Company management is a combination of all the different responsibilities business owners have, from overseeing finances to assembling teams to working with suppliers and supply chains. As you might imagine for a profession with so many areas involved, there are several management styles you might choose to follow.
Whatever your personality as a manager, there are generally agreed-upon skills, traits, and behaviors that translate to successful company management. It’s essential to be familiar with these as well as to know how to manage your individual company circumstances.
Table of contents
1. What is company management?
2. What are the 7 steps of good company management?
2.3. Document everything
2.4. Make improvements
2.5. Avoid micromanaging
2.7. Create a dynamic environment
What is company management?
Company management is the concept that you are responsible for one or more pivotal aspects of your business. There are four common types of management that company managers engage in, often overseeing multiple at once. Those are:
- Human resource management: This is sometimes called people management, and it’s about making sure employees are taken care of in regards to salary, benefits, and working conditions. Creating a stable workplace culture is an integral part of company management.
- Marketing management: Marketing managers develop and implement growth strategies and increase customer base by analyzing current customer feedback and competitor performance.
- Sales management: Where marketing focuses on raising customer interest and brand awareness, sales management is about taking the interest marketers create and converting that into paying customers. Sales managers are in charge of coordinating operations across the sales team and building customer relationships.
- Financial management: Financial managers need to know how to manage accounts, since they are responsible for planning all of a business’s financial strategy, including insurance, banking, and investments.
A successful company manager should have at least some familiarity with all of these areas. Keeping track of everything under the umbrella of management requires good time management skills and the ability to prioritize tasks. Prioritizing is part of time management, and it means you need to identify your short-term and long-term goals. That way, you can create schedules more easily.
In order to manage your time effectively:
- Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals
- Delegate tasks where possible/appropriate, so you aren’t overloaded
- Use appropriate technology to streamline daily operations
- Invest in customer retention, since it costs a business less and takes less time to cater to loyal customers than it does to attract new ones
What are the 7 steps of good company management?
Businesses commonly fail when they attempt to scale up without having the resources, strategy, or infrastructure in place to do so. You can help make sure your expansion efforts stay sustainable by following a few basic principles of company management.
Know your fundamentals
The two basic things you should think about in business management are your customers and your finances. The two are related, since understanding how you’ll generate and manage income means knowing where your income will come from.
Understand who you are marketing your product or service towards, how it will benefit them, and create customer personas as a way of contextualizing all that information. Identifying your niche is a key first stage in any marketing strategy.
Understand your financial needs, projected earnings, and where your funding sources are. Accurate projections ensure that you don’t scale too quickly, and can develop a realistic expansion timeline.
Build infrastructure
Your business infrastructure encompasses your various teams, your website, your business structure, and anything else that your business needs to execute day to day operations. An essential part of infrastructure development is making sure your new hires fill specific business functions.
Setting up an intuitive website and social media presence will help you make the most of customer outreach and give you platforms for fostering relationships. One of the essentials in any business is consistent communication, so you need a platform that makes this simple.
Document everything
Every action you take as a business manager should be documented. Recording all your sales, documenting projects, and noting down customer data are just smart management. It’s also important to document all your internal processes, which you can easily do with checklists.
Comprehensive documentation has a few functions. First, keeping detailed records helps you prepare for any audits that may come your way, and to ensure you are meeting the standards outlined in those audits.
Second, documenting everything makes continuous improvement easier. Smart management identifies areas for optimization based on company data, analyzing metrics to find weak points in the business. Having your sales and customer data recorded helps you adjust things such as your marketing strategy and product pricing.
Make improvements
Successful company managers are always on the lookout for improvements. One key way to improve your business is to take time to learn about your industry. Research current trends, market competitors, and business-related topics to make sure you’re always on the pulse of your field.
Improvements don’t have to be massive overhauls either. Most of the time, your long-term success will be a result of small changes that make your operations more efficient. This is another area where SMART goals are useful.
Avoid micromanaging
It can sometimes be tempting to want control over everything as a manager, but knowing how to delegate is essential. Micromanagement, in addition to stressing both you and your employees more than necessary, makes your team less productive.
Assigning tasks and responsibilities to team members and equipping them with the necessary training leads to a more skilled team. Effective communication and facilitating autonomy are also great ways to improve team morale.
Communicate effectively
This essential aspect of smart management applies to customers as well as employees. Drawing in business depends on the relationships you build with customers, which is why clear and prompt updates are crucial.
Communication between managers and employees is the difference between a well-oiled machine and a disorganized collection of workers. Articulating expectations avoids misunderstandings. Also remember to listen to any employee feedback or perspectives, since they are skilled workers too.
Create a dynamic environment
It’s important to remember that change is constant in the business world. That’s why it’s important to develop a business model that is flexible in the face of unforeseen developments.
Sudden changes can also have an impact on your employees. To help your team members adjust to new conditions, it’s a good idea to adopt a change management model you can follow in these cases.
Additional management tips
The previous 7 company management steps are essential for any business. If you want to optimize your business further, one of the best things you can do is utilize technology. Automation and AI both help streamline your operations in various ways.
One benefit of automation is that you can complete tasks faster. Automated solutions are available for a variety of things, such as customer support chatbots, email communications, and accounting. The increased speed frees you up to focus on higher-level management responsibilities.
You can customize most AI services so that they mirror the style and tone of your business, making automated customer interactions feel much more personal. Additionally, since these programs work off of data, collecting consumer, sales, and other types of information means AI can be personalized to suit your specific needs.
A great example of this is inventory management. Most businesses have an inventory of some kind, and manually taking inventory after every sale is tedious. It’s also not the best way to use valuable time, which is where inventory management software is helpful. Provided you’ve recorded your sales, delivery, shipment, and other data, you can plug all of it into the inventory management platform, which can track and replenish your inventory automatically.
Another management tip for budding company managers is to look for cost reduction measures wherever possible. Automation is already a good step towards cost cutting, as it can help you avoid mistakes and means you require fewer employees.
You can also save money by using fewer resources. Pay attention to how much energy you are using, in your building and along your supply chain. You can lower production and distribution costs this way.
A digital inspection platform like Lumiform makes company management easier by allowing you to easily document and optimize your processes. By sending your employees digital checklists to complete, you set clearly communicated expectations and automatically record the digital checklist results.
Transforming day-to-day operations using checklists also means spending less time training and watching over your team members, and giving them more autonomy. Finally, since all the data you record on Lumiform digital checklists is automatically converted into a visual report, you can identify opportunities for improvement easily.
