Basic Ingredients of Small Business Management

Stephan Szugat Article Title: Basic Ingredients of Small Business Management
Author: Stephan Szugat
Word Count: 991
Article URL: http://www.abenetis.com/encyclopedia.html
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Basic Ingredients of Small Business Management

This article is about the most important basic ingredients
necessary to manage a small business. However, they are also
necessary to manage very big businesses as well.

As all entrepreneurs know there is just one thing everyone needs
to do, but most don't like it very much. It's the solid
foundation of a business controlling system, your
accounting/bookkeeping. Being able to control your business
requires an up-to-date accounting. However, sometimes rough
pictures about your business situation and development are enough
to decide what has to be done next.

In these situations your controlling system needs to use other
figures, as the accounting data you usually get once per month.
If your controlling system allows you to use early indicators,
such as the number of customer contacts in a given period, than
you could be glad, because you got a system which enables you to
see what's actually going on and not what has happened in the
past.

To have control of your business needs a controlling system
where you get weekly reports, which just show you the most
important numbers of your business development. There are some
numbers which will always be important, such as customer
contacts, new customers, customer loyalty as well as some data
from your accounting system, such as your total receivables,
payables and your bank account balance, which have to be observed
carefully.

But your controlling system won't run your business, so it is
most important to have a lean organisation as it is called these
days. It's most important to have an idea of your workflows, so
that you are able to adapt your organisation to your needs. This
will save tremendous time, which could be used to develop or
improve products and services for your customers. There are many
ways how you could structure your organisation. Being able to
retrieve documents from your archives fast is one effective way,
to save a lot of time. A small archiving system could be set up
within minutes, if you don't like to use document scanning. You
only need an index list of your folders, than all documents have
to be indexed as well.

Indexing the documents is done by showing the folder number in a
list, describing the document and assigning a number to the
document, which will be kept in the list as well. In case you are
searching for a document, you just need to search the
descriptions; taking the indexed folder and looking for the
document carrying the number you are searching for. This system
requires using a numerical archiving system, which is not usually
used by most of us. It takes a little time to get familiar with
it, but when you saved a lot time searching for documents, you
would be glad that you use it.

Another topic most important for business management is
"Security". This does not mean, that only the security of your
customers and employees is kept under this heading, it also
includes the security of everything in and about your business.
It includes to keep copies of important documents in several
places other than your office, keeping your computer network save
and to provide a secure working environment for your employees or
yourself. You know best what is important for your company, so
just take a sheet of paper or your favourite spreadsheet program
and make a list of everything important to run your business.

After you finished this list, think about what has to be done on
each topic to have a secure solution. That's not that difficult
to do, if you have a computer network you have to take care that
access is made available only to the right people, this includes
the installation of firewalls, virus scanner and so on. Document
copies for example could be stored in a safe place at home or
preferably in a safe-deposit box at your bank.

Until now, all this has covered the internal management of your
business. You have not made any sales from all of this. So, most
important is the last part of business management. It's all about
getting customer and customer loyalty. It seems getting a new
customer needs tremendous affords these days, but sometimes you
hear from businesses where new customers just come in as if there
where no other solutions. Well, that is not usual anyway. To get
new customers today, you need good products and services and you
must be able to communicate what are the benefits of them. This
has to be done while advertising online and offline. As soon as
you have customers you need to keep them staying with your
business. This should be not a problem, due to today's
techniques.

You may send regular news on products and services and most
important you provide quality customer support. Otherwise
customers will leave as fast as they have arrived. Getting
customers is the hardest task in business management. You could
read a lot about it, but not getting any customer. The best way
is to try what works for your business and then improving the
procedures. Keep one thing in mind, nothing happens all of a
sudden, so take your time and try again and again.

To summarize the above, there are 4 basic ingredients needed to
manage a business,

- Getting and keeping Customers (requires good products and
services)
- a Controlling System which gives you a rough picture about
business development every week
- an organisational Structure and Workflow that suites your needs
- and a secure working environment.
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About the Author

About the Author:
Stephan Szugat is founder of abenetis a web-based service about Business Management Solutions focusing on the core needs of business management. He has approx. 15 years experience in the Finance and Accounting Area from companies of different size and from various industries. http://www.abenetis.com