It seems like the Holy Grail of business – an efficient business that is productive and works without you while also being profitable.
Phew! Also sounds like hard work. But it doesn’t have to be.
There are three steps to building and maintaining an efficient, productive and profitable business – and you’ll learn what they are in this blog.
Streamlining your business
Streamlining is simply a strategy to make your business more efficient by automating, delegating, simplifying or eliminating tasks.
And there are three steps to taking action:
- Planning
- Implementing
- Improving
How to get started when streamlining your business?
1. PLANNING
If you want to build a profitable business through streamlining, the first step is a project plan.
According to the Project Management Body of Knowledge, a project plan is: “A formal, approved document used to guide both project execution and project control.”
In your project plan, you will have goals, KPIs, milestones, key personal, and key tasks.
2. IMPLEMENTATION
Implementation is where the doing gets done and the action takes place! It’s important to stick to your plan when implementing so every task is done on time and in a sequence that is the most effective and efficient.
In this step, you will:
- Establish your work priorities ( what will have the greatest impact).
- Choose your starting place, usually the area giving you the most trouble.
- Go through your current processes for this area (and then each area after that).
- Start to document or re-document how you do each task.
- Break the tasks down into smaller steps.
- Maintain your documentation for this task.
- Automate and delegate your workflows.
- Start this process again for the next area that needs improvement.
3. IMPROVEMENT
Once you have implemented a streamlined workflow (and either automated it or delegated it to a team member), the next step is to continually improve the streamlining in your business – for the current tasks and then any new tasks you take on.
It’s in this step that you will test the workflows to make sure they are working properly and refine the process (and documentation) if they are not.
An Online Business Manager (OBM) will be a great addition to your team at this point (if you haven’t already got one!) because they can handle this work for you.
Start building a profitable business
These three steps will help you build a profitable business that’s productive and efficient, but you must take action.
If you don’t quite know where to start, start with my productivity and efficiency quiz, with tips on how to improve your business.
Simply fill out the quiz by answering the questions and then we will send you a report with tips on how to improve each area. Get started here.
