With the long hours, frustrations of managing employees, payroll and the occasional setback, it’s hard enough being a small business owner – let alone an efficient one. With the many hats needed to be worn, it’s easy to miss something. With the advent of the Internet and search engines, you now also need to maintain a web presence and participate in social media along with your brick-and-mortar storefront!
If you’ve made it past that barrier to entry, you may be destined for greatness, but only if you have enough discipline to do all the tasks involved with running your business.
To help ensure that you operate as smoothly as possible, here is a weekend checklist for small business owners.
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Get Organized
If you’re wading through waist-high paperwork all day, you’re wasting energy on unimportant tasks. “Where is that paper? Where did I save that file? What was I going to do next?” Get past these time-wasting challenges with the following tips:
Control Your Inner and Outer Environment
Your external environment is a reflection of your internal environment.
If you’re scatterbrained, your desk is probably a chaotic mess. But it works in reverse too! You can influence the clarity of your thoughts by changing your environment. Help tame your mind by keeping your physical and digital desktop clean and organized. Anything that must reside upon your desk should have a place and a purpose.
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Have a Workflow for Your Workflow
There are three poisons that will stop you dead in your tracks while trying to run your business, often filling you with anxiety and resistance:
- Carrying irrelevant information in your head
- Thinking about future tasks
- Leaving tasks uncompleted
How can you solve these problems? The best systems I’ve seen for this are Trello or Evernote.
Think of it as a fluid to-do list that allows you to prioritize and focus on what matters. Once your system is in place, you’ll never waste time wondering how you should use your time.
Offload any and all mental data into your Trello cards. Don’t allow anything to eat up your mental real estate because you will lose the ability to carry out what really matters. It also drains your energy and has the potential to keep you up at night.
In order to complete any open items, develop simple deadlines for each task to be completed, including dates and times. Then, organize them by ease and by deadline. Afterwards, set aside one day a week to handle administrative tasks that you can’t delegate.
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Outsource and Automate Everything Possible
If you can afford employees, have them. If you can hire a virtual assistant, do that too. If you can utilize custom coded software or apps to aid you to automate repetitive tasks, do that too. Use online resources like Upwork, Fiverr, or PeoplePerHour to find quality and affordable freelancers fast.
Free yourself from as many menial tasks as possible. You should never spend your time doing $20.00 work. If you’re not trapped in repetitive tasks that don’t demand much brainpower, you’ll be free to increase your revenue.
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Determine Your KPIs and Review Them Monthly
Your KPI is your key performance indicator. It’s the metric you create that measures your efficiency and effectiveness. By watching these, you can know how you need to pivot and change your actions to increase efficiency.
Don’t fall into the trap of being a number watcher or number cruncher. If you watch too frequently, you won’t see the forest from the trees and you’ll react to data too early. Once a month is the right period of time that allows trends to pop out with some statistical significance.
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Clean Out Your Inbox
Get every email in a folder. Every e-mail program will allow you to create other folders where you can file information away for when it’s needed. Even items that need to have an action taken, such as a response, can be filed into a folder made specifically for that purpose. Once your inbox is at zero, you’re free to deal with the ones that need action now or later, but they are together and organized.
For peace of mind, make sure you unsubscribe from any extraneous email newsletters. The less coming into your inbox, the quicker you can move on to what matters. Organization only has to be done once.
After you have used this tactics to get your house in order, it takes very minor maintenance to stay organized. Once you’re there, everything just happens a bit more smoothly. And when you’re not caught up in the day-to-day administrative catch-up, you can be free to innovate and grow. Get organized and be efficient with your work in your small business!
Luke Harsel is a writer, musician, student of SEO, and a Campaign Director at Local Marketing Solutions, a unique local SEO service. When he’s not on the internet, see him riding his bike around the various neighborhoods in Philadelphia. For more information visit localmarketing.
This is a wonderful checklist for me as a small biz owner beginner. Grateful to you. Emerson
Outsourcing and automating shouldn’t just be a weekend task, it should be a process that’s constantly in motion. Always be outsourcing and automating everything you can! Especially automating – a piece of software works for less than a penny per hour, around the clock, and with far more efficiency than a human could ever dream of. Take advantage of that!