Running a small business and making a profit isn’t easy. In highly competitive industries, small businesses usually have profit margins between 2.8% and 4.4%.
If you’re finding it hard to keep your business going, optimizing your small business might be the solution you need.
We’ll walk you through how to fine-tune key parts of your operations to boost sales, get more value from each employee, and improve your profit margins.
Let’s dive in.
In this post:
Optimization for small businesses means finding problem areas and making them better.
It’s like spotting a raisin in your cookie and deciding to take it out. Or, if you find out people love raisins, adding more of them in.
For instance, if your service technicians often need to return to a job because they didn’t have the right tools the first time, you can tweak your process to make sure they bring everything they need.
And it’s not just about fixing things inside your business. If a marketing campaign is costing you more than it’s making, you can tweak the ads or wording to get a better return.
Now, let’s dive into the details…
The best way to boost your company’s performance is by comparing your business to industry benchmarks or your competitors. This helps you spot where you might be falling behind and shows you where to make improvements.
But there are also some quick wins that most small businesses can take advantage of.
Below, we’ve pointed out five key areas where many small businesses can get better.
Here’s a simplified and less formal version:
A Google study found that over 63% of all shopping starts online.
If people can’t easily find your business through a search, you might miss out on most of your potential customers.
And it’s not just about online stores. Even small local businesses with physical locations need to be visible online.
Another Google report shows that searches with “near me” or location-based terms have jumped by over 500% since 2015.
If you don’t want to get left behind, you need to work on improving your local SEO and online presence.
Make sure your Google My Business listing is up to date with professional photos, the right category, your website, and locations. Ask happy customers to leave reviews and aim for genuine 5-star feedback. Start making content that answers common customer questions and uses keywords from your SEO research.
Efficient processes are crucial for keeping a good profit margin on every customer. If you don’t use your staff effectively, you won’t make the most money.
eLogii is a great tool to help you streamline your internal processes. With eLogii, you can:
These improvements can boost your profit margin. They’re not the only things you can work on, but eLogii makes it easy to start with these areas.
A great customer experience is key to making sales and keeping customers. According to PWC, 73% of people think the experience matters a lot when buying something.
Besides having a great product, here are some easy ways to improve:
How well your business does often comes down to your employees.
When they’re focused, motivated, and productive, they can help your company succeed even if other things aren’t perfect.
Yet, if your company has a toxic culture, fixing it can be tough.
One way to start changing things is to visibly reward employees who show the kind of attitude and behavior you want in your company.
For deliveries or field service, if you’re handling things manually, your dispatchers might not know how each person is performing.
With eLogii, you can easily track and analyze driver performance, including orders delivered and accuracy.
Instead of just trying to boost sales, it’s often easier to increase the value of each sale you’re already making.
For example, if you spend $50 on ads to get a customer who buys something worth $150, but your costs are $90, you’re left with very little profit.
And if that customer doesn’t come back, you’ve barely made any money.
To increase your customer lifetime value or average order value, try these changes:
A great way to find out where you can improve is to look at real-life examples.
In this section, we’ll show you how three different small businesses from various industries made big improvements.
Bristow & Sutor is the UK's leading debt resolution company.
By working with eLogii, they've been able to increase collections per agent and plan faster and more accurately.
Data from Bristow & Sutor’s case management system smoothly transfers into eLogii when cases are ready to be routed. After routing, the data flows back to the case management system, keeping everything in sync at all times.
Handling tens of thousands of calls on the screen is now smooth and lag-free.
You can also make last-minute adjustments to routes, and these changes update instantly across all systems thanks to API integration. This has greatly improved team efficiency.
With eLogii, simpler and more efficient field work is possible. Agents are now collecting more each day due to better routing. Full route optimization will make this even more efficient. Plus, making sure the right agent visits each case has also improved collections.
With over 1,200 employees, J-Club is the leading company in Europe for private label fashion jewelry and accessories, and it also provides a range of other retail services.
Before using eLogii, J-Club was using mostly fixed routes, with regional managers actively involved in the planning process for their areas.
J-Club aimed to boost planning efficiency and cut down on the distance their merchandisers traveled. They wanted to streamline the planning process to reduce HR workload, allowing regional managers to focus more on customers. They also sought to make the process more flexible and responsive to changes while maintaining efficiency.
With eLogii, J-Club automated route planning across their entire operation, considering all required visits and available merchandisers. The ‘skills’ function helped assign the right merchandisers to each visit based on factors like language and experience.
“Regional managers are now able to focus on the tasks that really matter for our business as opposed to there being a lot of time taken on the routing front. This has directly led to us being able to streamline and centralise the routing function which has had clear and direct benefits for the business”
– Jord van Dijk – IT Director, J-Club
Founded in April 2000, Crocus is now the UK’s top gardening website, offering a vast selection of plants from all over the world.
With thousands of orders daily, Crocus needed a system to automatically optimize routes, allowing their team to focus more on customer service.
Since switching to eLogii in late 2021, Crocus has doubled revenue without the usual scaling issues, cut planning time by 75%, and boosted driver productivity by over 60%. They’ve also doubled customer service effectiveness, saved time on customer calls, and improved their Trustpilot rating to 4.4/5 despite a huge increase in order volume.
To see if your improvements are making a difference, you need to track sales and other important business metrics.
This is the most basic but crucial metric.
How much money did your business make from sales? Did you earn more this quarter compared to the same time last year?
If you did, think about what you changed and how you can do more of that.
If you didn’t, consider what worked last year and how you can get back to that.
These metrics help you see if your customer experience has improved, even without surveys.
Are you getting more repeat customers or higher spending from each customer? That’s a good sign.
To check how productive your employees are, divide your total revenue (or sales) by the number of employees. This metric is useful if you’re working on improving business processes.
If your drivers use the OptimoRoute app, you can easily check delivery and customer service metrics, like how often deliveries are on time.
Being a small business owner isn’t easy.
But with smart tools like eLogii for scheduling and routing, you can streamline your delivery processes, get more out of your team, and improve your profits.
With faster deliveries, real-time updates, and the ability to handle busy seasons easily, you’ll also make your customers happier.
A more efficient team and a better customer experience set you up perfectly for other improvements, like enhancing your online presence and marketing efforts.