In the complex world of business, the concept of business activities plays an important role in understanding the dynamics of production, service offerings, and how value is created.
Business activities form the core of the economic process, regulating the flow of transformation of raw materials into finished products that can be enjoyed by consumers.
In this article, we will explore what business activities mean, why they are important, and how they work in running day-to-day operations.
What is Business Activity?
Business activities refer to a series of activities involving the production of goods or the provision of services.
The nature of these activities can be very diverse, ranging from the process of extracting metal minerals to harvesting agricultural products, or even converting raw materials into finished products through manufacturing processes.
In addition, business activities also include the provision of various types of services that meet consumer needs, such as distribution of goods from producers to consumers, transportation, financial and tourism services.
The existence of business activities allows us to enjoy a better standard of living.
They produce a variety of goods and services that are an essential part of our daily lives.
Without business, we would probably have to do everything ourselves, such as producing clothes, building cars, or even growing and harvesting crops to meet our food needs.
Why is Business Activity Important?
Business has a central role in shaping the economic structure of society.
Through the production of goods and the provision of services, businesses create value that enables us to satisfy our needs and wants.
By having a business that produces goods and services, we can easily get various products that are needed in our daily lives.
Therefore, business allows us to experience a much better lifestyle than if we had to produce everything ourselves.
Business Activity Functions and Processes
Business activities involve complex processes to produce and provide products or services.
First, businesses identify their target consumers and analyze their needs and wants. This involves understanding the market and the competition within it.
However, needs do not only come from individuals, businesses also require various raw materials , capital goods, and services from other businesses to run their operations.
After identifying needs and wants, businesses develop appropriate marketing strategies.
This includes decisions about what products or services will be offered, how competitive prices will be set, and how those products or services will be promoted to consumers.
In carrying out daily operations, businesses require various resources, such as raw materials, labor , capital, and entrepreneurship.
These four resources are managed by entrepreneurs who start a business by purchasing inputs and using them to produce final products or services that are sold to consumers.
Building Competitive Advantage
In today’s competitive business world, businesses must constantly compete for consumer attention and support.
Therefore, building competitive advantage is the key to survival and growth.
There are two main strategies proposed by Michael Porter to achieve this: cost leadership and differentiation.
Cost leadership emphasizes efforts to have a lower cost structure than competitors so that a business can sell products or services at a lower price or at least comparable to competitors.
On the other hand, differentiation strategy focuses on creating a product or service that is unique and adds value to consumers, so that they are willing to pay more for it.
Grouping of Business Activities
When it comes to grouping business activities, there are two general approaches used.
First, based on the sector or stage in the production chain, business activities can be grouped into primary sector, secondary sector, and tertiary sector.
The primary sector is involved in the extraction and conversion of natural resources, the secondary sector in manufacturing and construction, and the tertiary sector in the provision of services.
Another approach is based on the value chain, as proposed by Porter.
Here, business activities are divided into primary activities (such as inbound logistics, operations, and marketing) and support activities (such as human resource management and procurement).
8 Time-Wasting Business Activities and How to Fix Them
When you run a business, you must run the business with a full sense of responsibility, and be able to maximize your time to be more productive.
However, considering that business people have their own busy schedules, such as meeting with clients and other meeting agendas.
Due to this, business people must be able to manage their time by making lists of activities, determining priorities, and so on.
There are several things that are often done while working, but without realizing it, these are activities that can waste time if done excessively.
Here are the activities that could be wasting your time, and how to fix them.
Email Check
Often when you process an email you will feel like you are handling something.
But when you get to your email inbox, chances are you’re just procrastinating on what you should be doing with it.
Indirectly, you are wasting significant time on email.
In fact, surveys state that daily business email opening activities take more than five hours.
This is a huge waste of time that you could be doing more priority work than handling these emails.
To improve this habit, you need to limit the time you access email, by making a list of the hours needed to check email in one day.
If you want to check email every hour or so that’s fine, as email retrieval is necessary.
The key to not overdoing it is to make “checking email” a part of your to-do list like any other.
This is to ensure you don’t underestimate the amount of time you spend.
Exploring Websites and Social Media
Using social media is a natural thing. But when you search for information by browsing websites and social media for a long time, it will certainly waste your time, and you can’t let that happen.
