Do you know what your company’s most profitable 2 or 3 offerings are? More importantly, does your staff? Could you be wasting time working on projects that will gain you little reward in the end? If you can identify the products with the best margins, you can then start focusing the majority of your time on those products. There’s no need to waste resources on products or services that will provide little to no return on your investment.

Once you have identified your company’s most profitable product(s) or service(s), share that information with your employees. They must know and understand how they contribute to the profitability of the company. Knowing the profit margins on your goods and services is a start to this understanding. Also by explaining why you’ve decided to shift your focus to certain products, i.e. because of profitability, the staff are much more likely to buy-in to this shift and help push the products they know have good margins.

What metrics do you have in place to track results? Are these metrics available to everyone involved in the process or is your staff in the dark? When employees know how they fit into the business model and how their efforts directly impact the bottom-line, they become much more engaged and productive.