As an entrepreneur in a small business, it can be extremely difficult to manage everything singlehandedly.
You’re effectively a salesperson, business owner, HR manager, finance assistant, people manager and marketer, all in one busy little package.
Ultimately, your goal as an entrepreneur is to build a sustainable and profitable business where you can build something amazing and enjoy what you do every day, whilst protecting your future.
Whatever your personal motivation is, there are some simple things that you can do today which will make you work smarter.
Below I’ve detailed some of my top tips to help you streamline your business, gathered over the last 16 years of growing Damteq® and our clients’ businesses. Check them out!
1. Invest in your website and marketing
Having a functional website is all well and good, but if it just sits there gathering dirty pixels, it’s pretty pointless.
Your website can be one of your greatest assets for getting the word out about your brand and driving leads and sales. But you can’t achieve that without a solid inbound marketing strategy!
Try and build yourself a basic monthly or quarterly plan of things you can do to promote it; think of things like:
- Social media promotion
- Blog posts (just like this one)
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
But if you’re a sole trader or only have a small team, you don’t have the time to balance and perfect all of that. So, try looking into marketing automation software to help you schedule and manage your plan for you.
Using software to schedule social media and blog posts in advance and automatically send out email promotions and remarketing campaigns will free up a lot of your time.
For your SEO and paid advertising, you can always employ specialists like us to handle them for you! *cough* give us a call *cough* 😉
2. Optimise your business process
So, you’ve got yourself an office, a loyal team, lots of customers and a steady stream of new business coming in. That’s dam’ awesome, but if you don’t manage your growth carefully, your business can start running away from you.
One thing we’ve always done is set up simple business processes to follow. By doing this (even if you’re a sole trader), you’ll be able to scale more quickly, and all of your team will be onboard and following the same structure, which helps improve your team’s productivity and efficiency.
As you continue to grow and customer and market needs evolve, you’ll need to periodically review and adapt your processes to maintain efficiency.
Businesses that stand still and fail to innovate get left behind. So always being on the lookout for new ways to improve your business and how you work can help you streamline your business and sustain growth.
Top Tip? List everything that happens when you get a phone call or email about a new enquiry. List all of the singular tasks. This will form part of your Sales Process. Once you’ve written it all down, try to make the process more efficient by eliminating duplicate or unnecessary tasks.
3. Use software to help you
From my own personal experience, I know how difficult it is to do everything.
The sleepless nights, the early starts, and the late finishes. I have been there, and I am right there with you.
One thing that truly changed my day-to-day work schedule was my reliance on online software. Being able to offset the more tedious tasks you do, like managing team members’ time off, can help free up your headspace for more important things.
Look into software that can help you with your HR, customer management and project management. We love CharlieHR and Asana!
Using Asana to manage our project workloads, we can set a clear path from the start of a project, right through to completion, with deadlines and assigned team members so everyone is aware of their responsibilities and timeframes. This helps us to create a much smoother and more efficient way of working.
We even use a piece of software that manages every single task. We put everything we do into it because if it’s out of our minds, we can focus on what matters most.
4. Plan and allocate budgets effectively
Sometimes you’re so caught up doing ‘not so important’ tasks that you forget that you’re the driver of your business.
You are the only person that can really move your business to the next level, and to do that, you’ll need to spend time planning and stabilising your finances.
We’d recommend regularly analysing your profits and losses because your business relies on cash to grow. That’s why you have to make sure you don’t get greedy and overspend what you don’t really have.
Strategically plan for 3 months, 12 months and 24 months and have clearly defined goals and objectives with key milestones on how you think you can achieve this.
Keep some money back for your marketing spend. Ultimately, the more you can afford to invest in your marketing, the better. This will be the fuel for your business to move forward and grow.
Check this recent blog post to learn more about budget and resource allocation and how to create a business growth roadmap.
5. Change your mindset. Competitors don’t exist
Instead of worrying about what your so-called ‘competitors’ are offering, spend that time finding ways to truly blow them out of the water. Find that ‘no brainer’ reason why that prospect will choose you over them.
The sooner you change your mindset, the sooner you’ll see success. Focus on you, your business, and your goals rather than what that ‘award-winning’ company offers down the road.
At Damteq, we’ve never focused on entering bullshit awards that really don’t mean anything. With most awards, the company willing to pay £5000 for a ticket at the ceremony wins the award. Congrats. Great achievement there.
We’d rather focus our efforts and invest our time into innovating our services to become true specialists in what we do.
Our success comes from great reviews, happy customers, and seeing your business grow. The proof is in the pudding, after all!
So, instead of focusing on your ‘competitors’, focus on building trust with your customers and demonstrating why they should choose you over other businesses.
6. Don’t be a busy fool
Many business owners believe that being massively busy is a badge of honour.
They pack their schedules with back-to-back meetings, check their emails every five minutes, stay in the office until stupid o’clock, and run around like headless chickens.
But let’s be real. Being a busy fool isn’t a good look, especially if it means you forget things or let quality standards slip.
You need to spend your time wisely and focus on the things that really matter. Stop wasting time on stupid marketing strategies that just aren’t going to work. Cut out pointless meetings that could have been emailed. And stop doing unnecessary stuff that just doesn’t matter.
Plan your day every single morning and try to stick to it. Time management is key.
So, What Next?
We have met so many business owners over the years that find it difficult to juggle the daily struggles of business.
One even told us, “I’m amazing at putting boilers on the wall, but I have no idea how to make it into a business”. This same company now has a team of over 40 engineers, working 24/7 nationally. Pretty incredible, eh?
Most businesses are easy to run if you just apply logic and strategies to them. Structure your time wisely and plan ahead.
Take Damteq for example; we started in 2006 as a bedroom business with literally nothing. We’ve grown into a million-pound company in not so many years. We can build a plan and apply these strategies to your business to help you grow too.
The best thing to do next will be to give us a call or send us a message on live chat to arrange a date to pop in for a coffee. We’ve helped dozens of business owners achieve their dream goals, and we can do the same for you too!
