What is Business Improvement?

If I asked you, “what is business improvement?”, what would your answer be?

Perhaps you’d say something vague about improving business performance, increasing ROI or talk about upgrading to the latest technologies. So, which is it?

The truth is, it’s all of them.

What is Business Improvement?

Business improvement is an all-encompassing term, which is probably why it’s so difficult to define. In the vaguest sense, it could be described as the process of a business moving from one state to another.

Improvement itself is a trickier thing to define. Every business would like to improve their sales, their market share, their return on investment and so on. But this is usually done through smaller, departmental actions, like a marketing campaign. It could fall under the realm of business improvement, but it’s missing the big picture.

To understand it, we’ll look at the broad categories business improvement generally falls into.

Types of Business Improvement

We’ll start with the business improvement type we’ve already mentioned – marketing.

Marketing

This type of business improvement is mainly focused on increasing revenue. Whether that be through increasing market share, promotions, improving customer experience or any other common marketing strategies.

Business Process Improvement

Business process improvement looks to optimise operational processes to make them more efficient. Every business has their own unique processes, so there’s no end of examples of process improvement. A common one would be to automate manual activities where possible to free up staff to dedicate their time elsewhere.

Much of process improvement is the traditional approach to business improvement. It can still be helpful to businesses in modern times, but it lacks a broader perspective of your business.

Quality Improvement

Quality improvement does what it says on the tin. It’s about improving the quality of aspects of your business. This could be improving the product or service you offer to be more competitive, but it could equally be about improving the quality of internal aspects of the business like practices or processes.

Management Improvement

You might have guessed it, but management improvement focuses on improving the management level of a business. This could be with something as simple as leadership training. But it could also be changing the levels of responsibility, like transferring more internal control over to management.

Capital Improvement

Capital improvement revolves around investing more into the business. Examples of capital improvement could be physically expanding offices to hire more staff or through the acquisition of another company. It refers to investment into the company to improve the business.

Information Technology

This type of improvement looks at changing or updating the technology your business is currently using. Common examples of this would include upgrading cybersecurity software to ensure the protection of client data or changing internal systems to improve internal productivity.

Company Culture Improvement

Also known as organisational culture improvement, this type of business improvement looks at improving company culture. Every business has a company culture, whether they’re actively aware of it or not. It has a huge impact on employees well-being, as well as a knock on effect on employee productivity when company culture is lacking.

Company culture changes usually revolve around changing the organisational structure of businesses. Most often, to remove hierarchical structures within businesses.

Implementing Business Improvement

All the different types of business improvement we mentioned above come together to create a more comprehensive perspective of business improvement. Often at times, businesses become too focused on the bottom line, forgetting entirely about internal processes or staff.

For example, a business may be thriving in respect to marketing, but has a high-staff turn over, suggesting the company culture is lacking. To truly improve businesses long-term and permanently, you need a holistic approach which tackles all angles of business improvement.

Which is where we come in.

Business improvement is our speciality. We live and breathe it.

We believe that traditional approaches to business improvement, that are concerned only with the bottom line, lack the humanistic perspective needed to create long-term change.

It goes without saying, all companies would like to increase their revenue. But achieving that needs to be a longer term business improvement strategy than a sales promotion.

We take a holistic approach to business improvement, looking at your unique strengths and challenges to come up with a long-term business improvement plan that will increase your productivity and profitability. More than that, we’ll change your way of thinking so business productivity remains at the forefront of your mind, for good.