Lincolnshire Business Doctor, David O’Brien, features in the latest issue of Boughton’s Coffee House, the magazine for independent coffee shops in the UK. David advises on the key issue of streamlining your business:

Streamlining is about making business operations more efficient and effective by finding alternatives to resource-draining systems and tasks. Carried out well, it can make activity much smoother – both behind the scenes and front of house – in turn leading to better customer experience, happier staff, less time-wasting and more profit.

“The first step to streamlining is to understand and review your processes” says David O’Brien of Business Doctors. “Whenever a staff member spends time trying to remember how to do something, a process becomes costlier and less efficient. Any regular activities – from making flat whites to monthly accounts – should have a simple written process that captures best practice and is easy to follow.” For coffee shops, this means identifying everything required to keep the business running, then setting up streamlined systems for each task. This could mean formalising how and when sugar bowls are refilled or, on a more complex level, installing new software to ytrack stock more closely, or outsourcing admin to specialist professionals.