How To Improve Business Efficiency
Whether you own a small internet business, a blog or some other web-based business, you’ll know that your business can’t stand still. Amongst the day to day tasks of running a business you still need to think about ways to improve business efficiency so that your business can grow from strength to strength.
Minimizing the number of things you have to do each day, each week and each month as a business owner is also important. This means streamlining your activities and creating business systems and processes to help you generate leads, build your email list, create sales and improve your profit margins. There are 3 key efficient business practices that every entrepreneur can easily learn and implement.
3 Skills That Will Improve Business Efficiency
1. Streamlining
Henry Ford streamlined the automobile creation process. He took out things that didn’t work, erased meaningless activities and gave each employee on an assembly line just one simple task to perform.
Because an individual only had to perfect one type of task, each step in the process became quicker and the product became better. This is how you improve business efficiency.
FREE Checklist: How To Make Your Business More Efficient
Write It Down
To start streamlining, write down a list of business practices that you do. Don’t leave
anything out. Write down every single thing you need to be done, even if it’s as simple as thinking about your business. Now allocate a time value for each of these activities. How long do you work on the different aspects of your business? What you’re probably looking at is an impossible situation if you try to do all of these things yourself.
You have more activities and tasks than there are hours in a day. This is why you need to streamline your activities. Go through this list you just created and circle the things you personally must do. Be very honest with yourself and work this down to a number of hours which is doable for your particular situation. This is streamlining at its very basic level.
This is the way Fortune 500 companies are made. The person at the top only spends his or her energy and time on those things that are absolutely essential for them to be involved in. What are you going to do with all of those other activities which must be done, but not necessarily by you? You’re going to outsource.
2. Outsourcing
You’re currently outsourcing tasks all the time, you just don’t think of this process as outsourcing. For example, when you give your children tasks to help out around the house because you don’t have enough time to do everything, you’re outsourcing.
Outsourcing is one of the best ways to free up your own time for important tasks that require your full attention. Also, it enables you to get people who are more skilled and knowledgeable than you to complete tasks that take you too long to complete.
To start outsourcing go back to the streamlined activities list you created. Look at those tasks and processes you don’t need to be doing or take you too long to do. There are freelancers located around the world that can handle these tasks for you. This can range from your social media posts, email inbox management, customer follow-up and other necessary but time-consuming business activities. In many cases, they can do the job much more effectively than you and in a quicker time.
So now you’ve got people helping you in the real world, it’s time to look at the digital world.
3. Automation
Call it customer service, client retention or whatever you want, taking care of your customers is essential if your online business is going to succeed. You don’t have the money that a huge corporation does to spend on improving the experience your customers have. You probably don’t have the time necessary either, which is why you performed the streamlining exercise
earlier.
As a small business owner, you don’t need to be manually involved with every day to day interaction with clients. Below are a few of the automated services I use. These are proven practices and methods that you can automate and which can work in any business or market.
Email Autoresponder
An email autoresponder sequence is nothing more than a series of emails. When someone clicks on a link on your Facebook page, joins your email list or purchases a product from you, the delivery of a series of emails is triggered. These emails are created once and then go out automatically in a sequence created by you. Companies like AWeber provide software for a nominal fee that lets you create sequences of emails so you can automate interaction with your prospects and customers.
Email List Building
Before you start sending automated email, you need to motivate people to signup to your email list. SumoMe provides automatically appearing pop-ups that help you promote your business and grow your email list. You can set these pop-ups to appear after a person has been on your website for a certain amount of time, and you can customize the experience so these pop-ups only show up on particular pages or blog posts.
Repurpose Blog Content On Social Media
Social media is a great way to get your blog content in front of your prospects and customers. But if you only post it once to social media, it’s a lost opportunity. Missinglett_r automatically turns each of your blog posts into a year’s worth of social media updates, pre-filled with quotes, hashtags and images. All you have to do is review the suggestions and click approve. Then Missinglett_r will send the content out to your social accounts increasing engagement and clicks back to your website.
Free Checklist: How To Improve Business Efficiency
If you’ve been doing everything yourself, you’ll quickly find that this is a limiting factor in the growth of your business. Putting systems in place makes things quicker, and it makes it easier to outsource, giving you more time to focus on growth and new ideas. You must work smarter and not harder to improve business efficiency. To learn more on how to make a business more efficient download my free checklist, A Guide To Business Systems And Automation.
