of challenges.

- JEREMY LANG

Between rising input costs and increasingly price-sensitive customers, you can quickly find yourself between a rock and a hard place. If you feel like your bottom line is under more pressure than it can take, it might be time to streamline your business.

At its core, operational efficiency is about removing unnecessary friction in your business and ensuring that every rand and every resource is working as hard as possible.

Here's how to go about it:

Audit your current operations

Before you can improve anything, you need to understand what's actually going on. This means taking a hard look at all aspects of your business. Where are the bottlenecks and which processes are taking up the most time? It's also useful to get feedback from employees and customers here as they often spot inefficiencies that business owners miss.

A good operational audit will give you a clear picture of where your business stands and where the biggest opportunities for improvement lie.

Simplify and standardise processes

Complexity is the enemy of efficiency. The more steps it takes to get something done, the more time and resources it consumes.