How Developing a Business Process Will Improve Your Productivity

Are you running a business plagued with backlogs, slow productivity, or redundant processes? If so, then you need to explore how to improve your business processes and ability to scale. 

When you have the right business process in place, you can start to scale your production and grow your business without expanding your resources. 

Don’t worry if you’re not sure what that means we’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn all about how to improve efficiency by creating new processes for your business. 

What Is a Business Process?

In simple terms, a business process is a series of tasks or activities that accomplish a set goal. So, let’s say your business sells custom-made jewelry, you have a series of tasks to create that jewelry. But you also have another series of tasks to acquire the pieces for your jewelry.

For example, do you fly away to far off places and personally inspect each piece that you purchase? If so, can you outsource this to a professional in the area that you trust thereby freeing you up to focus on other tasks closer to home?

Additionally, where do you sell your jewelry? Do you showcase your jewelry at in-person events? Could you instead create an online store featuring your product so you are no longer required to spend the time at the in-person showcases?

When you look at each stage in the production of your product for your business, you can find ways to streamline your process and increase your efficiency. 

In today’s business environment you can’t be satisfied with your current process. Keep improving until you know it is the most efficient and gives you the highest output for your tasks.

You must continually look at your processes and evaluating whether or not they’re the most efficient and give you the most production possible. If not, it’s time to work on building more efficient processes to help you grow your business without increasing your resources. 

Why Your Business Needs to Focus on Building Processes

You want to grow your business. But your resources are finite. You only have a set amount of time, energy, employees, capacity, and tools to create your product and run your business. Therefore, if you want to grow your output without also growing your resources, you must become more efficient. 

Increasing efficiency allows you to get more from what you already have. And this is the key to scaling your business to the level you’ve always wanted. Some benefits to improving your business processes include: 

  • increased efficiency
  • increased ability to outsource
  • improved security
  • ability to remain agile
  • ability to continually improve

Business process automation allows you to grow your production without also needing to raise more capital or hire more employees. You need to keep your business agile so you can keep up with the changing demands while also keeping costs and duplication down. 

So, if you’re ready to grow your business then you first need to look at how you can improve your processes. This will allow you to grow without expanding your resources. The key is to work smarter not harder. 

How to Build Processes That Will Increase Efficiency

A business process is a way to map out your business plan in a workflow. It will show visually how you create your product and then get it to your market customer or client. 

There are two key components to creating processes that will help your business and not contribute to more paperwork. For your process to be beneficial for your company it needs to be properly documented. And each step needs to have clearly defined ownership showing who will be completing that step.

Documentation is imperative so everyone is on the same page about each process. This also assists in onboarding new team members in the future, you can easily show them why each process is important and who will be completing it. Before you start creating your business process, you need to ask yourself these four questions: 

1. what is your desired goal (or output)? 

2. What are you working with in terms of tools and resources (or inputs)? 

3. how can you create a logical sequence (or workflow) to get your inputs to outputs?

4. What tasks are required to achieve your workflow? 

When you have the answers to these questions you will be ready to start working on creating your process to improve efficiency.  

How to Manage Your Business Processes

As you grow the number of processes for your business, you will need to also grow your business process management. Which is how you document and disseminate the information to your team and suppliers. 

With our jewelry business example above we looked at two ways to outsource or digitalize to allow more time to grow their business. However, creating processes can be much more simple and minute that changing your business plan. 

When you change your product line, how do you dispense this information to your team or retailers? Do you send large files for them to download and look at? How can you simplify the process for both you to send out and for them to retain? You could convert multipage PDF to single image and send that instead. 

So, look at every part of your production process and see where you can improve efficiency, reduce redundancy, or simply make life easier. This will show you where to start to create processes for your business and scale to the next level.

Now, You Too Can Improve Your Productivity

Now you know why you need to create processes for each area in your business. You can easily see why they are so valuable in improving your efficiency so you can grow your business without also increasing your resources. Instead, create a business process so you can do more with what you have. 

Bookmark this article so you can refer to it again each time you have questions about how to create a process that will be valuable and beneficial to your business. 

For more great information on this and other topics, check out the rest of our blog.

3 Simple Ways To Hit The Ground Running With Your New Business

As an entrepreneur who has recently left the security of a nine to five, a regular, steady wage and excellent promotion prospects, it’s understandable that you want to hit the ground running with your new business. Gone are the days of a monthly paycheck to be replaced by financial uncertainty and a lack of future clarity. Your business plan may be top notch, you might have backing from the bank, and you might have a unique product or service ready to bring to market. As you have developed your startup, you will already know your target niche, and you should already have the research to inform your marketing strategy. To be sure of your ability to hit the ground running, follow this guide for business success.

