When your once-successful business starts to experience some form of stagnation – your employees are not motivated to put in their best, you’re experiencing customer attrition and maybe even financial losses – it may be time to start re-energizing your business.
Re-energizing your business means injecting fresh a boost of energy into your business, so that it becomes not just as successful as it was before, but maybe even more successful than that. A sustainable business is one that is able to successfully reinvent itself over the years, making sure that it remains viable in the market by meeting the constantly changing demands of their customers in the way they want their needs met. If you want your business to be sustainable and successful, the steps in this blog post will help you to inject energy into your business and start afresh.
Steps to Re-energizing Your Business
1. Reorganize and Realign Talent
In football, fans usually complain that the coach of their favourite team is not using players in their best positions to maximize their potential, and the same concept goes in business too. As the business owner, if you have too many responsibilities, it affects your ability to run the business effectively. Step back and carefully evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your team: employees, support infrastructure, business processes, etc. Based on your assessment reassign roles and tasks to those who are most qualified for those positions. Shake things up so that everyone gets to work where they will make the most positive impact on the business.
2. Change how you access your customers
If due to financial or contractual obligations you’re not able to change your business location to be closer to your customers, then change how your customers access you. If customer numbers have dropped and motivation is low, then set up a campaign to deliberately engage your customers. This could be online – which is always the cheapest and most effective – supported by phone calls and/or visits to your most important customers. This strategic move will increase your share of your customer’s mind your access to more customers if you include a reward scheme for referrals.
3. Revamp your Products, or Introduce New Products
Revamping existing products can be risky, so you need to be clear on what’s already working well and what isn’t. Leave what’s working and see how to tweak or enhance what isn’t. The potential this move has to bring in more profit, maintain customer loyalty, and upgrade your business image is great. Based on your engagement with your market you could create a new product, but test it first with a small customer base for acceptance before you throw too much money behind it.
4. Refresh your Brand
Refreshing your brand by making small but significant changes to your company’s image can revitalize your business extraordinarily. Ways you can do this include refreshing your logo, upgrading your website or creating a website if you don’t have one; becoming active on social media, and trying out new marketing strategies. Try a few low cost options to see what works, then invest in those you’re seeing good returns on.
5. Trim Down your Staff
This is painful but necessary. Recognise if you have the wrong number and/or fit of people and let them go in a dignified manner. Trimming down your staff helps manage your costs and makes room for new talent to come in that will bring new energy into your business. Moving people across functions also keeps everyone on their toes, so that sluggishness and lack of motivation do not get a hold in the company.
6. Learn and Grow
As the leader you set the pace and direction of your business, so it’s important you drive the process of ensuring you and your team keep learning and growing. This may mean getting an additional certification brushing up on leadership skills, taking relevant online courses, or organizing workshops and seminars for you and your staff. Leverage on relationships with friends/family for discounted rates in high quality face-to-face learning sessions. Don’t have the mindset if not training your team because they will leave. Invest in them so those who remain will take your organisation forward.
7. Evaluate your offerings
Critically evaluate all your products and services, and single out those that do very well in the market, those that have the most potential to bring in new revenue streams and those you should shut down. Redirect your focus on those products that are doing/have the potential to do well rather than focusing on the low-performing parts of the business.
Ideally you should carry this kind of exercise out at least once a year to make sure things are still performing optimally. Don’t wait for there to be a problem and start fire-fighting.
