Often looking within for ways to improve business and operational efficiency could yield a few percentage points as a percent of sales. Will it always save the day? No, but most know that long term improvements come incrementally by refining existing processes. Rarely does the process work perfectly the first time.
Incentives for employee ideas
How about a few days off? Dinner with a significant other. It does not cost that much and could create goodwill among the employees.
Publicize those results so one gets more. Look for ways to improve work practices, especially when little processes are documented or clearly understood.
Meetings
Have an agenda, purpose, and only invite stakeholders to that agenda. Conclude with action items, assignments and specific follow up dates. If every meeting did that – there would be far fewer meetings because that is as much work vs just throwing together an email list and few lines of topics in an invite via email. But many more productive meetings with achievable results would result. And more billable or useful work by employees. We all need better communication but effective communication with accountability is likely to generate better results.
9-5
Really? With the cloud? Flexibility might encourage loyalty or at least retention of hard to get and hard to keep employees. If your customers are nationwide, you likely want coverage that varies anyway due to time differences. Be flexible and adopt workflows where possible to accommodate.
Find Specialists
Off load areas not within the core competency of the business. Administration, legal, accounting. Do what makes you money and outsource the rest to save time.
These are some examples of easy to implement areas to help improve efficiency that do not cost much money but could result in greater results for your small to medium size business.