Automate your work … This is one of the best actions you can take in your business to reduce your workload.
As a business owner with a vision, you’re busy (all the time) and prioritising your tasks and workload, and even getting the important revenue-making tasks done can be difficult.
And you’re probably asking yourself “What do I do and where do I start? I just have so much to get done – there are not enough hours in the day!?
The answer lies within business optimisation and how to automate your work. However, to achieve this, you must prioritise optimising your business as a urgent task and get it done so you can reap the rewards.
In this blog, you’ll learn how to prioritise business optimisation.
Where to start to automate your work and optimising your business
To start optimising your business and automating your work, look at your critical daily tasks or the most important areas of your business (tasks with the highest value), that is your revenue-raising activities and the other areas that will help you have the most impact in the quickest time frame.
These areas may be different from business to business, but could include marketing, sales and customer service.
You could also look at the areas giving you the most grief and where you are having the most trouble, for example, staff onboarding or business promotion.
To get started to automate your work, download my free Business Growth Systems Checklist and rate yourself out 10 (one is the lowest and 10 is the highest). Then circle the area that is most important to you and that is causing you the biggest headache and start there immediately.
For example, if webinars are integral to your business, but you are losing sales and they are not converting as you need them to, that’s where to start.
8 steps to optimise your business and automate your work
Small business owners who are spending too much in their business, instead of working on their business can quickly improve their productivity and bottom line, and make decisions based on their goals, with optimisation.
Here’s how to optimise your business and automate your work:
- FLOW CHART: Create an organisational chart for your business. Add all the departments and future departments of the business.
- ACTIVITIES: Write down all the activities associated with the departments in your organisational chart.
- GET STARTED: Choose the area or tasks most important to your business, and where you are having issues, for example, sales and marketing.
- TAKE ACTION: Set a time in your calendar, sit down and start documenting the process and how you do each task in that problem area of business. This is called sketching the workflow.
- TIME MANAGE: Once you have sketched the workflow, give an estimate of time for each step and task in the process. Ideally how long should it take to complete from start to finish?
- DELEGATE/AUTOMATE: Next, ask yourself, can the task be automated or delegated to a team member? If yes, what other resources, people or technology can help you?
- IMPLEMENT: Implement the steps in your workflow and remove any unnecessary tasks. Delegate the work to an employee or contractor, and ask them to monitor the steps in the workflow so you can make changes if needed.
- TWEAK: After the task is implemented, continue to improve the process by validating it. This simply means to watch how the process is tracking and ask the people responsible for the task if any improvements or updates are needed.
Give it a four-week testing time so you can see the data patterns and zero errors. If you are still seeing mistakes after four weeks, the process is not optimised and it will need tweaks to run smoothly and save you time.
Essentially after four weeks, the task and the person doing it can run on autopilot so you are not so manually involved.
Business processes help is at hand!
If you’re having trouble with your business processes, help is at hand! I have written many blogs about “business processes” and how to automate your work, which you can read here.
Alternatively, please reach out to me for optimisation help. If you need to improve your systems and processes for better business results, I’m your optimisation angel!
Get in touch and let’s have a conversation about how you can do this quickly and easily so your business can start working for you.
