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Written by: Kevin Gardner
Managing a business is no easy feat. There are always myriad factors at play and many employees working in the interest of the overall company from different roles and perspectives. One of the most essential ways that a small business can become more successful is to simplify the management process and to reign in the chaos inherent to a complex system. Here are the tips every small business owner needs in order to excel.
Outsource Labor
Hiring and managing a staff is incredibly important, but it’s not the only way to get the labor your need done. In fact, it’s not even always the best way to keep your business operating. In many cases, the work that needs done will require a heaping helping of expertise that actually disincentivize hiring staff and encourage the outsourcing of that labor to third party companies. IT is a great example, because IT is a complicated field, an understanding of which naturally eludes the average person. You can search “IT company in Boston,” for example, in order to find many solutions to this problem in the form of IT companies fully staffed with experts in the field.
IT is not the only kind of labor that benefits from outsourcing, however, and another crucial one is marketing. Marketing is perhaps even more codified in businesses standard practices as a type of labor that one has outsourced, perhaps because it’s even more important to the success or failure of a company. When you hear marketing, you probably think advertising, and that is an accurate summation, but it’s wildly underdeveloped. Marketing is a hydra consisting of many heads other than advertising, another prominent one being branding, something that will continue to affect all other marketing methods and endeavors.
Prioritize Employee Morale
While you often should outsource labor to other companies, this isn’t always the case. There are many roles that would be more costly to outsource than would be worth the investment. However, there is a better way to invest in your on site staff, and that’s simply to treat them well. Since the industrial revolution, bosses have taken up a villainous role, demanding productivity and giving as little as possible in return, but that paradigm is slowly shifting in favor of attacking the productivity problem by making the well being of employees a priority. Science has shown that making demands from an authoritarian perspective simply doesn’t work. Meanwhile, being nice does wonders, and rewarding employees for their hard work will drive them to provide even better results moving forward.
Remote Employment
A growing trend in the employer employee relationship, both out of necessity and because it has a number of benefits, is remote employment. Remote employment is more or less what it sounds like, an arrangement in which employees work from home via a computer and an internet connection, and this work can likewise include any roles that require nothing but a computer in order to get the job done. This means that a variety of clerical positions fit the remote employment to a tee, and various forms of content creation such as writing and design can be given the same treatment.
The benefits of remote employment are many, and those benefits can easily go both ways. For starters, a business stands to benefit from reducing the costs associated with keeping an employee on site, namely their potential use of electricity and water, among other nefarious costs. Employees can benefit from curating their own working environment from the comfort of their own home. There will be growing pains for both parties when making the conversion to remote employment, but even that is sure to change as it becomes the new normal for many types of work.
Managing a company is complicated, and doing so successfully means simplifying it when and where you can. These tips can give you a great place to start your journey, but there are countless other methods of making business management more, well, manageable.
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