Someone else’s business always looks busier, more flourishing, or, somehow, having more customers. 

What is your definition of a business “doing better”? The above?

Is a business that always seems buzzing, necessarily better?

As I’m writing this post, it is close to 10pm, and I’m counting towards the half an hour mark, just waiting for a takeaway packet of fried noodles.

Are they that busy?

“The boss must be making big bucks!”

Really?

Before the boss smiles ear to ear and embarks on his gleeful hop towards the bank to collect the big bucks, think again. What would you think if it was your business?

Analyze your business operations. Are there points where there are bottleneck issues? Is everyone operating at full capacity? Or are particular functions overloaded in a lopsided manner?

In this particular case, all the buzz seems to revolve around one lady. She takes orders at the counter, picks up phone calls, handles cashier duties, and allocates – while shouting loudly (and impatiently, with an aura of importance) – to servers which dish should go to which table.

All this is happening with the bunch of servers otherwise looking disengaged and, when barked at to serve, looking flustered.

All I hear is the all-important lady dishing out orders at the waiting staff, who look lost, and each holding onto a dish, waiting for directions from the “control tower”.

They mixed up my dish.

I observed, while waiting, that it was just one of many other slip-ups within that period of time. A customer wrongly took an order belonging to another customer, and another dish was served to the wrong table. So there you go, precious resources wasted due to mistakes, not to mention stretching the service timeline, poor customer experience and monetary losses.

When situations like this happen where there is no queue, yet some employees look unnaturally busy, this is usually a telltale sign that the business owner needs to look deeper. Some questions to ask yourself:

• Are the employees in positions in which they are a good fit?
• Do you have the correct number of employees supporting your volume of clients?
• Where are the bottleneck points and areas of weaknesses in the entire process from sales to fulfillment?
• Are there systems in place to improve efficiency and reduce mistakes?
• What are your profit margins per customer?
• What are your sales figures – overall or by product type?
• What is your conversion rate – from leads to prospects to customers?
• Do you have metrics set up to measure and provide feedback for all the above?

Businesses in different industries will have to identify the Key Performance Indexes (KPIs) that best measure their performance.

KPIs can be spread across different business aspects, such as:

1. Customer service
2. Employee management and productivity
3. Profitability
4. Expense management
5. Systems and processes

If starting the process feels overwhelming, pick one to get going. It can be client satisfaction scores, time taken for fulfillment, client to service employee ratio, or mistake occurrences per individual process.

As many wise men have said, “What you can measure, you can manage.”

Visit La Belle Couture page to find out more about Peiru's work.

_{Edited by Nedda Chaplin}

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