How Outside Thinking Helps Your Business

Business leaders spend most of their waking hours thinking about how to build, improve or manage their business. There is a personal investment that is required to make businesses work and grow, which means owners and leaders often blend business and personal thinking as a normal state of mind. While this personal passion often is a key catalyst for success, the resulting takeover of mental bandwidth may result in perspective problems, prioritization issues, emotional thinking or distracted focus.

The closer a person gets into the details of their own business, it can often be more difficult to remain focused on the larger picture and what got the business going in the first place.

Leaders have a vision of where they want their business to go and look for opportunities to reach that vision and grow beyond it as possible. As opportunities happen, focus is often shifted in ways that impact how much time and thinking goes into the actual operations of the business. While leaders are out doing the business, the operation that enables that business to happen continues to grow and evolve - typically with less direct oversight. Change happens to businesses - how leaders manage and take advantage of change is what breeds success.

Good people are an essential element in building strong businesses. Finding trusted employees and partners who can help manage and grow the business allows leaders to focus on priorities. Looking to partners or outside resources to help your business can be a strength and an added value to your efforts. Oftentimes, it can be the most effective way to achieve business goals. Partners or consultants who are not intricately involved with the day-to-day operations, are often able to see things from a wider perspective, dedicate time to specific issues, or deliver a needed service without disrupting active operations.

Focused expertise from a third-party can help accelerate and effectively implement business strategy or change. With a dedicated resource for identifying and implementing new thinking and operations, leaders remain focused on their core business efforts. Experienced consultants and partners can offer insight from other projects and lessons learned through managing similar business challenges - ultimately assisting in the success of the business.

A Real World Example -

A growing restaurant business went from operating two locations to more than 10 locations under four different brands/concepts over the course of three years. As the leaders focused on opportunities to open new places and identify the right managers and chefs, less attention was focused on how the corporate operation behind these businesses could become more efficient and valuable to the team.

The leaders recognized that key team members were spending too much time on employee paperwork and training; causing an impact to the primary duties of their job. Tasks were often necessarily pushed to the back burner to focus on pressing hiring and staffing needs. As this issue was identified, the leaders knew their ability to spend time to develop needed improvements was limited. Instead of trying to work through and implement new processes and solutions themselves, they brought in Hawken Harbor to help work through their thinking and offer solutions to help their efforts.

After meeting with location managers and the corporate team, we worked with the existing payroll partner to implement an employee onboarding system that allowed employees to directly input and manage their information. As managers no longer had to manage paperwork or gather information, they instead utilized a dashboard to quickly review applications, hiring documents and company onboarding tasks. The introduction and implementation of this process reduced the manager’s time spent with staffing by more than 50%.

The long-term value of transitioning to a self-service employee management system provides a centralized record system, digital access to make changes and a shift of the work-effort from managers to employees in managing staffing paperwork.

(Not to mention the managers are rather happy not to deal with paperwork and file cabinets)

The resulting efficiencies would not have been achieved as cost effectively or timely had the company tried to make this change using existing internal resources. In working with an outside resource that is both knowledgeable and focused on the business priority, the company improved its processes, reduced the work effort of their top people and organized employee information at the same time.

Contact us - We can help your business too.

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