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Decisions Every Business Owner Has to Make

As a business owner decisions pass across your desk every day, from what colour to paint your office to whether you need to change your opening hours. These aren't the type of decisions we'll be looking at here. This post will be covering business decisions, think of the other more famous decisions that went wrong, such as Yahoo not buying Google in 1998 (and again in 2002). That's more of the decisions this post will look at.

What separates good companies from amazing ones can be the decision making that takes place at the highest level.

Decision 1 - The right people to work with

A company cannot grow unless it has the right employees working for it. Think about the future aims of your company as set out in your business plan, are your current employees able to carry out the work needed in order to see the plans through? Will you need to hire better skilled employees or retrain your current ones? These are the types of questions you'll be needing to ask yourself.

Don't be afraid of offering incentives in order to get a happier workforce; this could be something simple like a relaxed dress code compared to your competitors or a free lunch every Friday. Just remember that happy workers are hard workers (and they're more likely to stay with your business).

Decision 2 - What are you?

There was a time when businesses could offer everything a customer needed, a physical shop, an online shop, online customer service, an address to write to for customer service, phone support, etc. The list could go on.

However, in recent years this focus has changed. Businesses have found that they were spreading themselves too thin, so the focus is now towards the best channels for them. You will need to decide on the best way to have your business which could mean thinking of how your customers will want to find you. It's better to focus on one channel and provide it well, rather than multiple channels and provide them poorly. This can mean the difference between a customer having faith in and being loyal to your brand, or looking elsewhere for better service.

Make a Choice

Decision 3 - How to cope if your business is struggling

There may come a time when your business isn't coping as well as you would have expected, failure happens, it's a natural part of life. But what you need to do is to learn from it. What can be done differently? What didn't work? Was there anything at fault? Then when you learn from the mistakes your business will come back bigger and better.

Decision 4 - What are your goals?

Without goals there can be no growth, it's as simple as that. So how do you define your goals? The best goals are ambitious but achievable, this is the part which can be a struggle to get right.

Take the goal of doubling production of a specific product, how will your business do that? Break this up into smaller plans. This could come down to doubling the workforce, hiring a larger premises (to accommodate a larger workforce) and streamlining processes to reduce waste. The list could go on.

But businesses are fluid and ever changing, so goals should be flexible too. What if you find that you have a high employee turnover after doubling production? Your goal could then change to retain employees and you would have smaller goals based around this.

You may find that having step by step plans for the future will help your business. As the adage goes "Failing to plan, is planning to fail".

Conclusion

There are probably more decisions out there that will need to be made, but by making these four decisions listed above your business should be on the right lines. But no one wrote a book about owning and running a business and everyone's experiences will be different. Tweet us what decisions helped you with running and growing your business.

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