Four Ways to Leverage Your Business and Turn “Busy” into Growth and Profits!
Is your business extremely busy, and you’re finding it hard to keep up? Are you having to do everything, yet unsure of how to scale your business in order to earn more, and without sacrificing too much time of your own?
This is one of the most-asked questions I get from Business Owners. If you are extremely busy, working long hours just to keep up, how can you streamline your business to make more without sacrificing every free hour you have?
The power of business is leverage – leveraging time, money, and resources. If you continue to try to do everything in your company yourself instead of growing by hiring the proper person or using the proper service, or investing in resources that will help you streamline, you will bottleneck your own company. You are busy doing the wrong things, and not doing the most important things, which is getting work and doing the high-end work. Here are four streamlining options you can do now in order to leverage your time, money, and resources:
- Create systems for everything! We all tend to want more business, but can we handle more business? The first thing you need to ask yourself is, are you prepared for more business? If you are already busy, chances are the answer is “NO”. You need to streamline first. In other words, put systems and procedures in place to help. Ensure you have systems in place so you can maintain quality from service to service or product to product. What tends to happen when you are busy is quality and service tend to be sacrificed, even with the best of intentions. Without systems, it’s hard to maintain a frenetic pace and keep your quality standards high. Even though it’s hard to put systems in place when you are really busy, it’s the most important thing you can do to help leverage and streamline your business.
- Automate everything you can. If you are in a business where you are always doing something over and over, but you are doing it by hand, or doing it in some way that seems to take a lot of time, chances are you can automate it and make it simpler. For example, if your business is always having to give quotes, automate your quoting system. Quotes are a key cog in a lot of businesses, but the problem is, you don’t get paid for every quote. And the longer it takes you to get a quote out, the less likely you are to get the work. Don’t leave money on the table, there are dozens of quoting apps available on most cell phones, let alone computer programs. If you are trying to quote by hand or even by computer but have to input information manually, this is a huge time-waster. Learn how to get your computer to work in your favour and save you time. This is also the case for invoicing. Automate your invoices. If you are already automated on both quotes and invoices, are they syncronized with your accounting software? Is your marketing automated, so you get leads on a regular basis? Do you have any payroll, and if so, do you have it automated? Do you take appointments? If so, do you have a system where clients can make their own appointments on your own website (or other great apps) if they chose to? Everything you have within your business that can be automated should be automated.
- Delegate what you can’t automate, whereever you can. There are always tasks and responsibilities that need a person rather than an automated system, such as a bookkeeper, or someone to monitor your social media, or someone to take and make appointments for those clients that don’t want to use your automated system for whatever reasons. The highest and best use of YOUR time is either getting work or doing the high-level work that requires your expertise and that others cannot do. Don’t waste your time doing simpler tasks that you can hire others to do. Once you pass the startup stage in your company, you are no longer saving money doing menial tasks. Your time is valuable and limited, so use it wisely.
- Outsource work when you can. Sometimes you have a project that needs a specific task done, but you don’t need someone on a regular basis to do this. Or you don’t need a full-time receptionist, but would like to have one available when your phone rings. Impossible, right? Outsource this work! There are so many places you can go to and get almost any type of work done with a bit of vetting for the right price and the right skills. Upworks, Uassistme, virtualemployee.com, and rubyreceptionist are just some of the many outsourcing companies available to do anything from answer your phone 24/7 to creating powerpoints from your outline for a presentation, to creating complicated spreadsheets for your quoting system or invoice system. You get the idea.
Simply put, leveraging and streamlining your business is the key to business growth and allowing you to both increase profits AND work smarter, not harder. Use your resources and get time and money back on your side. Step out from being the hub of your company, but manage and lead the high-end work, high-level strategies, and high-end prospecting instead. Only then can your business grow, scale, and prosper.