Resourcefulness is the ability to find quick and innovative ways to overcome challenges. This year has given us all a crash course in learning to be resilient and resourceful. As a small business owner, finding creative ways to meet the needs of your business, your staff, and your clients is a necessity, but also the number one way to promote growth and success for your business. Being resourceful in all of your business decisions and practices will lead to better, more streamlined processes, allowing you to save time and money and helping strengthen your business to survive hard times.
Here are a few key components that resourceful owners use to promote growth and stay in touch with their business needs.
Be Open to Change
First and foremost, you need to be open to change. Having an open mind and being open to new and innovative ways of thinking about a routine process or situation is what will make a better solution possible. Cultivating the idea that a better solution is out there can make it much easier to go out there and make the changes that you need in order to run a more streamlined business.
Analyze – And be realistic
Next up, you need to be able to objectively assess the situations or processes of your business in order to determine where a change needs to be made. The first step in thinking outside the box is to determine what you want to change and what you have to work with. Developing a detailed objective list and then pairing resources that you have to make the change a reality creates a roadmap for easy execution.
Optimize What You Have – Be creative
This is where thinking outside the box really comes into play. Coming up with solutions for doing more with less in a stream-lined way could be as simple as asking, “if we didn’t have this resource or process, how would we get along without it?” Maybe a system you already have in place can be expanded or adapted to handle other processes. Or maybe a shuffling of duties, or scheduled tasks, could lead to a more eloquent solution.
Stay Focused
Finally, when you decide to implement change, be sure to stay focused. You can’t change or improve everything all at once, so be purposeful when selecting and implementing changes. Focusing time and effort on the change and following it through to the end can mean the difference between the intended outcome or having to return to the drawing board.
As a small business owner, you are in the unique position of being flexible enough to make improvements regularly and to implement them quickly. Doing more with less because you have created an innovative and clever solution is a savvy and smart way to continually develop your business strategy and to strengthen your business during tough times.