To fix this, you need to track your online time. There is no other way to identify the problem than to measure it.
Once you know the extent of your online surfing habits, you can take steps to stop them, such as adding apps that make you mindlessly go from one site to another.
When you go online to search for information but end up getting diverted to other information that is not needed.
So to avoid such useless business activities, you need to note down the things you want to search for, then determine the time to search for that information.
Holding a Meeting
Holding a meeting certainly takes up quite a lot of time.
According to estimates, you spend half of your time in meetings.
However, not all meetings are bad, but it’s good to know whether they are useful or boring.
To improve this, you can write about what went wrong with the meeting, there are two focuses to pay attention to, namely;
First, pay close attention during standing meetings .
A Monday morning team meeting might be helpful, but it’s probably not good.
Second, while it’s nice to hear everyone’s status updates, sending them via email is a better option than a meeting.
However, if email will cause a lot of confusion or open up misunderstandings and arguments, then scheduling a meeting would be better.
If you finally decide to hold a meeting.
So, make an agenda and send it to everyone concerned to find out the discussion topics of the business activities that will be discussed in the meeting.
Make sure you include a time limit on each item on the agenda, so everyone stays focused and the meeting finishes on time.
Participate in Many Professional Developments
When you want to improve your professionalism , you’ll scour the web for podcasts, books, blogs, webinars geared toward your industry.
That’s certainly good, but it takes a lot of time. It was supposed to improve professionalism, but in reality you’re not even doing any work.
How to fix it? Try to follow the best and latest practices, which you can also get potential customer relationships and client work.
You can set aside a specific time, such as every week or every month, to focus on professional development.
You can also save relevant articles, podcasts, or discussion groups to study at your scheduled time.
Employee Micromanagement
When you hire a new employee, it means you have work to delegate, and you trust that employee.
However, it is not uncommon for business owners to want things done a certain way.
In fact, this makes business owners spend time observing and repeating the work that has been done by their employees.
This not only hurts your employees, but it also wastes your time and energy that could be used to do other tasks.
To fix this, when you as a business owner want the work of the business activity to be done in a certain way.
It’s a good idea to create a list of specific tasks or steps you can take to complete the job.
By creating a process manual, you can use it to train subsequent employees.
What you need to know is that even if you like things done a certain way, chances are employees have their own ideas.
It could be that the idea is more efficient, so don’t hesitate to ask if your employees have more effective suggestions for doing the job.
Doing Perfectionist Things
The proposal you have created may look great, but it will look even better if you just tweak the icon one touch.
Additionally, use different fonts, and you can add customer anecdotes.
The above is a perfectionist treatment that should be avoided. Because, finished is better than perfect.
So, how to fix this?
Basically, if you say that things could be a little better, but did anyone else notice?
When your work is almost done, it’s best to save it immediately and come back to it a day or two later.
After that, you can analyze whether there is something wrong or not. If there is, fix it immediately.
If there is only a small problem that takes more than 10 minutes to fix, but only you notice it.
So, assume that the work is good and you can send it immediately.
That, work or business activities that you think are bad will always have a bad impact on you.
If you focus on things that are barely visible, it will certainly waste time.
Especially when you’re making changes that essentially don’t affect anything.
Vendor Search and Process Updates
By conducting regular audits to find out whether the service provider can offer better terms.
Also, you can consolidate services with one vendor which makes it easier for you to manage relationships and billing.
However, any new process will come with a learning curve, so you want to make sure you’re not trying something new just for the sake of it.
To fix this, if you feel that you can get more money to get a better one.
So, ask other entrepreneurs to see which programs they use for various activities.
If someone you trust has done the hard work, there is no reason to do it all yourself.
And, it’s always best to automate as many business activities as you can, from appointments to invoice reminders.
Learning New Things
Spending time learning something you don’t master is a huge waste of time.
Even though there is a term “wearing many hats”, if it is studied without enjoying it, it will not sink in.
To fix this, you need to know your preferences.
For example, you are interested in the website, then you can proceed to a certain level.
However, if you try to design your own newsletter but keep messing it up.
So that means you’re not doing yourself any favors by trying to save money to learn something new.
To overcome this, you can look for someone who is better at doing the work that you are not good at.