subject: 3 Ways To Better Organize Your Business [print this page] One of the biggest mistakes many small business owners make is not putting the right systems in place to run their business and often feel overwhelmed by the chaos and the disorganization. As business owners, we are expected to manage our lives, our business, our people, our process and build our business at the same time. Being organized allows you to focus on your business versus being stuck in the chaos of running your business.
1.Systematize
Our businesses are run on systems that we put together after we develop our vision. When we first start out, we begin by handling everything ourselves. The best task every business owner can do is to begin to document their process and consistently follow that process every time. This allows for ease of training when you begin to hire staff, ease of improvement when you begin to grown and ease of freedom when you want to start pulling yourself away from the day to day operations. A great book to read is Michael Gerber's The E - Myth Revisited.
2.Automate
To become truly efficient, you must learn how to deliver more with less resources, time and money and the best way to accomplish that is through automation. Once you have strong process in place that is utilized in a systematic way, now you must look for tasks that can be automated. For example, your fulfillment, your follow up, your sales process, your ordering process etc.. Are you still fulfilling the orders for your products or can that be automated and outsourced? How about your follow up systems? Do you have a way to continue to communicate with your customers in an automated fashion? Always look at technology investments. It is easy to calculate the ROI (return on investment) simply by calculating the amount of hours multiplied by the average labor dollars and calculating the payback period and return.
3.Outsource
There comes a time when you must delegate and outsource. The first things you want to take a look at are the tasks that you are not proficient in, for example, bookkeeping. If you are not a numbers person you will be better off outsourcing this task to a bookkeeper who can help you with your numbers. The time it would take you to learn this skill to the proficiency of an expert, will take you longer and therefore cost you more money than to simply outsource in the beginning. Same goes with administrative tasks. You need to ask yourself, is my time best spend focusing on this task or is this something that can be outsourced so I can focus on revenue producing items?
