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    How can I get better at looking internally at my business?

    As your business grows and develops, new people, processes and products will arrive. This is all positive but, as a business leader, you need to understand how everything fits together to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. By taking the time to look at the internal workings of your business, you’ll be able to identify both strengths and weaknesses in a timely way.

    Ways to help you deal with it:

    Action plan

    Learning to prioritise your internal strategies

    Effort : Medium
    Impact : Medium
    Use our five-part action plan to prioritise your internal strategies and improve your accountability as a leader.

    ACTION PLANS are a structured list of steps designed to help you approach tackling a particular business challenge.

    • We explain why each step is important
    • Customise by setting your own completion dates and assign tasks
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available

    Action plan

    Are your company’s processes fit for purpose?

    Effort : High
    Impact : Medium
    If you’re worried about how efficient a process is, our five-step plan can help you work out whether or not it’s fit for purpose.

    Action plan

    Identifying and overhauling outdated processes

    Effort : High
    Impact : High
    Poorly performing processes impact productivity and sap employee morale. Follow our five-step plan to fix systems that aren’t working.

    Action plan

    Sharing financial information with employees

    Effort : Medium
    Impact : Medium
    What information should you share with employees and what’s the best way to communicate it? Use our action plan to help you get started.

    Guide

    An introduction to getting better at looking internally at your business

    It’s important to stay up to date with what others are doing in your market and trends that could impact your business. When it comes to evaluating internal performance, however, it’s something that tends to slip down the list of priorities.

    GUIDES break a challenge down, providing important context and real-world experiences.

    • Based on SME experiences, not corporate jargon
    • Filled with real-world stories
    • Achievable steps every business can take

    Other support that's available

    Improving your internal processes

    Improving your internal processes

    Taking the time to think and learn about your internal processes can have positive implications for your business, as Workspace helpfully explains.

    How to spend your time

    How to spend your time

    By learning how to better manage your time as a business leader, Small Businessify explains how you’ll have more opportunities to look at the internal processes of your business.

    How other businesses have tackled something similar

    Claire Ladkin

    Real business story

    Work on your business, not just in your business

    Working on the business, not just in it, has been an essential learning for the leaders of All About The Cooks and Woky Ko..
    Tom Dunkerley, Sift

    Real business story

    SMART goals provide motivation and direction with a clear yardstick of success

    For Clownfish Events and Sift, the SMART concept is the cornerstone of successful goal setting – helping to provide provide motivation and direction..
    Dhruvin Patel

    Real business story

    Success doesn’t have to be defined solely by your sales

    Building an incentivised team and regularly reviewing KPIs helps Ocushield to not lose focus of what success means to the company..

    The questions lots of businesses are trying to answer

    What issue is keeping you awake at night? A bit of targeted support is often all you need to overcome those challenges.

    Select a topic

    Digital

    How can I improve the digital presence my business has? How can I streamline and automate some of our business processes? How do I work out the best digital sales channels to use? How should I use the data I have to improve decision making? How do I effectively seek external digital support? How do I know if my technology is robust enough for growth? How should I best budget and plan for new technology investments? How do I assess and choose the right technology to improve business operations? How can I understand what digital tools or support my business needs? How should I go about collecting data to improve my business?

    Leadership & Strategy

    How do I learn to become a better leader? How do I improve the communication in my business? How do I get staff interested in our vision and values? How can I reflect on my own strengths and weaknesses as a leader? How do I give my team autonomy and get better at delegating? As a leader, how do I learn to trust others within my organisation? How do I apply learnings from other businesses to my own company? How should my role as a business leader evolve with the company’s growth? How can I balance short-term needs with long-term targets? How do I get better at noticing and reacting to warning signs?

    People & Team

    How can I develop the skillsets of my workforce? How can I reduce employee turnover? How can I run a better appraisals process? How can I keep my best members of staff? How do I manage an effective remote workforce? How can I develop career paths for my staff? How can I increase staff engagement and motivation? How do I deal with a challenging member of staff? How can I improve my hiring and onboarding practices? How should I performance manage my staff?

    Planning

    How can I work out what required skillsets are missing in the business? How can I get staff interested in the financial situation? How can I define and communicate my vision for success? How do I ensure my business can navigate a dip in trading? How do I know when to scale up my business? How can I make my business more resilient to change? How do I better inform my business plans? How do I know when to invest in my business? How can I get better at looking internally at my business? How can I balance ambition with setting realistic goals?

    Sales & Growth

    How can we better serve our most loyal customers? How can I identify new customers to target? How do I create targets and KPIs for my staff? How can I get a better return on investment from my marketing? How do I make sure my team and processes are ready for growth? How do I develop a clear unique selling point? How do I financially plan for new opportunities? How do I build a network to support my business? How do I benchmark my business against competitors? How can we develop new products and services?
    All