Administration

There’s nothing more tedious and boring when starting your business than the administrative aspect. If you are not careful, the paperwork involved in your startup can slowly take over your days until your business becomes stagnated because you cannot fill your time with anything else. Instead of becoming bogged down with documentation, consider setting up a virtual mailbox, like the ones at https://physicaladdress.com. This prevents paperwork from coming to your door, and the outsourced company will scan everything to a virtual mailbox ready for you to look at as and when you are ready. People can still send you mail, but you won’t have sackfuls landing on your desk.

Social Media

Prior to even launching your startup, you should have generated a following and interest by utilizing social media platforms. The millennials chosen method of communication in the twenty-first century is Facebook and Instagram, so it’s vital that you get in on the action. Find your company voice, post relevant and meaningful content, and encourage comments and shares from your followers. If you can harness the interest prior to your launch, then you will have a greater chance of generating sales at the moment of launch.

SEO

Search engine optimization can be the bane of many an entrepreneur’s existence. While you can choose to clue yourself up on the algorithms of Google, keywords and meta tags, it will be more effective to outsource this business function to an expert. By relinquishing the responsibility for your SEO and web design to an offsite expert, you will revel in the joy of having a business with a greater online presence. Your brand visibility will be strengthened as explained at https://www.lifehack.org/, and you will appear on the first page of search results. This means you can convert more visits to your site into sales, generating more cash flow to keep your business on track.

Launching your new business venture should be an exciting time. You are following your passion and making a name for yourself in your chosen industry. The anxiety of knowing where your next paycheck is coming from shouldn’t be at the forefront of your mind. By hitting the ground running, generating sales immediately and keeping your cash flow buoyant, you will help your business to go from strength to strength.

This post is a collaborative effort by St. Louis Dad.

Cutting Through Messy Side Hustles With Accessibility

Whether you are an independent freelancer or you’ve decided to launch your own side-hustle company, there is one thing that you need to know from the start: Messy businesses don’t make it. Indeed, in a world where everything is accessible in a click, you can’t afford to delay your work and services. That’s precisely why organization is essential: Keeping everything you and your customers need accessible at all times.

For freelancers, stay-at-home dads and moms, and independent professionals, the notion of accessibility is the ideal combination of digital technology and offline practicality. To create a substantial presence, you need to focus your efforts on gathering the tools to maximize your response time, your availability at the right time and location, and your visibility on the go. Being accessible in the modern economy is as much about ensuring customers can find you than ensuring you can find what they need from you.

Mobile side hustlers need an app

Business on the go is what your customers want

Online retailers such as Amazon have built their entire businesses on enabling maximum accessibility to their customers. There is only one level up after that, and it’s to redefine the on-demand market. Indeed, side-hustlers need to look for one-to-one alternatives to make accessibility their USP – Unique Selling Proposition – on the go. Thankfully, you can find guidance in Android Uber app inspired platforms that put individual skills and features on a market in needs of short-term and immediate services. Getting in touch with a professional massage or beauty expert, for instance, can happen through an app, where you can book the right service to the location of your choice. For a mobile hairdresser business, this is the perfect solution.

The most effective office in the world

Admittedly, even a mobile side-hustle business needs a tidy office space where you can keep all your invoices, certification and equipment. Keeping a side-business at home is, however, tricky, especially if you’re prone to misplace documents or items. Here’s another rule of accessibility for you: Everything in one place and one place for everything. Something as simple as labeling your electric cords can avoid confusing in the long term. Similarly, storage boxes and color-coded filing systems will keep your stuff organized and easy to find whenever you need them. Why does it matter? Because your side-hustle on the go needs to maintain a professional front both for customers and official authorities.

No more wasting space!

Finding digital storage room for your business data is also a matter of accessibility. You don’t want to walk around with a pack of USB keys at all times, trying to remember what is stored on each of them. Live with your time! Your side hustle needs cloud computing to keep all data accessible when you need them – and to scale up when you need more storage space. For someone who wants to stay on top of the curve, it makes everything accessible from anywhere!

Cloud computing

In conclusion, with half of Americans pursuing a side-hustle career, you can’t afford to build your freelancing activities without accessibility. From making your services accessible when people need them to keeping all your business documentation stored and findable for admin purposes, being accessible gives you the economic freedom you crave.

This post is a collaborative effort by St. Louis Dad.

Great Tips For New Freelancers & Small Business Owners

As a freelancer or home business owner, you are in charge of absolutely everything. It can feel like you have been gifted with the most freedom you’ve ever had – but with great freedom comes great organization. Having the freedom to create your working week is a great thing. But, you need to have systems in place that allow you to enjoy that freedom and stay as productive as possible.

There are of course going to be plenty of days where the system doesn’t feel like it’s working, or that you just don’t feel like working – and that is fine too. But, to help you have less of those days, and more ultra-productive smooth ones, here are a few tips.

