Cutting The Dead Wood From Your Business Ship
A good analogy for running a business is that of a seafaring ship, one of the older, wooden contraptions it’s amazing people endured long months at sea with. To begin with, we build the ship with our bare hands, but one day it becomes ocean-worthy.
However, the ocean is not predictable. We must ride the waves, plug holes in the boat, effectively manage the crew, and always keep the goal in mind. We must also avoid the singing sirens of quick success that always lead to ruin.
We’ve labored this metaphor a little too much now, but forgive us one final image – cutting the dead wood and dead stock from your ship is important too, lest you weigh the ship down and struggle to operate.
For this reason, cutting the fluff, the overbearing detritus, and the tired accumulation of systems, documents, and processes from your company is all in service to one vital virtue – streamlining operations as well as you can. In this post we’ll discuss where to get started:
Staff Performance Reviews
It’s important to review your staff performance regularly and to schedule regular catch-up chats with them. This process is best held by your managers, but it can also be worthwhile to schedule regular performance reviews with your department to ensure the best results.
This isn’t to catch your staff out of course, if anything it’s to help them express their feedback or concerns and to see exactly what could be improved within their management or the team. However, it’s also true that staff performance, regularly reviewed, can also bring to light staff members who repeatedly fall under the goals set for them.
That may mean, in some cases, that they don’t pass their induction period, or that disciplinary measures need to be applied, such as demotion or even dismissal. This should never come without warning but after several attempts to right the course of action. Over time, staff performance reviews help you get the best out of your team, but in some cases, they can cut out dead wood too.
Streamlining & Managing Contracts
Asking “what is contract lifecycle management” is often very important, because the continual negotiations, agreements, mutual relationships, contracts and plans you have need to be updated, not only for planning purposes, but good bookkeeping, document discipline, and transparency where available, too.
Streamlining and managing your contracts in this way is not to catch you out, it’s an overarching system designed to help you renew what needs to be renewed, close certain accounts when they expire, and to make this entire process easier to handle from a document keeping perspective.
That in itself can help you cut out unwanted detritus from your organizational planning, helping you always operate with a clear-view, and streamlined objectives.
Obsolete Products & Services
It’s important to regularly review the performance of your products and services, and try to develop as a result. After all, if you’re going to review employee performance, why not the performance of your major money-makers? Obsolete products and services can be a real issue, and in some cases can confuse or detract from the effective library of products and services you’re doing well with.
Combining services, innovating scalable, modular packages, and streamlining your offering can be very helpful. Here you can also remove dead storage pages, obsolete payment integrations, or references to names that have been rebranded since. Even companies that rarely publish new products can benefit from going back and reading advertisement copy to make sure it’s still relevant. The same goes for your “meet the team” pages and any contact information that references offices you no longer use.
In other words, products, communications, and branding needs to be updated, and it’s essential to be vigilant.
Accounts & Data Closure
It can be worthwhile to purge customer accounts after a period of five years of inactivity, this not only helps you begin removing their data from your systems (especially if requested, and always in compliance with data retention laws), but it will improve cybersecurity by having less accounts that can be compromised.
Moreover, customers often have the right to be forgotten depending on what economic zone you operate in, and while you keep data for anti-fraud purposes where appropriate and legal, less data to manage can certainly help you keep data secure over time.
With this advice, you’re sure to cut the dead wood from your business ship, and benefit in the long run as a result. From there, your firm is sure to weather stormy waters with clarity and ease.
