As small business owners ourselves, we get it – ensuring that your customers and employees are happy with your business while maintaining an appropriate amount of growth and a healthy ROI can be a constant balancing act.
Small business owners wear a number of hats and may function in a number of roles on their org chart, so making the claim that there’s one singular challenge facing all small business owners is painting with broad strokes, to be certain.
However, we see our clients and our peers facing the same issues regardless of industry, business size, or experience. The biggest challenge facing all small business owners is communication.
After all, owners have to communicate effectively with their employees and their customers, as well as teach their team to do the same while still focusing on the business, the product, and the work that’s on their plate. Effective communication and processes around excellent communication is paramount – and poor communication is likely wasting a lot of time and money.
We’ve all been there: we’ve been in a staff meeting and rolled out a new process, and everyone paid attention and nodded and then went into the week and nothing changed. It can feel like your communication is falling on deaf ears!
So, you send out a company-wide email, and you say it again at the next staff meeting. The repetition and the frustration wastes more time and eventually one of two things happen: you give up or you spend even more time trying to implement change.
Eventually, the new process becomes a habit and you move onto the next thing, but shouldn’t one meeting be enough to effect change?
In theory: sure, it should. But the reality is that repetition is the mother of all studies, meaning, your people – employees or customers! – need to hear something repeated on average seven times before they’re ready to make a change.
Your time is valuable and you shouldn’t have to spend it repeating yourself, even if that’s what the people around you need. There should be a way to automate these new initiatives and streamline your communications so that you can use your time doing the things that made you want to own a business in the first place.
We actually created a guide to help you streamline your communications, and we’d love to share it with you for free. In it, you’ll learn skills and tools that will dramatically improve your communications internally, saving you time and money. Click here to download it free!