5 Key Areas Most Businesses Are Struggling With

It’s easy to see where your business isn’t succeeding. What’s less visible is what you need to focus on to improve things. These key areas are ones that many businesses are struggling with right now. Businesses that aren’t growing are ones that aren’t reaching their potential. There’s a lot to learn when trying to scale a business from one level to another.

There are a lot of missed opportunities out there because they fail to see how they’re losing. So I’ve gathered what I believe are 5 key areas most businesses are struggling with and how you can overcome it. Some of these may be recurring issues in your business and others are problems your competitors are experiencing, but either way, it’s worth discovering where you’re weak. Here are key areas most businesses are struggling with and some approaches to fixing or improving them.

Founder Dependency

Founder dependency is when a business is dependent on a founder for everything. This can be bad because it means that the business isn’t scalable, and if you have to fire your founder, you will have a much harder time finding someone with the same skillset. Some of the ways to fix this are:

• Hire skilled people who can take over for your founders when they get tired or overwhelmed by their workload
• Set up systems so that tasks don’t require anyone’s constant attention

Compliance

Compliance is a key area that most businesses are struggling with. This is often overlooked or neglected by companies and business owners, but compliance can have a big impact on your bottom line if you aren’t careful. As a business owner, you are responsible for following the law. This means paying taxes, following health and safety rules, and protecting your customers’ data.

Taxes are an unavoidable part of running any business. You need to make sure that you’re paying all of your taxes on time and in full, otherwise you could end up in hot water

For example: if you’re an accountant or financial advisor, it’s important that all of your clients’ financial information is kept confidential and secure; otherwise they may lose trust in your company!

Capacity Building

Capacity building is the process of developing an organization’s ability to execute its strategic goals. It’s about making sure your company has the resources, skills and processes needed to achieve its objectives.

Capacity building is important because it helps companies meet customers’ needs better. For example: If you want to launch a new product, but don’t have enough staff in place yet or haven’t developed processes for quality assurance or testing, then you’re probably not going to be able to deliver on time or with high quality results.

Key areas of capacity building include:

• Organizational design – How do teams work together most effectively? What does each team member need from other teams in order to do their job well? How should power be distributed across departments? How should decision-making authority be organized? These are all questions that affect organizational design (and are part of strategy development). They must take into account both short-term and long-term goals; they also require input from managers on down through the ranks so everyone has input on how things will be run at his level within an organization.
• Human resource management – This includes recruiting employees who fit into existing departmental structures; managing hiring processes for new positions; providing training programs for current staff members as needed by their positions; setting performance standards so everyone knows what’s expected of them professionally and personally (like showing up every day at work), etc.
• Information technology – In today’s world where most businesses rely heavily on computer networks running software applications together seamlessly (or nearly seamlessly), this category includes creating infrastructures that can handle large amounts of data processing while maintaining security protocols against unauthorized access by outside parties over time (also known as “cybersecurity”). It may also include upgrading older systems when necessary due new regulations issued by governments around world requiring companies do so within certain deadlines if they want remain viable competitors in marketplaces worldwide.

Human Resource

Once you have hired the right people, it’s not time to sit back and relax. You will need to train them, develop them and manage their performance.

• Train the Right People: In order to be successful, your team needs to know what they are doing. They need training such as sales training or customer service training in order to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. This can be done in-house through workshops or externally through a corporate learning course provider like SkillSoft (www.skillsoftcorp.com).
• Manage The Wrong People: Managing the wrong people is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for any manager because it takes away time from those who deserve it most – your top performers! It’s important that managers understand how best practices can help them recognize bad behaviors at an early stage so they can deal with them before things get too far out of hand

Automation

Automation can be used to improve efficiency and reduce costs. Automation can also be used to improve processes, customer service, internal processes and employee productivity.

For example: if a business has an internal process where people have to manually enter their time worked into an Excel spreadsheet every week, then automation could be used so that the system automatically does this for them through software integration. The automated process will save them time by eliminating human error and reducing costs because they no longer need to spend money on staff time or training resources for employees who are leaving soon anyways!

Each of these areas needs to be addressed by different departments within your organization.

The first two areas, relates to customer service and employee satisfaction are often handled by different departments in your organization. The third and fourth areas, involves sales and marketing can also be handled by entirely different departments or teams. Finally, the fifth area of automation is typically the responsibility of a different department than the others or outsourced.

Conclusion

The takeaway here is simple: if your business needs to be more profitable without having to sacrifice quality of production or customer service, then you’re going to need a strategy for addressing these five key areas. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available online that can help you develop effective strategies for improving in each area. In fact, we put together our own list of the top 10 must have tools for small businesses. And if all goes well, you’ll be on track towards achieving your goals in no time!