By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions With constantly changing economic conditions, business leaders often encounter the daunting task of improving their organization's profitability. Some may not know where to start. A great way to do that is to optimize their organizations. Check out the following five steps an organization can focus on to optimize their organizations -- because who doesn't want to elevate their profitability? 1. Craft a Culture Employees Can Embrace According to McKinsey, companies with cultures ranking in the top quartile of the Organizational Health Index post a 60% higher return to shareholders and 200% higher than those in the bottom quartile. There's no easy formula for creating a great culture; doing this subject justice in a 500-word blog could prove quite challenging. The foundation starts with valuing each individual, giving them a voice in everyday matters, and creating an environment where employees love to come to work. Then, build from there. 2. Work Closely With Employees to Develop Goals They'll Support When business leaders establish top-level goals and all levels of the organization establish their goals in support of them, that's an excellent place to start. However, the employees have to buy into their plans. Executives must cast a vision of where the organization is heading and the employee's role in getting there. If employees don't connect to the big picture, productivity can suffer, and the organization's profitability could follow suit. 3. Make Effective Use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Successful organizations use KPIs to measure progress toward their goals. Even if you're currently using KPIs, you want them to tie directly to your most critical operations so you can stay on top of the progress toward your goals. You'll be alerted when measures are trending downward by monitoring your KPIs so that you can intervene more quickly with solutions. 4. Improve Your Processes Organizations with streamlined business processes experience reduced costs, increased revenue, and improved profitability. Take Merchants Insurance Group. After streamlining their Portfolio Management area operations, they improved on-time project delivery to 80% and achieved a 758% revenue growth in the first two months. For your operations, focus first on improving your processes, which are the most significant cost drivers and have the most time-consuming tasks. By doing so, you're likely to experience more significant gains on a shorter timetable. 5. Automate Your Processes When organizations automate their business processes, it's a powerful tool for reducing costs, improving productivity, and increasing profitability. It's common for productivity to increase by over 300% with workflow automation over previous processes. A great plan is to automate recently improved processes. Doing so can achieve even more significant cost reductions and productivity increases than process improvement alone. Speaking of automating processes, Michael Cantu's and my best-selling book on Amazon, No-Nonsense Digital Transformation, discusses the power of automating processes. Not only that, we dive deeper into how to transform cultures and encourage employee buy-in of organizational initiatives. So it isn't just for digital transformation fans! If you're interested in learning more, click the button below.
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By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions As a business leader, have you and your team embarked on a carefully constructed business plan only to find it quickly unraveled as you executed it? To avoid this trap, here are five suggestions on how to ensure your plans lead to successful outcomes: 1. Bring Your Best to the Table When you develop a plan, include a broad range of opinions, expertise, and experience. In other words, your team's input is essential to plan success. Ensure that your team is included upfront in the planning process so that your plan will result in a well-rounded approach. 2. Develop Contingency Scenarios Even the best plans can go awry when unaccounted-for situations arise. That's why it's important to brainstorm multiple possibilities upfront to ensure your bases are covered if things don't go as you would have liked. A good formula to follow is IF THIS, DO THAT. When such an event occurs, consult with the team to decide which contingency plan would work best (when there are multiple options) and, if need be, adapt your choice to your circumstances. 3. Communicate Plan Changes When you experience changes to your plan, ensure that all your team members and affected stakeholders receive notice of such changes. Doing so will help prevent misunderstandings and potentially wasted effort spent on a previous version of the plan. 4. Create Avenues for Gathering Feedback and Data Make it easy for team members and stakeholders to give you feedback during plan execution so that you can make adjustments along the way. This will help ensure your path to success. Providing a forum for regular reviews where feedback is encouraged is a great way to do this. Monitoring progress through data collection as you execute the plan is also essential. Ensure that your data collection techniques are rigorous enough to ensure data integrity. 5. Plan for Regular Progress Reviews Having everyone on the same page is crucial for plan success. Ensure your team meets on at a pre-determined frequency, considering plan speed, complexity, scope, team availability, and size. The planned frequency and required attendance for particular team members for reviews can change later if the need to do so arises. Here's some good news: a great way to accomplish all these suggestions is through Scrum, a proven, best-practice approach. It just so happens that it's one of my passions! What is Scrum? In short, it's a streamlined way to manage projects. It allows for regular reviews with stakeholders and synergistic daily meetings (called Daily Scrums) that keep communication lines open amongst all team members. Plan changes can be made on the fly and quickly communicated to team members and stakeholders. Better yet, projects can often finish much faster than traditional approaches. You don't need to take my word for it! Click on the button below to download a case study about one of my clients.
