What skills set top managers apart?

If you own or manage a company that sells and delivers goods directly to consumers or to other businesses, there are three ways to stay competitive.

Each of the three skills, or operational areas as they’re sometimes called, deserve close attention in managers. Why? Because they are, in a way, the essential ingredients that fuel your organization’s profitability in the short term and its financial stability in the long-term.

The big picture view of the three encompasses a system in which managers first deal with the question of money, whether that pertains to making, storing, investing, or paying tax on it. The other two pieces of the excellence puzzle represent how to maintain adequate inventories of products without wasting space or funds, and leveraging the power of fleet management to make deliveries safe, prompt, efficient, and logistically wise. Here’s a bit more about each of these three skills of operational success is needed in your managers.

Financial planning

Financial planning, which includes tax planning, is at the heart of your organization’s sustainability as an entity. It is to the for-profit business what monthly budgeting is to a household, but it’s even more vital because the amount of funds is typically much greater and affects more people. If numbers aren’t your strong suit, be sure to hire capable accountants and finance professionals who can take care of the multiple facets of the company’s financial health.

Fleet management

When you oversee your company’s vehicle fleets in an efficient, safe way, you’re doing perhaps the single most vital act of all, which is getting products to consumers. That’s what the entire paradigm of a for-profit company is based upon, when you stop to think about it. You make items, you sell those items to interested consumers, who usually pay for them before delivery, and then, complete delivery.

What happens when you improve your fleet management capabilities? You enhance and magnify all the benefits that already come with smart fleet management, and there are dozens of them. A short list includes things like better planning of routes, a higher level of customer satisfaction, custom reporting, timely vehicle maintenance, lower fuel expenses, and increased levels of driver safety.

Dash cams, for instance, are perhaps the single most helpful of the many devices that in use today. You can review a helpful guide on the many kinds of dash cams used in trucks. The small, high-tech cameras give truck drivers and fleet managers much more control over safety because even the tiniest dash-mounted electronic eye leads to increased visibility, reduced collision costs, and fewer accidents.

Inventory control

What do you do with unsold, returned, and unfinished products? That’s the concept behind inventory control. When done right, you can vastly lower your company’s expenses by knowing how much to produce, how long to store it, how to store it, and how to track each item. The software helps immensely with this task but it takes humans to find the right programs, install them correctly, and regularly maintain them. Selling goods for more than it costs you to produce, store, and ship them is the very definition of profit.