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Increasing profitability and growing your business further are incredibly important aspects for any team. Project-based businesses are no exception.
While each team may have a different plan of action for the future, there are certain guidelines that any business functions can begin following immediately, to help improve their profitability.
Simple changes such as cutting down on over-servicing and monitoring projects closely can make a huge difference in a business’s financial performance.
If you are looking for ways to help boost profitability in your project-based business, read on for a few helpful tips that you could employ:
Time is money
As time is an agency’s biggest asset, it is incredibly important to make sure that you are tracking where it is being spent correctly.
The best ways to do this are to make sure employees are filling in a time log accurately, so you have a full picture of how much time is being spent on projects and can bill accordingly.
You can consider what proportion of their time is billable or non-billable, and make any necessary adjustments. Keeping a detailed log like this could help you cut down on any over-servicing and will ensure that you are receiving the correct amount of payment for the work you do, and maximise areas of profitability.
Use a visual work scheduling tool
Putting a scheduling tool in place to ensure that you are making the most effective use of your team’s capacity will have a direct effect on the productivity on your business.
If tasks are booked into a planning tool, then each team member can see what they should be working on at any given time and will ensure that they can access this information quickly and easily.
In addition to improved productivity, you can also add key project deadlines to the scheduling tool which can help ensure all client tasks are completed on time. This in turn helps to keep clients satisfaction levels high and the agency profitable.
Visibility aids efficiency
Storing all project information centrally will benefit the whole business. As everyone will know where tasks are up to at any one time, staff don’t need to be chased for updates.
A central location for project information will also increase accountability, and ensure all staff are aware of who needs to deliver what and when. Using such public deadlines will mean staff are always completely informed of their own and their team’s deadlines, and therefore will increase productivity.
Use software
One of the most effective ways to increase profitability is to employ a good quality project management software.
Software such as Synergist can help you see at a glance, the health of your jobs and improve the project billing process by allowing you to create invoices from previously inputted information, or provide multi-currency support where needed.
This type of software will alert you of any issues such as projects not being delivered on time, or costs overrunning as soon as it starts happening, so you have time to take action before profitability is affected.
As you can see, there are a few simple changes that you can make to your business processes and financial controls, which will help improve profitability within your agency.
