~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Even if you’ve been doing the same job for the last 5 years, you can always get better. There are always to learn to be more efficient, more pro-active, and generally do things better. One of the things that I’m learning as I get older, is that even when I’m the expert in a given area, there is always someone out there that knows how to do things better. There are always ways to optimize a given process, or just perform a little bit of evolutionary improvement on what is already happening.
One of the big ways I’ve done that is with my home care business- Extension of You Home Care. I saw a lot of small opportunities in the market to do things better. That means that clients have better outcomes, and employees have a higher rate of job satisfaction with what we’re doing. By incorporating all of the current best practices in the field, and adding a couple more small changes- namely paying our employees a bit better and offering paid time off, we’re able to offer a superior product to our clients. As we’ve been in business almost a year now, we’ve learned a number of different ways to improve our processes internally, and operate more efficiently. It is a learning process, and indeed life is a process of learning. I figure that you’re either learning or you’ve got dementia or are dead. I’ll take the learning approach any day.
I could probably write an entire novel on all of the different things we’ve learned since starting a new business- business practices, policies, and ways to do things more efficiently. Each of those realizations meant that we learned something, and subsequently did things better. One of our early challenges was in automating billing for our clients. Each week, we have to tally up how many hours were worked, and worked by various caregivers, and clients, and then quickly turn around and do payroll, and bill clients. Needless to say, we are highly motivated as a business to make sure that we are billing clients promptly. A lot of the lessons we learned in the early days were about how to make sure we were billing accurately, and that the client was able to pay the bill, so we could pay our employees.
We also had corresponding challenges around scheduling employees for shifts and hours. We try to make sure that no employee is double booked, or is working too many hours. We also have to make sure that the caregivers that are assigned to a particular client are pleasing to that client. We had to learn to be very creative when scheduling shifts, so that they made sense, and worked for everyone. There was a lot of improvement there for us. The key is that we learned about that improvement, and kept getting better.
What about you? What were some times where you found yourself learning and getting better?
Meet the Author: Haley Lynn Gray
Haley helps female entrepreneurs create a strategy plan for their businesses – so they can make enough money to spend quality time with their family, pay for their children’s dance lessons, pay bills – and not worry about where the next client is coming from.
Haley is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Leadership Girl. She helps other entrepreneurs build their businesses by sharing the benefits of her business education and experience through Business Coaching.
Whether you want to get a new business off the ground or expand an existing business, Haley can assist you.
Connect with Haley:
- Work with Haley: https://leadershipgirl.com/work-with-haley/
- Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Leadershipgirl
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haleygray
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