Small Business Productivity Tips

When you're running a small business, as an entrepreneur with a team or a solopreneur you need to make the most of the time you have available. Being efficient isn't a good thing, it's a necessary! Working smarter not harder to get the best results for your business.

Managing Your Time

The first step towards productivity is creating a good time management plan for yourself and your business. This means:

• Setting firm boundaries for yourself and your clients

• Creating space in your diary for business expansion activities (marketing/ hiring new associates/ sales calls)

• Looking at time blocking client work to stick to scope/ hours allocated

Utilising your calendar this way to provide structure and clarity to your weeks allows you to focus on specific task based actions at any one time rather than being pulled in a thousand directions and distracted by incoming messages.

Delegation is Essential

In any business knowing when to delegate is an essential skill for any owner or manager. We all have different strengths, identify the areas you thrive in and those that you need expert support to manage. Accounting, marketing, sales, administration and so many other key business components can be managed by other people that know how to do these processes more efficiently.

Automation - Setting up Systems

Automating processes that are repeatable means you can prevent yourself from doing tiresome repetitive tasks. Have you looked into creating your email funnels? Linking your Xero correctly to you bank account? Working within your systems to create an easy and simple process is something that a virtual assistant should set up to make things faster and easier.

Goals and Priorities

Once you have all these things in place the best thing to guide yourself and create efficiencies is to build a structure of goals into your year. Plan yourself 3 month, 6 month and 12 month goals that will help reach your business to the next level.

Having in place a strategy to achieve your goals will create a strategic plan in which you need to be efficient in order to meet your targets.