As a small business owner wanting to grow your business you will be looking at ways to improve your business to generate more profit and cash, to free-up working capital, and to make more effective use of your own time. While there may be one-shot improvements you can make, such as outsourcing an overhead function to make a net saving, there will always be those issues where the benefits are obvious but the means of achieving them are not so clear. Continual Improvement is not just for manufacturing quality Adopting a systematic, continual improvement approach to those issues could be the answer. It used to be thought that continual improvement was about manufacturing quality, but these days, quality is seen as something that should be embedded right across a business. And likewise the continual improvement methodology can be applied to issues, right across a business, in every function, for example: improving the enquiry rate from an existing marketing budget increasing the … [Read more...]