Whether mild or extreme, problems happens in businesses all the time. From declining sales to product quality issues to employee challenges, every business faces a unique set of challenges.
It’s very important to take a look at your business and identify the potential problems that could be hurting the bottom line.
How Effective Problem Solving Can Boost Your Business
Efficiency
This is always the most common benefit. By optimizing your business process, you’ll be able to offer more quality and quantity in every area, resulting in more goods, services and overall value for your dear customers.
Competitive Advantage
problem solving can quickly become a competitive edge. Particularly when you improve your products and services based on your market space. Having the potential to determine what may need fixing in your business quickly (or even issues you’re experiencing in your industry) can give your business competitive advantage in the market.
Say, for instance, you and your competitors purchase supplies from the same distributor, but there have been delays in your orders. Finding other distributors that have shorter production cycles would allow you to sell your goods and services faster than your competitors.
Customer Satisfaction
Addressing customer issues directly is essential to the satisfaction of your patrons allowing you to encourage customer loyalty. These positive relationships are needed for long-term growth.
How To Identify Problems To Solve In Your Business
Gather Data And Information
You should be collecting important data for every aspect of your business cycle. Everything from business performance and customer feedback to financial reports.
It’s also necessary to solicit feedback—both positive and negative—from your customers. Doing so gives you a direct pulse on your business. It’s not only important to ask for feedback, it’s even more important to respond to it. Make sure you are commenting back on your customer reviews on review websites.
Conduct A SWOT Analysis
Perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis to learn more about your internal and external factors. Depending on the complexity of your business, you may consider performing multiple SWOT analyses for each of your departments.
We construct a SWOT analysis on a yearly basis during our executive retreats. This allows the leadership team to come together and truly look at the business as a whole to identify areas of needed focus and highlight areas of success. This exercise usually sparks additional ideas from the team, and we’re able to come up with new initiatives for the upcoming year.
Use The ‘Five Whys’ Method
One of our favorite techniques here at ROK is the simple yet effective “Five Whys” method. It involves gathering a team and repeatedly asking “why” (typically five times) to uncover the root cause of a problem.
We love this method because it’s simple. Making your problem solving too complex can make it difficult to gather input.
Next Steps Once You’ve Identified Your Problems
Determine Where You Want Your Business To Go
Having a clear vision of the best possible business cycle for your company is always the first step in problem solving. This lets you make the best decisions for long-term.
Prioritize And Plan
Not all problems are created equal. In fact, some issues aren’t worth being solved at all. Once your task list is set in place, you can begin planning how you will execute the list. One thing every successful leader does is delegate. This may be hard to do at first, but you’ll never get up that mountain alone. Delegating some of your tasks can help you cross items off your list and allow you to focus on big-picture ideas.
Empower Your Team To Solve Problems
Similarly, put a team in place that can assist with decision making. Setting your team up for success and giving them power to make decisions on the fly, or long term, can help solve problems quickly.
Prepare To Pivot, If Needed
Being agile in business is the key to success. Things will be thrown your way you did not prepare for or oftentimes didn’t anticipate encountering. It’s important that you and your team are able to pivot and change with the times. For example, when Covid hit, many businesses failed because they were unable to adapt to the new normal. Did your brick-and-mortar business turn digital overnight, or were you unable to make the necessary changes to provide your goods and services to your clients?
Having the ability to make changes when necessary allows your business to adapt quickly to a changing environments.
Measure Your Progress
All the data and metrics in the world mean nothing if you don’t use them. It’s imperative that you are constantly looking at your progress and that data. Something my team and I have done at our weekly meetings is to do a quick check-in on our KPIs. This is done regularly to ensure we’re meeting our targets and to quickly identify areas that may need to be improved throughout the sales cycle instead at the end of the month or quarter.
Looking at your numbers regularly gives you a true pulse on your business, and allows you to make better educated decisions. Do you need to increase leads or sales? Are you seeing customers fall off at a certain point? These are questions that can be answered quickly if you are constantly looking at your metrics.
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Whether mild or extreme, problems happens in businesses all the time. From declining sales to product quality issues to employee challenges, every business faces a unique set of challenges.
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