3 Tips Your Business Can Use to Kick Off the New Year

1. Delegate

Most business owners are smart, ambitious people. That is often the key driver to their success, but as is often the case, a person’s strength can also be a weakness. Since business owners tend to be so smart and driven, they feel they can do things better than anyone else. As a result, they often try to do too much. We specialize in handling important, yet time-consuming and repetitive tasks like payroll and employee compliance that don’t need to take up time from a business’s key personnel. It’s hard for many owners to give up control of these kinds of tasks, but it’s been our experience that once they do, they realize how much better their time is spent focusing on other aspects of the business.

2. Communicate

We have heard time and again that one thing employees hate is a lack of communication within a company. We completely understand why this can happen. Business owners are extremely busy and are constantly dealing with one unexpected issue after another. So when something newsworthy happens within the company, good or bad, there’s often a tendency to avoid it because it’s just one more thing to have to tackle. Not to mention the follow-up communication that typically follows a company-wide announcement. Unfortunately, not sharing news creates a vacuum that human nature has a tendency to fill with incorrect information or rumors which are typically the worst case scenarios. We’re not suggesting you inform everyone about everything all the time, but communicating with employees early and often can help you avoid the rumor mill and gain trust from your employees.

3. Become a Master of Time Management

Time is all we have. Small businesses tend to have smaller staffs and if the business is growing, that means the staff is being strained even more. That’s why it is vital that you make the most of your, and your staff’s time. Besides simply making good decisions about how to spend your time, we recommend a few time-saving tips:

• When using calendars to schedule meetings, don’t always use the default 60- or 30-minute meeting. If you only need 20 minutes to accomplish the goal of the meeting, just use (and schedule) 20 minutes.
• Be on time for meetings. It goes without saying that if you have scheduled a 20-minute meeting and you show up 5 minutes late, you’ve wasted 25% of the time you’ve allocated, not to mention the fact that any staff waiting for the meeting to start represent payroll dollars that are literally being thrown away.
• Conduct meetings standing up or use standing tables for meetings. We’ve seen too many meetings devolve into story-telling sessions as people lean back in comfy boardroom chairs. Want to stay on point? Conduct a meeting while standing. You’ll discover that thinking on your feet is not just a figure of speech.

We’re all about helping small businesses grow. We hope these tips will help you kick off a great 2019.

~ The Simpeo Team