What is Business Management?
Updated: Dec 20, 2022
Business management is handling, coordinating, supervising, and organizing business activities to meet business goals and objectives. Managing a business covers producing goods or services, cash management, physical equipment and resources, marketing, and cultivating innovation.
The main functions of management include:
Planning
Organizing
Leading or Directing
Controlling Resources
The ultimate responsibility of business managers is aligning resources with business objectives and achieving financial goals.
What Does Management Do?
CEOs, Managers, and Directors have the empowerment and authority to oversee an organization and make business decisions. Management teams are sometimes solo entrepreneurs or founders or a team of managers across multiple companies worldwide. In well-established or publicly-traded companies, the policy is defined by the board of directors and carried out by the CEO.
Effective management consists of building teams, continuously improving, and collaborating across departments to meet company goals. Here are some of the methods or tools business managers executive to meet achieve results:
Setting clear expectations and boundaries for staff to perform at high levels.
Participating in business activities to streamline processes
Collaborating with lower-level managers and developing future talent
Consistently tracking performance and variances to goal/budget.
Listen to feedback and implement procedures that improve workflow and employee relations.
Interact with industry leaders, competitors, and partners in the value chain to uncover growth and expansion opportunities for your business
Standardized reporting and communication channels to eliminate redundant meetings and emails
Data analysis and reporting to align resources
Business management comes to building successful teams that fit with the company culture. More importantly, successful managers are constantly evaluating and driving efficiency improvements to organizational resources:
Financial: cash, assets, liabilities, and investments
Human: recruiting and retention, training and development, and flexible work structures
Physical: inventory, real estate, equipment, and other tangible assets
Technological: intellectual property, patents, software, databases, consumer information, private data, and internal systems
Effective Business Management
Business managers develop systems, procedures, and processes known as controls to effectively deploy resources, meet profitability goals, and guide decision-making. Internal controls provide a foundation for tactical and strategic business decisions when forecasting, growing, and operating your business. Effective managers meet organizational objectives by satisfying customer needs and expectations consistently and repeatedly.
Business controls ultimately devise a business management system by monitoring the current performance of finances and staff, planning and forecasting for the future, and receiving customer feedback. Skilled managers challenge the status quo by utilizing their controls' data to improve the business continuously. Robust controls will provide managers with current snapshots of financial data, KPIs, employee performance, inventory levels, customer service scores, and the overall company scorecard.
Business management systems allow managers and companies to store critical data from their core business activities in an accessible channel for all authorized parties. Regardless of the function, these systems are crucial to meeting deadlines and sticking to your annual plan.
If you are ready to receive an assessment of your business management practices and internal controls, reach out to us today for a free consultation! sales@westportbusmgmt.com