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The easiest way to describe the notion of profit would be to say that it is a financial gain you get when you deduct the amount you are obliged to pay from the amount you have earned. This being said, there are two ways to increase your profit.
One is by increasing your income, and the other one is by reducing your outcomes. Both of these things can be done by boosting your productivity, and here are four simple ways to do so.
Read also: 40 steps to develop a millionaire mindset
Focus on Creating Return Business
The first thing that can significantly boost your profits is increasing the number of return customers. You see, according to one survey, only 8 percent of all your return customers are responsible for over 40 percent of your entire profit. The reason behind this is quite simple.
The first time someone does business with you, they are quite cautious. If they find the quality of service you provide the first time satisfying enough, they are likely to come back for more, this time willing to spend even greater amounts.
Another reason why return customers are so profitable is due to the fact that you don’t have to invest much work or resources to convert them.
A person who is satisfied with their first purchase from you has a 27 percent chance to come back. A customer who makes 2 purchases has a return chance of 45 percent, while for someone who has bought from you three times, the chance for the next return rises to an astounding 54 percent.
This being said, the more one buys from you, the more they are likely to return even if you do nothing to win them over. This alone means that focusing on the return customers brings you the best ROI.
Matching Tasks and Skills
The next thing you can do in order to increase productivity is to try to match people in your employ with the tasks they would be the most competent performing. This, however, starts during the hiring process.
By hiring too many people with the same skillset, you will clog the machine. For this reason alone, you need to diversify as much as possible. People coming from dissimilar backgrounds have different standpoints on certain issues and may be better suited for performing different tasks.
Unfortunately, this is not something that many first-time employers pay attention to. In other words, a diverse team is a holistic team, meaning that it can get a job done with minimum resources invested.
A Distraction-Free Environment
One of the things that tend to kill off productivity the most is the inability of your workforce to focus on the job at hand. Working in a crowded office space means working in an environment full of distractions, which is something you need to deal with as soon as possible.
One of the things you can do is try to keep your office space minimalistic and, in this way, remove most of these visual distractions out of sight.
As for the noise that working in the office brings, there are more than a few solutions to this problem, as well. First of all, you can try separating the working area from the breakroom and even move the water cooler into the hallway.
In this way, people on the break won’t distract those who are still working. Next, you can encourage people to communicate with their colleagues across the room through IM software. Finally, you could invest a bit towards buying silent peripherals and noise-canceling headphones.
Incentivize Your Employees
In the end, keep in mind that your company depends on the personal initiative of the individuals, which is why you should try to incentivize your employees as effectively as you can. This goes from measures such as handing out promotions, premiums and raises to commending people publically for a job well done.
Another thing you should definitely keep in mind is that “customer is always right” policy tends to turn your staff against you, same as the ‘employee of the month’ practice turns them on each other. If you are to create an office of the 21st century, you need to leave these relics of the past behind.
In Conclusion
As you can see, increasing the productivity of your team and the overall efficiency of your office is not exactly rocket science, although it requires no small amount of work.
Additional things you could try out are – bringing down the number of conference room meetings to a minimum, replacing some of your office appliances with low-power ones, and using cloud computing.
The list just goes on and on, which means that it is up to you to find all the methods that suit your business the best.
