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Improve your business’ personality, a bit at a time

When you’re working to improve your business, your focus is usually on the big things. Big decisions, big contracts, big hopes, big pressures, and often some big leaps of faith. It can be easy to think that these are the only things that matter, but the small things often make a massive difference in the long term.

Of course, the little things are, by definition, often not the things you’ll prioritise when you want to improve your business’ profitability or sustainability. They might be small regular tasks you have to fit in between the Big Important Jobs, systems you put in place to make things run more smoothly, and little routines that, over time, become part of the everyday background noise of business.

Note those two words – “over time”. These tiny aspects of your business life are there all the time, and they work together to shape the personality of your business, without your even realising it. The way you’ve integrated all these little processes into your work time, and how friendly it feels to interact with them, is a key indicator of the health and approachability of your business. And if you want to improve your business, you need to think about all those small things which you’ve taken for granted for so long.

Take a little time to think about how this applies to you, and consider steps which you used to think would improve your business, but might not actually be helping that much. Put simply, how friendly does your business feel? That dress code you enforced for your team to make everyone look professional… does it foster a sense of belonging and unity, or do your staff feel like faceless drones? That rule you made to only check your emails in the morning, so you can concentrate all afternoon… is it helping your productivity, or are people complaining that you’re not getting back to them quickly enough?

So many small rules are implemented when a business starts, and although they’re small, the nature of business means that there are a lot of them. Don’t take them for granted. Whether you’re in the early stages of setting up your business, or you’ve been established for decades, there’s always room to improve your business life. And it goes without saying that customers would much rather deal with a smiling business than a scowling one!

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