In today’s fast-paced society, productivity is the name of the game, and where your business is concerned, improvements in productivity levels can dramatically impact profitability. Below are four productivity-boosting practices the business advisors at top CPA firm Doeren Mayhew help our clients implement and monitor on an ongoing basis:

  1. Identify your key productivity indicators. Many mid-sized companies don’t have the resources to spend inordinate amounts of time measuring productivity, so it’s important to determine the areas where you should be focusing your efforts. What would be most valuable in illustrating how your business is progressing during a given month? For businesses in the service industry, one of these indicators might be revenue per employee. For manufacturers, this might be how much product is being produced during a period of time.
  2. Start measuring. The benefits of measuring indicators are two-fold. Not only does it provide the data you need to run your business by the numbers, but measurement can play a major role in driving change in employee behavior. For example, a productivity indicator for a restaurant might be the number of people served during a shift. If your report reveals that the average waiter or waitress serves 15 customers, and some of the waitstaff is falling short of this average, you’re likely to see an immediate impact on productivity once employees realize their performance is below average and that you’re monitoring this productivity on an ongoing basis.
  3. Identify your strategic interests – and make sure your team is on board to pursue them. Most owners of small and medium-sized businesses become so deeply involved in the activities of running the company that it’s difficult to step back and think strategically. Further, we’ve found that entrepreneurs are often so visionary that even when they do develop a strategic plan, communicating that strategy to their management team can be difficult. To address this challenge, we recommend that business owners and their management teams hold an annual strategic planning session designed to identify issues and opportunities, outline a plan for tackling them and ensure that the team has a shared vision moving forward.
  4. Narrow your focus. Once you’ve identified your overall objectives, choose a few major initiatives on which to focus your efforts. Closely held businesses have a limited amount of resources related to management team time and money. Therefore, it’s better to be realistic about what you can accomplish, and focus on successfully and efficiently completing the top projects that will move you toward your goals rather than spreading yourself thin over a wide range of projects. Set up indicators and monitor your progress toward these goals.

Doeren Mayhew is a top CPA firm with a robust Business Advisory Group to offer more than traditional accounting to our business clients. For more information, contact our CPAs and business advisors in Michigan, Houston or Ft. Lauderdale.