For companies to succeed in today's world it is more important than ever to be working as smart as possible. There are many areas a company can look at to make improvements but we've looked at five key areas we believe are crucial as a great starting point.

1. Concentrate on Core Strengths

As an entrepreneur, it is important to identify your strengths and to focus on these areas. It is difficult to be successful at all, but as a startup or as a small company, because of all the costs associated with recruiting, it is also often unlikely to hire additional support from day one.

Try not to do everything yourself, because the work standard will suffer and affect your health as well.

Highly qualified and professional professionals are available and willing to assist businesses on a project-by-project or task-by-task basis. It makes it much better for companies to reduce their headcount and budget while meeting their targets to be able to outsource only tiny bits of work.

2. Be Clear On Outcomes and Planned Outcomes

This is about making sure you do the right fundamentals. SMART goals are the best way to provide direction and make things happen. Many of us know this technique, but how many of us take the time to make sure we implement it whenever we set objectives?

There are many interpretations of what SMART stands for but consider it as Precise, Observable, Achievable, Practical, and Time-Bound. Ask yourself whenever you set an objective, however small that may be, how does it work in these five areas? It's easy to say: "I want to increase my profit," but you should say: "I want to see a 20 percent increase in net profit from the beginning of Q2 to the end of Q4," and this has to be a real increase, of course, and it has to be possible with the available pipeline and customer base. Getting this level of detail provides transparency, accountability, and traceability when setting targets.

3. Explore Technology

9:00 a.m. Days By 5 p.m. Office-based work is quick to become a thing of the past. Technology helps us to interact, contribute, collaborate, and communicate on the planet from almost anywhere. Make use of this, when you can. Keeping costs low is probably the number one priority for entrepreneurs. Technology should back up this. For example, can you log on and work from home or from co-working spaces rather than paying rent in an office? When you are a bigger business and you have an office, would you use other software forms to take care of routine manual activities and reduce overhead? Can you allow your team to work remotely, which means you might take a smaller office to the hot desk for staff? There are programs available to enable teams to work in this way to collaborate.

4. Automate Processes

Automating processes is an easy way to ensure that the monotonous, labor-intensive tasks are handled efficiently and cost-effectively. Many fields can be fully or partially automated to make a company work smarter.

Look at your processes and, as far as possible, break them down. This will then make it easy for you to look at each task and decide how to handle it, and who or what to handle it. Finding it difficult to keep track of who is doing what and where you are for some pieces of work, then look at some project management tools like Quickscrum to help you handle your tasks.

5. Setting A Work-Life Balance

The last point is the most important, arguably. Making time in your life for the essential things. Sometimes we concentrate so much on work that we neglect the truly important things. We all have aspirations and goals as entrepreneurs that push us but we must not forget that nothing is more important than health and family. Know how to turn off, and find something to do other than work.