Tag Archives: business improvement

Cut out the middle man Buy your computers and accessories directly – abandon resellers. It’s cheaper and a whole lot faster. Stop external catering for meetings – buy the ingredients at the supermarket and arrange on plates. Put your prices up to lousy customers that eat your time and resources – you’ll either make more […]

Where everybody gets a bargain. Buy stationary from the Warehouse – and throw away those addictive catalogues. Put a donation box in the kitchen and ask staff to pay $1 per drink from the fridge. You are providing drinks right? Go Lean – it’s really tough and takes years to do well, but Lean manufacturing […]

Beers work too Give bonuses in kind, not cash. A weekend trip for two to Rotovegas for $300 feels like a lot more than $300 in cash. Insource your legal work by hiring a young, smart lawyer who is 3 years out from law school. They tend to be good at other stuff too Ask […]

Go green Turn the computers and lights off each night as you leave. Alternatively ask the security guards to do so when they do the rounds. If you have cleaners then ask then to swithcb the lights off after they are done. Go hybrid – and lose the thirsty clunky Commodore company cars and invest […]

Do it yourself Do your own book-keeping and GST returns. Print your own business cards – you own the design, not the design firm Audit your software, and stop paying licenses for anything unused

Ask and ye shall receive Ask staff to present to the CEO their delivered improvements each quarter. In front of their peers. (this really works) Fire your unprofitable customers – that means you need to make sure you know how much each of your customers costs to service and earns you in margin Fire your […]

Count them and cost them Make sure every computer is being used. Nobody gets two and none sit idle. This seemingly easy task is made much harder that it should be by many organisations. I’m very much in favour of spare computers, but they should be centrally located, under the control of the help desk/IT […]

Are you brave enough to kill the dinosaur? Kill SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle or whatever big system you use. Let’s face it you aren’t actually saving money by using it, everyone hates it and it costs a fortune to own in fees, upgrades and training. Get each department to run their own books – using Xero, […]

Think like you think for yourself Switch to Gmail Get a ‘best friends’ telephone deal for your work. Don’t use a business deal if the personal ones are better Get rid of almost all of your printers – and make the ones you have harder to get to, and track printing by person/cost center. It’s […]

Drinks are on the house, but only when in the house Buy staff beer and wine for Friday afternoons – but don’t put credit cards down at bars Cash in staff carparks – give them 50% share of the savings and encourage them to walk, use public transport, cycle or motorcycle Get everyone using IM […]

Spend like you spend, not like a corporate Stop buying refundable air fares – get the cheapest ones for 1/4 the price and throw them away when unused. It ends up being much cheaper Set your printers to print default black and white, double sided. Open up the internet – get rid of the expensive […]

<I pulled this post after posting as I wanted to expand it, but it was already commented on externally – so here it is again.> Get out there Use OpenOffice.org as the default office application. Give Microsoft Office only to those that really need extra bells, whistles and TLC. Meet your customers every day – […]

Know what everybody does Know how many staff, contractors, temps and so forth that you have. Count everyone in and out each day, divide them into logical groups, assign an owner to each group then use appropriate strategies to reduce. Each person that walks in the door needs to be there for a business reason. […]

Focus on the big things, not the little things Focus effort on removing the primary bottleneck in your process. That means stop working on anything that isn’t the current or next bottleneck or business as usual. And I mean everything. This is the secret sauce behind the turnarounds that I and talented small teams have […]

Give the people what they want Go through your Microsoft receipts line by line – and systematically reduce it to zero. Give this task to the palid looking guy who looks after your servers and databases. Abandon PCs – and get Apple Macs for everybody. People will start wanting to come to work again, and […]