By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions As business leaders, we sometimes make big mistakes that can be hard to shake from our minds and consciousness. What steps can we take to turn things around? All-Pro Defense Tackle, Chris Jones of the Kansas City Chiefs, is a great role model for handling missteps and charting a path to success. He used the mistakes he made in a crucial game last year that ended their 2021-2022 Super Bowl run, miscues that he used as fuel to achieve tremendous success this season. In Chris Jones’ own words, “Last year stuck with me. I had two critical plays that I should have made that I missed (in the AFC Championship Game). We know how the game went.” Here are three things Chris did that we can use to turn our mistakes around for good. 1. Work With a Mentor After last year’s tough loss, the Chiefs brought in a new defensive line coach. Chris said about his coach: “Bringing him in as a mentor for me and a defensive line coach has completely [transformed] my game, whether it’s the run game or the pass rush.” As a result, he’s won two awards this season for being the best defensive tackle in the NFL. Steps You Can Take: If you need a mentor or coach, find one! Your connections can be an excellent source for referrals to outstanding individuals. And if you are already working with one, fully engaging in the relationship to help ensure accountability is a perfect thing to do. 2. Use Mistakes as a Motivator Chris didn’t let his past mistakes plague him; instead, he used them as motivation to improve. During the offseason, he worked diligently with his mentor to enhance one of his weaknesses (tackling runners). His hard work paid off—he achieved a career-high number of tackles against "the run." Steps You Can Take: Objectively evaluate what you could have done better and develop a plan to improve. And if you're still in a place of regret, decide to put the past behind you. If doing so is still a challenge, consider the possibility that you may need to forgive yourself for your mistakes, an often overlooked action we can take that can yield tremendous results. 3. Finish Well In Chris' own words, "It's not about how you start. It's about how you finish." The Chiefs' defense had its best season performance in their last game. They struggled much of the year due to an overhauled, inexperienced defense. But after playing 17 games together, they’re clicking, just in time to bring their best game forward as they head into the playoffs! Steps You Can Take: Keep building upon your plan to overcome and succeed. Work with your team to build consensus and cooperation so you're all on the same page for goal achievement. # # # Speaking about goal achievement, are you properly positioned for success in digitizing your organization? If you have questions in the area, check out Michael Cantu's and my best-selling book, No-Nonsense Digital Transformation. It provides a step-by-step roadmap for preparing for and implementing digital transformation initiatives in your business so you can help ensure success even before you start. If you’re interested in learning more, click the button below!
By: Kathy Kent Toney, CEO & Founder of Kent Business Solutions With the start of a new year, most organizations' leadership are looking for ways to decrease costs and increase revenue. One way to go about that is to eliminate waste in their operations. Employees ultimately want to do the same thing. They don't want to deal with inefficiencies that waste their time. What to do? Streamline your workflows with Lean tools. For those of you unfamiliar with Lean, here’s a simple definition: The use of Lean eliminates waste in manufacturing and office processes. It also creates more value for customers while using fewer resources. Doing so lowers costs. But those aren't the only benefits. Streamlined processes also reduce employee frustration. Through Lean activities, employees help develop the solution. Since they are involved firsthand, this often brings a greater sense of engagement and job satisfaction. Reduced costs and more engaged employees ultimately contribute to greater profitability. And what company doesn't want that? You don't need to take my word for it. Here's an example of a successful Lean implementation in which my colleague was involved. Before they started the project, this Kansas City manufacturer recorded $18M in annual sales and employed 100 employees. Two years after their Lean implementation, they experienced these results:
Companies that embrace Lean principles aren’t the only ones to reap the benefits—customers do as well. When companies go Lean, customers experience higher satisfaction and increased product quality. A fundamental tenet of Lean is ensuring that only value-added activities occur regularly for which a customer would be willing to pay. You may think: "these benefits are all good, but I don't work on a factory floor. Here’s some good news: any organization or discipline can benefit from using Lean. Check out this video to see how Lean can help Sales and Marketing! Are you interested in learning more? Here are some tips on starting a Lean-thinking attitude in your organization. If you'd like to explore what Lean or other process improvement approaches can do for your organization, I'm offering a free ½ hour Discovery Call. I'd love to discuss any questions about Lean or any challenges you are experiencing!
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