Photo by MARVIN TOLENTINO on Unsplash

Work With How You Work

Some people are night owls, some people are early birds, and others work in dribs and drabs throughout the day. If you can see a pattern in how you work, use that as the basis for your schedule. There is little point in putting a working routine together that starts at 6am if you aren’t functioning at your best till 12. By choosing to work in the times, you are most productive you won’t waste any time getting things done. If you have any staff or work with other freelancers, you’ll also want to implement a system to schedule your employees with ease too. As well as time routine, you could think about what times your breaks would work best, could you prep your lunch the night before?

It is all about making your day run as smoothly as possible and maximizing your working time.

Set Timers

Have you ever heard of Parkinson’s Law? “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” – does that sound familiar? Probably. Most freelancers are guilty of letting their days run long because they don’t set solid time limits on their work. It might sound counterproductive – getting all of this freedom then tying yourself into timetables and timers, but by maximizing your working time, you’re going to getting a lot more free time. A few great options are:

  • Be Focused: Allows you to set up a task list with a time to complete it and a work interval in between each. Typically it sits in 15-minute slots with 5-minute intervals until the long interval of 30 minutes. You tick each task as you complete and it moves on to the next one.
  • Office Time: This one has expense tracking, Apple calendar syncing ability, summary graphs, and a simple invoicing system. Perfect for keeping track of hourly contracts.
  • Time Panther: This has a brilliant break down of projects and clients. So you can tally up how much time you have spent on each, making invoicing for hours spent super easy. It has timers to keep track of all of the activity, and it can even tell you when you were working productively or when you were surfing facebook.

Lists Are Your Friend

Each and every morning, you should make a checklist. You might like to tie this moment into when you have your morning coffee (or shake if that is what you do), think about what you need to achieve. Be specific too. Rather than just write ‘deal with emails’ write something closer to ‘respond to XYZ, contact ABC and unsubscribe from X newsletter’. Setting actionable goals will help you feel accomplished. Transfer that written list into your digital time tracking app, set your timers up and away you go.

Goals are Goals

The lists are part of you setting daily goals. As well as daily, you should think about setting goals for the next 3/6/9/12 months. Think about what it is that you would like to achieve. Want to create some downloads? How about complete an eBook? Learn a new skill? You’d be wise to write down a financial goal too. Visualizing your goals, and keeping them somewhere as a visible reminder will help you stay on track. Once you have written down your goals, think about the actionable steps that you’ll need to take. If you don’t already have one, then you should put together a business plan or at the very least a vision for your venture. For two reasons, every business should have an idea of the very long-term goals, and the purpose which they serve. And, on the very hard days, the vision is a nice reminder of why you started this in the first place.

Don’t Get Bogged Down

When you are implementing new working systems, it can be all too easy to pile on too much work and not manage to finish any of it to the standard you want. Or, in your excitement, you take on more clients than you had room for. Be sensible with what you have the time to do without exhausting yourself. Overwhelm is a real thing and can hit particularly hard when you are the only person who can be held accountable.

End of The Day

When you send that last email or put the final period at the end of the sentence, and is time to switch from work to personal take stock of the day. Have a look at your to-do list from the day, what did you accomplish, what needed more time than you had thought? Where there any tasks that you keep putting off? By taking a moment to talk about what you didn’t get done, you will begin to streamline your process even more.

Now is a good time to check things that track your productivity vs procrastination, like the Time Panther app mentioned above. How can you eliminate those distractions?

If you haven’t been able to find a system that works for you, now might be a good time to head to Google and check out some productivity planners. You might just find the one that makes a serious impact.

Keep it Neat

Having a neat filing system that works is very important. The earlier on you have a system for your files the better. As a freelancer or small business owner, you need to be able to access things quickly and easily. If a client were to call and ask for some specific information, but you couldn’t find the file – either on your computer or a paper file, it doesn’t look great. These are some of the documents that you should make sure are within easy reach and in good order.

  • Receipts (although you might like to get an app to manage these)
  • Invoices (have a paper and digital copy of all of them)
  • Tax Forms
  • VAT documents
  • Legal Business Documents
  • Client Project Files
  • Accounts

To be extra organized, use color coding for all of you files, and have the corresponding folders and email markers for that client on your emails. Anything over a year old that you no longer need to refer to, place in an archive folder. Remember to keep any financial details or sensitive information in a safe filing cabinet with a lock.

Make Friends

The joy of the internet is that even if you are really pushed for time to meet in person, there will be numerous online message boards or groups that have the same interest as you. If you work in marketing or PR for example, search for groups that meet your needs. You can use them to socialize, to chat with others, ask for advice and maybe even pick up some work. Building a community of people with similar goals is great for motivation.

This post is a collaborative effort by St. Louis Dad.