How to Make Your Business Run More Efficiently

As a business owner, how much time do you spend on menial or administrative tasks every week that don’t yield any revenue? Are you looking for ways to make your business easier to manage? Do you need to streamline operations and improve your finances? 

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re probably wasting upwards of 22 hours a week at work on tasks that take time away from the more important issues according to a study reported on Inc.com.

Learn how to put a stop to it now to maximize your output and start generating a profit!

A lot of aspiring and established entrepreneurs do dream of running a company that is simple to manage so that they can focus on everything from other investments to their personal life. Yet to do this, you need to make the right decisions for your company so it can run smoothly without having you work around the clock. Here are the steps that we recommend. 

Hire the Right Team Members from the Outset to Ensure High Retention and Low Employee Churn

First, you need to make sure that you are getting the right team on board with the right skills for your business. You should be doing this from day one and being careful with your hiring decisions. There are a number of key challenges here, however, the main point is to make sure that you know what skills are needed to fill each position, and then be sure you are asking the right questions during every phase of the interview process.

Ideally, you should be looking for people who are going to be valuable assets—both for the job and the company culture--in your business for the long term. That way you can avoid the problem of employee churn and not spend money on recruiting, hiring, and training new team members, only for them to leave a few months or a year later. If you find that the person you hired is not performing effectively in their position, it could be worth exploring additional onsite, in-house training rather simply cutting them loose. Some reports (such as SHRM) show that every time a company replaces a full-time, salaried employee, it can cost between six and nine months of that salary. This is due to the advertising, screening, interviewing, hiring, and training protocols.

Use Outsourcing Solutions and Providers for Projects Where Your Team Falls Short

Do be aware that if you are keen to keep your team small, then there are outsourcing solutions available. With the right outsourcing solution and help, you will be able to make sure that you can cut the costs of your business and still get the quality services and skills that you need for specific projects. You should be exploring outsourcing for any area of your business that is either expensive or complicated to manage effectively. For instance, if you need to hire a graphic designer or copyeditor for one project only, you can find qualified help on websites such as Upwork.com or Freelance.com. This is a much more cost-effective option than hiring a full-time or part-time specialist. 

Another example of outsourcing work would be an IT management service such as www.egistech.com. An organization like this can work to make sure that your IT systems run effectively behind the scenes and that your business doesn’t encounter unexpected downtime, fewer disruptions, or other information technology problems. You don’t want to end up in disaster recovery.

Explore the Right Technology and Tools for Your Brand from the Beginning

Next, do think about the tech tools available on the market. There are numerous options available that might provide you with the relief you need when managing your company from scheduling meetings to social media automation to project/task management software. Some of the technology tools that we use at FemFounder.co are HootSuite.com to streamline and automate our social media posts, Canva.com to develop our website and social graphics, ConstantContact.com to distribute email newsletters and announcements to our customers, and Squarespace.com as our main web hosting portal. All of these tools save hundreds of man-hours every month by automating various tasks.

Essentially, this will mean that you won’t need to spend as much time or effort on tedious administrative tasks or putting out fires. Indeed, everything can run far more smoothly, with or without your personal input.

How to Delegate Effectively to the Right Team Members as Your Business Grows

Finally, you should make sure that you are able to effectively delegate in your business model to the right people in your organization. This isn’t as easy as most business owners assume, though. It can be difficult to relinquish control over key areas of your company. When I launched my first business, I always felt the need to be in control of every aspect of the business. But that led to more problems over the long run.

You need to make sure that the right people are in place to handle menial administrative tasks for you. That’s why it’s so important to hire the right team from the beginning as we have already discussed. Once you have the right team members in the right positions, the trick is to train and then trust them to make the right call with key decisions. Where possible, you need to make sure that you avoid micromanaging any of your team members—this can lead to your most valuable players to leave your company. You can learn more about team delegation on www.mindtools.com.

We hope this helps you understand some of the best ways to make your business a lot easier to manage.