Small businesses often need to improve their efficiency to stay profitable and relevant. As more small businesses pop up, competition increases, especially over the past few years. Therefore, as a small business owner, you must focus on how you can change systems and processes to get the most out of your business each day. Below are 3 areas you can focus on to improve your small business efficiency.
Many small business owners do it all themselves. Unfortunately doing this means many things are not done to the best standard. Or, it’s possible they are done well but as a business owner, you are working long hours, which often leads to burnout. Both of these situations are not great for long-term business success. To avoid these issues in your small business, evaluate the tasks you do, and which tasks you are best at. For most small business owners, their primary focus should be on product design, development, and marketing. Therefore, you may want to consider outsourcing your bookkeeping, accounting, and administrative tasks. You could also consider hiring a virtual assistant to handle website updates, SEO, and customer service.
Automating processes is one of the easiest ways to improve your small business efficiency. The two primary areas you should focus on automating are marketing and finances.
For automating marketing, first set up an email list, then create your content. You should have emails and triggers for an abandoned cart, a regular newsletter, returning and new customer promotions, and finally holiday-themed promos. For example, 12 hours after a customer abandons a shopping cart, the system will send the abandoned cart email. Email marketing has great ROI and is simple to schedule ahead of time. You can also spend time once a month, preplanning and scheduling social media content. Just remember to monitor your social media once posts go live to interact with your customers.
For financial automation, ensure you have a reliable payment system. This payment system can then automatically take payments and you can schedule any reoccurring payments within the same system. Not only does this make it easier for invoicing, but will also minimize the amount of time it takes to consolidate the books each month.
Now, embracing digital doesn’t just mean using social media, and having an online storefront. There are so many more tasks that can now be dealt with digitally. For example, using smart contracts instead of regular paper contracts. By creating contracts digitally, and enabling digital signatures, you can cut down the time it takes to start on new projects. It also makes it much easier to reference later on as you can simply search for any particular clauses or timeframes within the contract.
You can also use digital platforms to schedule tasks for you and your employees. By using a platform like Asana, employees can interact with each other, send instant messages and updates on projects and clearly see any deadlines or project requirements. Ensure you select a digital platform that works for you are your business. Embracing digital technology should mean that you spend less time on menial tasks, and more time working on what matters.
As more people choose to support local and small businesses over larger companies, ensuring you offer quality and efficient service is critical to your success. Plan ahead for the future of your small business, and its potential growth in the market. Ensure you use the strategies above to help improve your business efficiency so you can stand out from the crowd.
