Business Owners: You Need To Watch Your Assets!

As a business owner, wasteful spending is anathema to everything you stand for. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you’re afraid to invest in your business. You’re savvy enough to know that you can’t cut your way to growth. However, you’re also aware enough to be able to target and eliminate wasteful spending. Costs are inevitable. Wasteful spending is never an inevitability. And in the current climate, where even well established businesses face a precarious future, business owners know that wasteful spending can be preillous.

And that means that they need to watch their assets. From their machine plant to their electronic devices, software and, of course, their human resources they need to account for every penny that they’ve invested in the infrastructure that allows their businesses to run. Whenever they are lost, damaged or otherwise compromised, they need to be repaired or replaced. And that can create a squeeze on your cash flow that you could really do without in the current climate. 

Here are some ways in which you can keep a closer eye on the assets in which you’ve invested.  

Invest in Business Intelligence software

The first step to reducing cost and protecting your business is visibility. In the age of big data, most business leaders have more data than they know what to do with. The real challenge comes with obtaining true visibility of that data and mining it for actionable insights. This is why Business Intelligence software is so important. It can help individual departments to pull together to work on shared goals and identify areas of wasteful spending such as departmental assets that keep getting lost or damaged. Which brings us to…

Make your team accountable

Your assets are only as safe as the person using them. And if you’re to entrust your team with your assets (whether that asset is an iPad or an articulated truck), you need to ensure that those assets are safe in their hands. Literally in many cases. Obviously, that means significant training not just on the use of these assets but on their proper care and maintenance. They need to know where and how assets are stored when not in use and how to keep them safe from theft or criminal damage. Moreover, they need to assert a measure of personal accountability such as assuming all or some of the cost of a damaged asset.

Use hardwear to provide greater transparency

All of the above is perfectly adequate if you intend to keep your assets on-site. But if you have off-site assets like a fleet of vehicles, you need to be able to see where those assets are (and what condition they’re in) at all times. The good news is that fleet management solutions like HD Fleet do a great job of this. They go beyond simple GPS functionalities (although they do that too), and incorporate drover cam to guard against distracted driving. 

Have an open forum where employees can comment without judgment or reprisals

Finally, as important as it is to protect material assets, it’s even more important to protect the human beings who bring the values and ideals behind your brand to life. And that means they need to be able to come to you whenever they feel unsafe, unsure or unfairly victimized. There should be a forum to which all members of your team have access where they can voice their concerns without fear of judgment or reprisals. Even if that forum is something as simple as an open door.