When we’re ambitious and want to accomplish a lot, we find that there’s never enough time, money, or manpower to get them done quickly and nicely enough. What we can do is to reach as many targets as we can afford to with what we do have.
But it’s not always clear what the best ways are to allocate the resources we have at our disposal. If you absolutely need to set up a website and purchase new office equipment but have only enough money to cover one of these two needs, which would you choose to attend to first? What if you can’t easily tell which would be more beneficial in the short, medium or long term?
In this article, we’ll be looking at two ways to handle the more complicated decisions around devoting time, manpower, money and other resources in ways that ensure growth for your business going forward.
1. Spend More on What Gives the Most
It just makes sense that we would devote more of our time and money to aspects of our business that yield the most revenue for it or contributes the greatest part to its growth. This could mean repairing, replacing or adding to equipment that’s crucial to boosting the production of your most valuable product or paying higher salaries for the services of more skilled staff.
If there’s any lack of clarity with this point, it’s in the fact that you have to determine what internal agents actually contribute to your business’s growth. You might be able to tell what they are in many instances. In others, you may have to carry out an audit of your business to determine what they are.
If you’d like to know what departments are worth investing more in, you can carry out a review of their productivity based on measures for those individual departments. If it’s products, you may look at the sales you’ve recorded for all your offerings and determine which ones are bringing in more value for you. Channel more resources to the employees, departments, equipment, and products that are giving the business the most returns.
2. Devote Extra Time and Effort to Developing Potential
We want quick results. That’s understandable. The world isn’t standing and waiting for our business to grow and thrive. Why wait for personnel and conditions to get better? And what’s the point with expending our energies on improving them?
Here’s why harnessing potential is important: it’s exactly what you need if you’re going to build an enterprise that’ll last. It’s smart to spend on proven ability, but it’ also good to try ‘molding’ talent into a form that makes your business achieve more than it currently does.
Personnel and products don’t become ‘proven’ until they are given a chance to prove their worth. Besides, with potential, you have greater leeway with directing the course of their development and making sure that they fit in with the future you envision for your business.
Of course, you want to be certain that there is real potential with whatever product or resource you’re looking to develop. You can determine this by observing their performance for traits that correspond to promise; for example, a creative, innovative streak one employee displays on the tasks she performs, or another’s consistent willingness to put in the extra work to achieve excellent results on the job.
Extra Tip: Shed Less Productive or non-Core Business
You may do this partially, by outsourcing non-core aspects of your business to others within and outside of your enterprise; or fully, by laying off perennially unproductive personnel or selling off obsolete equipment. This brings your business to a leaner, healthier shape, and allows you to focus on the aspects that really matter.
While this isn’t exactly a means of allocating resources, it’s a way to prepare the ground for such allocations to work as efficiently as possible.
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