Small Business Best Practices: Tips to Keep Your Business Running Smoothly

Guest Writer, Gloria Martinez, www.womenled.org

Running a successful small business is no easy feat, but several best practices can help to improve business efficiency, profitability, and workplace collaboration and communication. The Family Flips discusses four of these best practices in the sections below, so read on to find tips for running a successful small business!

Monitor Your Financial Performance

When you’re busy running a business, certain things do fall through the cracks — but financial monitoring shouldn’t be one of them. Financial monitoring offers insights into your company’s most and least successful areas, enabling you to reduce spending, increase revenue, and make the smartest financial decisions for your small business.

As you begin monitoring the financial performance of your small business, it’s a good idea to use an income statement (also known as a profit and loss statement). This type of statement measures your financial performance throughout a specific time period. Some companies run their profit and loss statements quarterly, while others prefer to run them each month.

A profit loss statement template is one great option for monitoring your business profits, losses, expenses, and revenue — and determining whether any changes need to be made to your business in order to improve your financial performance.

Organize Your Small Business

As a business owner or entrepreneur, organization is a skill you’ll need to master in order to successfully run your small business. And fortunately, technology makes this easier than ever. You can use apps like CamScanner, for instance, to scan, manage, and convert important business documents, while Dropbox can be used to store and share files in one easily accessible location. You can even finally formalize your business structure as an LLC through sites like ZenBusiness.

Other organization tools for small businesses include task management software (like nTask and ProjectManager.com), customer relationship management software (such as HubSpot CRM), and note-taking apps like Evernote. Plus, password management tools such as 1Password and LastPass can be used to safely and securely store and manage all your business passwords.

Stay Connected to Your Team

Even if your team is still working remotely, it’s important to connect with your employees on a regular basis — whether it’s on Zoom, Slack, or by email. The team at Learning Tree International offers the following recommendations for connecting with your team from afar:

• Meeting with each employee daily via Microsoft Teams (or another video conferencing software)
• Organizing team-wide meetings twice per week
• Sharing daily goals and activities with your team (like taking a walk over lunch)
• Sharing photos of recipes, home projects, and pets to promote interaction and communication between team members
• Organizing virtual happy hours and coffee chats

In addition to connecting with your team virtually amidst COVID-19, there are some steps you can take to improve workplace communication. To do it, Tim Eisenhauer of Axero Solutions recommends creating an onboarding process for new employees, implementing intranet software and collaboration tools (like Microsoft SharePoint and Asana), and encouraging employees to engage with your company’s social media channels.

Join Your Local Chamber of Commerce

In addition to monitoring your financial performance, organizing your business, and staying connected to your team, joining your local chamber of commerce is another best practice to implement as a small business owner or entrepreneur. By joining your chamber of commerce, you can take advantage of networking opportunities as you meet other business owners in your area. Plus, you’ll increase your exposure in the community!

All business owners face challenges, but these best practices will help to keep things running as smoothly and profitably as possible. Plus, you’ll improve workplace communication and collaboration — and turn your company into a place your employees truly love working at!