Month: January 2020

Our three top tips to help you spend less time in the office

First of all, Happy New Year!  I hope this year brings you peace, success and happiness.

The start of a new year is a great time to make some resolutions to take stock, evaluate how things are going and make some changes.  Most people’s resolutions tend to focus on losing weight, exercising more and saving money/spending money etc, but do you do the same with your business?  Do you spend time over the Christmas break (or at any time of the year) to evaluate what worked and what didn’t and make changes?

I’m no expert in conducting formal business reviews, but if you want to spend less time in the office, working evenings and weekends doing business admin and more time with your family or working on your business and growing it, I can help.   Here are my 3 top tips for reviewing your admin processes to help you spend less time doing admin and ultimately make your business more streamlined and more profitable.

1. Review your processes from start to finish

Look at the processes in your business.  Map out what happens when your customer first makes contact, what is your reaction to that contact and the process from start to finish.  What would an ideal transaction look like?

What is your ideal response to every eventuality?  For example, if something should go wrong.  What is your complaints procedure? 

Create a company handbook with templates, so that for every event you have a policy/procedure and template to work from and give your customer everything they need and help them with their next steps (even if it doesn’t involve you). 

For example: if you provide residential building surveys.  Do you have a list of recommended solicitors, estate agents, moving companies, builders, decorators etc?  You can gain cross referrals whilst providing your client with everything they will need to move house and beyond.

Make your process as simple and as easy as possible for you and your client.

2. Outsource areas which aren’t your expertise

Do you spend hours two-finger typing, working on spreadsheets or creating email campaigns?  Are you an expert in these areas? If you aren’t, chances are you are spending a lot more time doing a task which it would take an expert a quarter of the time to complete.  Business owners have to wear many hats but there comes a time when we as business owners need to realise that our time costs money.  Time is finite, utilise it wisely.

If you have an hourly rate, look at how long it takes you to complete a task and compare it to the cost for getting a task completed by an expert.  What could you do in that time? Could you be out getting attracting more customers instead?  If you do something like social media or Facebook ads yourself – do you know how successful your efforts are?   Chances are your efforts wont be as successful as an expert in this area.

Letting go can be difficult but chances are once you do, you will wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.

3. Automate repetitive tasks

Automation means using technology to operate or control a process without human intervention or input from an operator. For example, Calendly is free appointment scheduling software which allows you to make appointments and add them to your diary without human interaction. 

There is so much automation technology such as chat bots, Zapier, IFTTT etc out there just identify your repetitive task and no doubt there’s automation software out there to help you!

Conclusion

As business owners we need to ensure that we are continually reviewing processes to ensure that we are spending our time and energy wisely.

If you would like to find out how a Virtual Assistant can help you streamline your business and processes or have any queries please get in contact today.

I look forward to catching up with you next month.

Best wishes

Gemma

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