Dynamic Business

Productivity not only saves you time and money, but also helps you focus more on your core business. Here are some solutions to make you business more productive.

Productivity is a byword fast becoming management-speak for ‘cutting costs’. While productivity can certainly help reduce costs, the concept of productivity is more about how to maximise quality time on your business, with one of the tangible benefits being a healthier bottom line due to having more time to make money.

Lack of productivity often affects small companies that lack the human resources to cover the non-productive aspects of the business. To be a successful solo business operator, for example, you would need to maximise the proportion of billable time in your core business, while minimising the time spent doing un-billable administration work. Hence businesses with staff require a mix of staff, weighted in favour of those producing profitable goods or services.

Leave it to the professionals
One solution to ensure you invest in your core business is to outsource activities that fall outside of it. Unless you are an accountant, why should you spend half a day a week slaving over the books when you could pay a professional who will take half the time? The freed-up time can then be diverted to profitable activity, enough to pay your accountant and more.

Mark Jones, general manager of business centre franchise MBE Australia, says businesses should look to outsource as much of their non-core operations as possible. He gives the example of a typical business that has bought a high quality colour printer for the occasional run of marketing material: “There’s the cost of the capital equipment, the ongoing cost of maintaining it, supplying it with materials, and if you’re paying $1,000 a square metre for your office space, there’s that cost,” he explains.

“Then add the cost of staff—if you have equipment, you need to have people to run it and they need to know how to run it properly. After all of that, you’re not going to make any money from printing.”

You shouldn’t have to invest so much time or money into printing when you can outsource that part of the business, and that’s where the MBE concept has taken off, Jones believes. “It has become, for many businesses, their back office. They don’t buy equipment or take on new staff, they just outsource their services to MBE.”

The model has worked in the current economic environment because businesses are reluctant to outlay money for staff and equipment. “Now we get people who are using the services because they want to save money—they don’t want to buy equipment, they don’t want to take on staff,” says Jones, but adds that boom times were good to them too. “When everything’s going great, we get the overflow.”

In addition to print services, the centre has been designed as a one-stop shop for businesses’ back end operations with a telephone-answering service, mailboxes with a suite address, and courier collection, which works well for home-based businesses and business owners who travel. And you needn’t make the trip out to find an empty mailbox—they provide SMS alerts for when things arrive for you, saving businesses time.

Jones sees the outsourcing trend continuing, not just for business centres such as MBE, but in general. “Companies will tend to outsource more, they will be a lot leaner with less staff and less office space. They will be a lot more adaptable and flexible businesses that will want different services like consultants and other people who specialise in doing what they do,” he believes.

Softly does it
Software as a service (SaaS) has been an increasing trend for small businesses because of its streamlined simplicity and its scalability, both key aspects of saving time on finding and maintaining software.

Marcus Bartram, director of emerging markets at Telstra Business, says SaaS solves a number of problems for SMEs, especially those without a dedicated IT person on staff. Gone are the days of wasting hours chasing multiple vendors and their respective helpdesks. Instead, SaaS provides a platform that enables SMEs to find quick, suitable solutions without the need for specialist IT knowledge.

Bartram looks after Telstra product T-Suite, which is a SaaS platform with the added bonus of being on the Telstra network so any problems can be diagnosed with one phonecall. “Previously there used to be a chain. If there was a problem they’d turn to an IT guy and then he’d turn to the software people, then they’d blame the network and call Telstra,” he explains. “What we do is provide a single point of contact and we sit in front of all the people they would have contacted previously.”

Future capabilities will include SaaS for mobiles and a cross-product platform that will give users indicators from all their applications. “This will be a dashboard to see that, based on all the information from all these applications, this is the health of your business,” says Bartram. The tool will save business owners from having to enter into each application to retrieve results.

Another software solution to make your business more productive is the paperless office. Document management, including printing, filing and retrieving documents, can take a big chunk of time you’re better off using on your core business. According to financial solutions company Attache Software, not many businesses know that the Australian and New Zealand tax offices no longer require paper records if you meet their electronic record-keeping requirements. In addition to saving filing time, electronic records offer document security and result in faster handling of enquiries because the business’ document history is at hand.

Attache estimates that a business with an average monthly total of 400 documents—such as invoices, statements, remittances and pay slips—could save more than 40 hours of staff time each month using a suitable system, time better spent more productively elsewhere in the business.

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