Moving fast – what does that mean in business? Ultimately it refers to the speed in which you operate, which includes daily processes, your use of technology, capturing trend opportunities, and your overall ability to gain new customers. For many small businesses, this kind of traction is gained over time, and it’s very hard to pick up this kind of speed immediately.

But once you’re years in, it’s best to conduct a review over your movement speed. Namely: how fast is your company moving compared to what it was doing last quarter, or even a year ago? To understand this metric, you’ll need to investigate a few key areas, some of which we’ve listed down below. Organization speed changes naturally over time, but it should never be slow enough to lose you money; let’s investigate that in detail.

Keep Your Eyes on the Online World

The online world is where it’s all going on. The more you know about it in the moment, the more you can capitalize on the trends that move it. And as we all know, these can change from hour to hour! Social media is the best place to take note of these changes, and the more you interact with this world, the more relevant you’ll stay.

Create content calendars to keep your finger on the button. Use this to push out both time sensitive and evergreen copy onto your feeds, to keep people coming back for more. You can also set up alerts for targeted keywords, to ensure you’re the first to hear about any news within your sector.

Simply put: if you’re ahead of the curve you can plan accordingly. Customers tend to enjoy a timely manner, as they can reap the rewards of something new and interesting to indulge in.

Take the Complexity Out of Customer Service

Customer service is the key process of key processes. The more time, money, and training you invest into it, the better the outcomes you’ll get from it. And if you’re not a customer focused business, what are you even doing with your time and resources? To move as fast as possible, you need a customer service desk that speaks for you. You can achieve that easily with new tech and new techniques.

Take an insurance broker as a good example here. This is a company that needs to deal with often complicated and widely ranging requests, and using a software platform like Artificial can streamline the resolvement process. Indeed, there are plenty of niche programs out there for companies in all sectors, and using them to uplift your customer service operation is often the best way to stay modern.

Update Your Network Tech Regularly

A company network is its biggest asset. Your network needs to remain safe, secure, and speedy. That means you need to update it as regularly as possible. Make sure you’re always aware of when new patches come out, and have maintenance carried out at least once a month. If you’re going to rely on tech, make sure you take care of it!

Be Flexible

Being flexible brings the human element back into this grand race. We all know how hard we can work to stay ahead of the curve and bring the perfect thing to the customer platform. We can even exhaust ourselves and our teams trying to do so.

But if you remain flexible, and let tech do most of the work for you, there’ll always be time for the more important things in life. You can achieve that work/life balance that makes people want to do their best work for you.

Assign different schedules for different people, take personal requests into account, and ensure your team takes their vacation when it’s allocated to them. This is all part of being a modern company and assures your values reflect what the market wants out of you. This is simply part of your strive to move with the times, and that’s appreciated by the current shopping generation.

Moving fast in business can be a result of hard work and good initiative, but it can also be something you miss out on from time to time. So push yourself a little; check out the areas above to see how they stack up within your company.

Are you flexible? Are you focusing on the customer? Are you aware of the current trends? And do you have your team on board? Answer these now for better streamlined operations in the future.