If you feel like you are constantly drowning in admin tasks and never actually have time to work on scaling your business, it might be time for you to streamline your business systems.
I love trialling new systems which can streamline my work processes, and finding the best, most effective and easiest way to do those time-consuming admin tasks, leaving me free to work on the areas of my business I enjoy.
Going through your regular tasks, as well as your systems and streamlining the ones that you can, will take a little while but it will save you huge amounts of time in the long run. I’d suggest spending the weekend getting them set up so you’re ready to hit the ground running on Monday morning with your shiny new systems!
1. Take note of where you are spending your time
The first step in streamlining your business is to work out where you are spending most of your time and then focus on how to create systems and processes around those tasks to help free up more of your time.
The best way to do this is to track how long you spend on all the different tasks you do in your business. This too will take a bit of time, but you only really need to do it for a week and the time you’ll save in the long run will be worth it.
For every task, or type of task, you complete in your business on a day-to-day basis, time how long you spend doing that task and make a note of it.
Pretty soon, you’ll have a great idea of what you are spending a lot of time doing. For me, it was creating and sharing new content for my blog and socials as well as reading and replying to emails, so I knew that I needed to set up processes and systems around these tasks to cut back on the time I was spending there.
2. Get rid of everything you don’t need
This is a tough one because we often feel like we need to be doing everything – blogging, having a podcast, and a YouTube channel, and be posting on ALL the social media channels – to have a successful business. On top of that we need to be finding clients, having discovery calls, onboarding new clients, and serving them to the best of our abilities PLUS taking care of our own business admin tasks.
We’ll get to these things shortly. But, for now, let’s just get rid of everything we don’t need to be doing.
Hate posting on Twitter? Then don’t do it.
Know that your ideal clients aren’t on Facebook? Take your business off Facebook.
Anything that you don’t need to do to run your business, get rid of.
3. Create SOPs, workflows and checklists
The next step in streamlining your business is to create SOPs, workflows, and checklists for all the tasks that you regularly do in your business and for your clients.
Dig out the list of tasks you made in step 1 and, for each task, create a step-by-step guide or checklist. Don’t forget to include all the tiny details that you usually spend time checking. For example, if you find yourself looking up a particular code each time you create a new sign-up form, add the code to your guide.
Add these SOPs, workflows, and checklists to your chosen project management tool so that you can refer to them, or even duplicate them, each time you complete a task.
These documents will help you streamline your business on a couple of different levels.
Firstly, if you’re following the same steps every time you do something, the work you are doing will be consistent – each blog post will be formatted in the same way, each client will receive the same onboarding experience as the next, and so on.
Secondly, you will be saving yourself a lot of time. You don’t need to spend hours rummaging through your sent folder to figure out what you sent to the last client you offboarded, or sit staring at a blank laptop screen trying desperately to remember all of the steps you take when setting up a new opt-in form and you won’t be clicking back and forth between 20 different tabs to access all the information you need to create a new website for your latest client.
Don’t worry if you can’t remember all the steps and key details when you first create these documents, you can always add to them the next time you complete that task and remember the additional details. Done is better than perfect!
4. Don’t be afraid of templates
If you find yourself writing similar emails from scratch each time, or perhaps when it comes to creating Pins for your blog posts you open a blank document every single time, why not spend a little time creating some basic templates that you can adapt as needed.
Templates were something that I really didn’t want to use in my business when I first started out. I wanted to give my clients a personalised experience and I was worried that, by using templates, I would sound like a robot and not be able to make real, human connections with my clients. That just wasn’t true.
Templates are the number one thing that has helped me to streamline my business, and my clients’ businesses too.
Some templates you might want to create and use in your business include:
- Forms: inquiry form, client intake form
- Onboarding Documents: contract, invoices, welcome pack
- Emails: answering FAQs
- Graphics: cover images for your course lessons, pin templates
5. Invest in tools and apps to make your life easier
For most parts of your business, there will be an app or tool that will help you streamline things. Whether they just make your life that little bit easier or allow you to automate the process completely, they are well worth the investment!
CLIENT MANAGEMENT
I particularly like HubSpot. It’s a great CRM for all types of business – you can automate the onboarding process, appointment booking and offboarding process.
INVOICING
There are lots of other options out there for service-based invoices, but I like to use Xero. Automate recurring invoices so that they get sent to clients on a regular basis without you needing to do a thing.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Scheduling social media, for me, goes hand in hand with batching which is a great way to save time in your business and generally help things run a bit smoother.
For most of us, social media is a massive part of our marketing strategy, but finding the time during the day to post live can be difficult.
Set aside a chunk of time at the beginning of the week, or month, and queue up posts for your various social media channels. There are a few different systems that will help you do this, such as Buffer, or Hootsuite, but personally I use Later. I queue up posts for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.
If you’re working on your Pinterest strategy, Tailwind is the best way to make the most of your Pins. Spend some time setting up your account so that it posts on auto (Tailwind will figure out the best time of day for you), without you having to lift a finger.
If this still feels like a LOT of work, a virtual assistant will be able to help you create SOPs, workflows and checklists; find the right tools and apps to suit you and your business; and support you along the way to a more streamlined way of working.
Contact the team at KD-VA to discuss how we can help you to streamline your business.
