Pursuing a growth strategy doesn’t necessarily mean you need to invest capital to acquire new tools and resources to execute. In some cases, maximizing your existing organizational resources is a great way to grow.
Your organization has all sorts of resources you can leverage from financial and human resources to your brand and goodwill, and one of the biggest benefits to leveraging existing resources is the potential of saving your organization time and money.
After all, your organization has already invested in plenty of resources, so it’s important to fully leverage those before investing in new resources.
Examining these four areas will reveal multiple ways to maximize existing organizational resources:
High-Potential Opportunities
Evaluate all the growth opportunities you are considering and develop a decision matrix to rate and rank each opportunity. Determine which ones offer the highest future potential and then consider the resources needed to be successful. Align your existing resources around those prime opportunities. This may require you to say goodbye to initiatives that are less promising.
Project Planning & Management
Determine the requirements for every project on your radar to help you understand the resources that will be needed. Once you know the requirements, choose resources for the project by comparing the project plan with your current capabilities and capacity. Incorporating resource utilization data will help you better manage and allocate existing resources.
Upskilling & Outsourcing Expertise
When reviewing project requirements determine whether or not to outsource some aspects of the work to help you meet your goals more efficiently. Alternatively, you might need to upskill and train your employees, increasing their skill sets in response to changing demands. Upskilling and outsourcing can result in higher-quality outcomes and are often a better use of existing resources.
Customer & Employee Satisfaction
You’ve likely heard the old adage it’s easier to keep an existing customer than find a new one. Well, the best way to keep a customer is to ensure that customer is satisfied. Examine customer relationships and find out how thrilled (or not) your customers are with your offering, as well as how exceptional (or not) they believe their interactions with your organization are. Build loyalty and help your customers feel valued by communicating with them regularly. The same goes for your employees. Make sure they have the training and development they need to excel at their jobs — and, especially, train your managers well. Your managers are key to creating an effective, healthy organization and strong managers will increase your team’s productivity and improve employee engagement and morale — which in turn will have a major impact on customer satisfaction.
