Acquire the Skill Called Efficiency - Economies of Scale

<p>"...many processes can be greatly improved by your personnel or approach to the process itself (no new technology required)"</p><p>In all of the past articles in this series the focus was on how you can affect change in yourself through your own actions - committing to your tasks, linking similar tasks together, planning your time for optimal performance by task and in using technology to improve how you perform the work. The next two types are related to creating efficiency through your environment.</p><p>Large-scale efficiency, the kind shared across an entire team or organization, comes in the form of economies of scale. Normally economies of scale refer to buying goods in volume to lower the cost per unit; when it comes to business operations economies of scale refer to how processes work in relation to your resources and personnel. Although certain types of efficiency can only be gained by leveraging a technology across multiple processes or specialized skills, many processes can be greatly improved by your personnel or approach to the process itself (no new technology required).</p><p>As you grow your team you hire people who can perform your weakest tasks with their strengths (or sheer labor). The idea then is to hire people who can perform tasks better than you can for less cost. The catch is hiring more people doesn't make you more efficient, just like buying a new technology doesn't speed up your processes. It's how you plan to employ that new person (or technology) in your process that makes the difference.</p><p>The best efficiencies are not actually technology based, but process-based and span across multiple resources that are working together. Creating efficiency through an economy of scale is done by planning for it. Start by reviewing your current processes in terms of steps, technology and people. Look at how multiple processes work together and assess whether they can share technology and people. For example, if you have three people who work with your customers and you make a lot of appointments it may make more sense to have your receptionist schedule all the appointments (e.g. like a doctor's office). By centralizing appointment-making activities you free up time for everyone else to focus on other areas of the business. Of course this example depends on having someone to offload the task to but the idea is simple: identify a task that can be more efficient by changing who does it or how it gets done.</p><p>Economy of scale efficiency should be the natural evolution of adding resources to your team and business. Unfortunately it only 'naturally' creates efficiency when you look at how all your resources work together to accomplish a process. Fortunately this type of efficiency only requires that you make intelligent choices about how you use your current resources and people. With a little hard work you can start enjoying economies of scale right away.</p><p>Thanks for reading,</p><p>Richard Walker</p><p>Did you find this article helpful? If you did, then you can find more articles here:</p><p><a target="_new" href="http://www.EfficientCEO.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.EfficientCEO.com</a></p>