The Entrepreneur's Story

When you first started out you were excited and enthusiastic. You had a great idea for a product/service that had a well-defined and large market. From your experience you knew the pitfalls and drawbacks of the established players and so you knew that you could succeed and give the marketplace what they lacked but really yearned for.

From there you steadily built up your business, shakily to begin with, but you kept your head above water all the way through. At each stage of your growth you could see where you could go next. You needed more people to cope with demand. That generated some quality issues to begin with but you worked your way round that.

Recently, however, you have concluded that there is too much going on for you to oversee every part of the process any more. When someone is off sick you no longer have time to jump in, roll your sleeves up and get on with it. Instead you have to ensure that someone else in the organisation has the transferrable skills to take on that role.

Instead you are ever increasingly tied down and held back by administration. For some time now you haven’t “done” anything, as you spend all your time authorising other peoples’ work. In addition some of your trusted supervisors are also complaining that they are spending excessive hours at work ensuring the right deliveries get to the right customers on-time when they should be attending their kids’ parents’ evenings or watching them play football for their local team.

Does this sound like you?

You have customer demand seemingly outstripping your ability to supply and adding more bodies doesn’t solve the problem as it doesn’t greatly improve your throughput but it seriously affects your margins.

So what’s the solution?

Work smarter. The chances are, you have the resources you need to fulfil all your customer orders, but you are spending too much of your time on inefficient methods. Too many processes that add little or no value to your product. They used to be vital but just get in the way now.

There is a solution but it will mean a number of actions.

1. Get a better understanding of your working practices throughout the whole business so you can see the areas of greatest inefficiency.

2. Identify a business solution that can automate as many of your manual processes as possible without jeopardising your flexibility.

3. Start a cycle of continuous improvement so that you can grasp the quick wins and follow these up with a rolling cycle of phased sub-projects.

You may be lucky to have someone in your organisation who can guide and drive you as a business through this potential minefield. But many have found to their cost that this is just another call on someone’s already overfilled day, so most organisations look to a trusted advisor to guide them.

Medatech UK have many man-years of experience in doing exactly this. We have experience in many different industries which means we can both speak your language but also give you new insights that have worked in other environments which may help you with a different perspective and give you a new edge over your competition.