If you’re running a whole business by yourself, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and then burn out. So how do you simplify things, and take the pressure off?
In the early days you probably longed to be busy and making money, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy when you finally make a full-time income and have a long list of clients to deal with.
The key to keeping it all together is to try and simplify and automate wherever possible, to save time and boost efficiency.
Automating processes can free up time
Every business has lots of little repetitive tasks that, alone, might not take too much time to do – but add it all together and it can become a huge time drain. Creating invoices, sending confirmation emails, marketing new content or sending updates to customers are all solid examples of this. The good news is that all of these processes can be automated to save time, freeing you up to concentrate on other things.
Niche down
You don’t need to do everything for everyone. If you do a bit of everything, it’s harder to keep track of everything and ensure consistent quality, resulting in lots of small mediocre jobs, rather than one big good one. Instead, you could focus on doing one thing really well and making a name for yourself in that particular niche as an expert.
Know when it’s time to get help
When you’ve dragged a thriving business into life from scratch, handing a task to someone else can be difficult. However, there comes a time when you’re going to need help from others. If you want to grow, it’s the only logical way forward, especially if there are skills you don’t have – and there definitely will be!
Sharing your workload will allow you to become more efficient and spend more time managing the business as a whole, rather than trying to do everything in between.
Create templates
When it comes to things like contracts, invoices, proposals or reports, you can save yourself a lot of time by creating a template that you use for several clients and projects.
There’s no need to write up a brand new contract from scratch if you have the same policies in each one. Draw up a template and then personalise it where necessary.
Simplify your new customer on boarding process
One area you can revisit in your business is the method by which new customers come on board. Do you have an efficient process for new customers to sign up or purchase items? Is this followed by automatic confirmation emails or booking entries or do you end up having to do these tasks manually?
You can simplify this process by including online forms on your website which trigger notifications for you, confirmation emails for customers or automatic newsletter sign-ups. There’s usually a simpler solution out there for businesses like yours.
