Building a lean business is a popular concept among businesses that want to achieve growth and success while minimising waste and maximising efficiency. In a lean business, the focus is on doing more using fewer resources, reducing costs, and improving overall performance. It’s all about working smarter, not harder!
Building a lean business is a journey, not a destination. It requires constant experimentation, learning, and adaptation.
Where can you start building a lean business?
An effective way to begin the journey is to understand where you are at right now. The easiest way to do this is to grab a bunch of post-it notes (or electronic post-it notes), get the team (if you have one) together and map out ALL of the steps that it takes to get a product or service to your customer. This will include big and small steps including customer service, production, delivery, invoicing and everything in between.
Then you will need to go back through the steps and work out if there are any that can be combined, removed, automated or replaced with technology. Once you have a true understanding, you can go into action mode to make the process smoother. It’s also important to set a regular meeting to work through all processes in your business to review and refine.
The key to keeping a lean business is focusing on continuous improvement, but how do you know if you are improving or if the actions are making a difference? Measure everything!
Data-driven continuous improvement
Being data-driven means measuring everything, from customer acquisition and retention to product usage and feedback. By tracking key metrics, you can identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions. There are loads of metrics that can help you to identify changes in your business, a simple Google search will bring up several for you to start tracking. My advice to any business is to make sure you can calculate the metric easily and it makes sense to your business, if the generic ones are not relevant, think about what is most important for your business and create a metric that works.
Use technology to your advantage
The second key part of continuous improvement is the focus on automation and technology. From my experience, businesses tend to try to throw more people into the business to help it grow, however, it’s also important to spend the time to review the processes of the business and upgrade these before hiring new people.
By implementing tools to help you build a lean business and using technology to streamline processes, you can reduce costs and improve efficiency. For example, you can use marketing automation tools to automate your email campaigns or use project management software to streamline your team’s workflow. With technology helping you with the nitty gritty, you will be saving time and money, while building a lean and smart business.
It’s a journey, not a destination!
The third key point here is that operating a lean business is a “continuous” approach, you need to be constantly looking for ways to optimise your processes, reduce waste, and improve efficiency. This requires a culture of experimentation and learning, where failure is seen as an opportunity to learn and improve. By focusing on continuous improvement, you can stay ahead of the competition and deliver more value to your customers.
Building a lean business requires you to be laser-focused to ensure you are always working towards using fewer resources, reducing costs, and improving overall performance. By focusing on measuring everything, using automation and technology, and continuous improvement, you can build a successful and sustainable business that is working smarter, not harder!
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