One of the interesting things about today’s market is the fact that small businesses can compete with larger enterprises on the market. Ecommerce, the internet in general, and the many resources available to small businesses today certainly make the playing field more accessible. Even when you have limited resources as a small business owner, there is still a lot you can do to reach potential customers.

Even better, there are steps that can alter the level of competitiveness among small businesses further. Simple and actionable tips that we are about to review in this article will help you get started with increasing your business’s competitive level and prepare your organization for fiercer competition.

Build a Culture

A strong culture is always the most valuable asset for a business. As a small business, building an internal culture for better competitiveness is easier compared to when the business has scaled up to a certain point. Incorporating values like accountability and ownership into the organizational culture will help your business be more competitive on the market.

Culture may seem like a difficult thing to develop at first, but there are real steps that can be taken to make culture formation a faster process. Reiterating values and setting up the right workflows are among the actions you can take to reinforce a business culture.

For example, the implementation of the Kanban method for project management has been proven to be effective in boosting accountability. Tasks are displayed in visual form as Kanban cards, team members can be more proactive in every project, and detailed Agile metrics can be tracked without having to rely on manual updates from team members.

Online Kanban tools like Kanbanize make the process even simpler. You can implement Kanbanize for project management to instantly boost efficiency while shaping the internal culture of your business.

Focus on Efficiency

Speaking of efficiency, Kanbanize and the Kanban method, in general, is also handy for increasing overall efficiency of the organization. By visualizing tasks using Kanban cards, it is much easier to keep track of resource usage, cycle time, and other mission-critical metrics that need to be monitored. A migration to a Kanban board also makes managing team members and their workloads easier.

Efficiency can be boosted further by dividing projects into smaller tasks and keeping the cycle time of every iteration short. You have more opportunities to monitor the results of each cycle and suggest improvements. It doesn’t take long before continuous improvement becomes a part of the business process.

Efficiency creates more leverage. When you are operating as a lean and efficient organization, you can be more flexible in responding to market challenges. This, in turn, makes you a lot more competitive compared to larger corporations with huge overhead and complex organizational structures.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Automation is your best friend when trying to be more competitive on the market. Automation of mundane and repetitive tasks is not only more accessible, but also more beneficial to small businesses. Rather than manually dealing with invoices and purchase orders, for instance, you can automate these tasks and assign team members responsible for them to other, more important tasks.

Automation lets you increase the operational capacity of your business without expanding the business itself. A handful of team members can handle much larger projects with the help of automation. At the same time, automation reshapes your workflows and make them more efficient.

Even the aforementioned Kanban tool, Kanbanize, supports automation. You can automate everything from card creation to updates and integrate the Kanban board with other cloud services. This means you can manage sales projects as easily as you can handle finance-related tasks without having to rely on manual work every time.

Be Self-Aware

Last but not least, make sure you understand the importance of knowing your organization inside out. Map factors that affect business operations, make sure you stay aware of what competitors are doing – and how you plan to respond to those activities – and stay on top of resource usage at all times. The more self-aware you are as a business entity, the faster your reaction time will be in the event of market changes.

At the end of the day, self-awareness is how you gain insights and learn about what to do next. Once again, there are plenty of online tools to help you collect data and gain insights, including monitoring tools such as Brand24 and CRM solutions like Salesforce. Add integration to the mix and boosting competitiveness will no longer be a difficult challenge to overcome.

These are some of the actionable tips that can be implemented immediately to boost business competitiveness. There are plenty of opportunities to seize in today’s market, so staying competitive is a must. Small businesses have plenty of advantages to leverage against larger corporations; these tips simply bring out the best competitive advantages and allow you to be more agile on the market.