If you currently have or are planning to start your own B2B company in the future, buckle up and get ready for a wild ride. There are going to be some sleepless nights, frustration that seems to never end, and a phone that never stops ringing. If you are successful anyway.
In order to keep the doors open and the website up, you are going to need much more than a string of beginner’s luck. You need to have a plan for everything. While it would be far too strenuous to try and cram everything you will need to know about owning a B2B business, here are three crucial areas that will need to have someone’s attention if you are wanting to increase the amount of profits you are seeing. The best way to increase profits is by improving efficiency of employees or staff in the organization. High efficiency will eventually lead to increased output and lower costs but there is a possibility that quality of service or products may get low so, efficiency should not be accepted at the expense of decrease in quality.
Keeping your employees accountable
You have obviously experienced something attractive in the people who work for you or you wouldn’t have hired them. That being said, does this automatically mean you are going to take them for their word with every situation that comes up? If your answer is “yes” to that question, please comment with an email address of where I can send my resume.
Now, let’s be clear about something. Simply keeping track of someone’s time you are paying for doesn’t exactly mean you do not trust them. It means you’re an investor who is smart about what is being done with the money. Clockspot has become one of the most trusted names when it comes to tracking the time of your employees. One of the reasons for their success and popularity among businesses is the ability they provide to track time from anywhere. Accountability is one concept that is very important when it comes to performance appraisal of employees in the organization. Each employee is accountable for the work or decisions taken and others should not be blamed for an outcome lower than the target set.
How much do you spend getting paid?
Another area that often doesn’t receive as much attention as it deserves is how your company spends accepting payments from other businesses. Depending on the service you use and the provider you are receiving it from, you may be spending way too much money collecting the money you have made. If you use credit card processing for B2b services, you need to spend some time going over any hidden fees or charges you may be currently paying.
While these charges may not seem like much, depending how well the company is able to camouflage what they are charging you for, when you count the tens, even hundreds of thousand of transactions you are involved with over the course of a couple years, the money adds up to a significant amount.
How easily are you to be found?
Regardless if you have an actual brick and mortar business or not, your website says a lot about your company. It is your one employee who works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It will never be late or need to go home early. Regardless of the time of day, your website is always there to represent you and the service or product you have to offer.
Because of this, the company you pay to handle the hosting of your site is of extreme importance. You need to know that your company’s name is always available, despite where someone is searching from. Regardless if the customer is around the corner, across town, or five states away, they need to have access to you for your business to reach it’s full potential.
Kidal Delonix is a contributor to Mr. Hoffman's blog. The views and opinions are entirely his/her own and may not reflect Mr Hoffman's views.
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