Four Key Initiatives That Lead to Operational Effectiveness and Higher Profits in Your Business

Does your business have the necessary initiatives to build operational effectiveness? If not, you may be cutting yourself short of higher profits or leaving money on the table. 

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, how big it is, or how mature it may be. A successful company requires four key initiatives to run the business effectively.

The following are initiatives, or business operations, that are the key to running a business effectively: strategic planning, operations design, initiative execution, and business intelligence.

Strategic Planning

Do you have a strategic plan for your business? 

With business operations, there is one main obstacle entrepreneurs often face — alignment of the vision, mission objectives, goals, and project initiatives. 

Moving forward without a clear plan is highly ineffective. After all, It’s the foundation and fulcrum of your business’s future. 

There are four main steps to strategic planning:

1. Identify your business’s vision, mission, and objectives. 
2. Decide on goals to move your business forward.
3. Create a mid-term action plan to reach your goals.
4. Implement measurement systems analysis (MSA) and key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate performance

Having a strategic plan helps lay a solid foundation. Creating a strategic plan sets a sense of direction. It unifies teamwork towards the same goals, measures performance, and creates cohesion throughout the company. It allows organizations to be proactive rather than reactive.

These all strengthen operational effectiveness which leads to:

• Higher profits
• Operational ease
• Organizational growth.

Operations Design

In order to build and implement your strategic plan, you’ll need an operations design that is right for you and your team. It’s the system your team will use to understand structure, priorities, and connect everything back to your business strategy so that it runs like clockwork.

In other words, operational design is the set of systems, standard operating procedures, processes, templates, tools, and rhythms your business follows on a day-to-day basis. 

Building these helps your team streamline workflows which leads to better execution, teamwork, accountability, and operational effectiveness.  

Initiative Execution

For initiative execution to work, you need to make sure everything is in the right place. 

Do you have the right team? Clear roles for each team member? An overall alignment to the business strategy and the right tools available for your team? 

You’ll need discipline, transparency, and efficiency to execute strategic initiatives successfully. 

That is to say, the team needs to be focused on the mission objectives and goals, have clear information and communication available, and be organized. 

Without these, you may fail to meet your project objectives on time and under budget. Team members may become disoriented, disorganized, or lose traction which means loss of valuable resources, time and money.

Strong project management and integrators can help your team understand the overall strategy and how everything connects within the organization. They help teams stay on track and maintain forward progress so that you have successful execution.

Business Intelligence

Periodically, take a step back to evaluate the business as a whole. Business intelligence comes from observing the overall well-being of your company which is every leader’s role. 

How are your strategic initiatives impacting the business? Do you have a positive company culture, file centralization and solid transparency within the company so that informed decisions can be made by all leaders and key stakeholders?

To understand your organization’s overall well-being, you’ll need metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to weigh, measure and evaluate initiatives. 

Measure them against other initiatives and how results and outcomes are impacting the business. This will enable you to see how everything is performing on a more holistic level . As a result, you’ll find areas for improvement and be more precise, targeted and focused.  

Business operations have a lot of moving parts across different departments, divisions and teams. When you have these four key initiatives down pat, performance optimization is on the horizon and your organization is on target for maximum impact. 

Are you a visionary leader who’s looking to implement operational effectiveness? Wherever you are in your business journey, we can empower you to fine tune your business. Reach out for free consultation, to increase your profits and maximize your positioning.