As a small business owner, we know you’re a workaholic. However, not every day needs to be a 12-hour workday. With the right tools and business services in hand, you can quit burning the midnight oil and actually enjoy your evenings. Here are a few ways you can streamline your small business to run more efficiently.
Be a To-Do-List Ninja
A never-ending to-do-list won’t get you out of the office any earlier. So help yourself manage your daily tasks with
Producteev. It’s a free web-based task manager and allows access from your email, mobile phone or web. In addition to easy access, Producteev can sync with your Google Calendar, allowing you to receive daily reminders of the tasks at hand.
Organize Your Inventory
You’re likely already organizing your inventory, but how efficient are you? If you’re like many small business owners, you’re likely using an Excel spreadsheet. The first thing to do is to stop. There are multiple reasons why Excel is bad for inventory tracking. It’s inaccurate and will cost your business time, money and unwanted stress. What’s the solution? Automate your inventory tracking with an inexpensive inventory control system. Our inventory tracking systems will save you time and money, alleviate unwanted headaches and allow you to run your small business more efficiently.
Avoid Interruptions
Running a small business means making important decisions and answering questions from employees and clients, but not all decisions and questions need an immediate answer. To avoid these not-so-important invitations, it’s a good OK to put up an auto-responder on your email client. By doing this, you’re telling people that you have your head buried in a project and don’t want to be interrupted, saving you more time to tend to those more important aspects of running your business.
Manage Your Email
Responding to emails is an essential task for a small business owner and his or her employees. Many people find this task daunting, and it adds unnecessary stress to their daily work routine. With
Email Center Pro, you can assign specific team members to designated emails, which can eliminate lost emails or even multiple responses to the same message.
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
One of the biggest mistakes you and your small business can make is to make change. Of course not all change is bad, but if your current business operations are working, then leave them alone. A good way to stay consistent is to standardize your business processes. You can pretty much standardize anything from file formats to emailing clients and customers. Doing so will save you valuable amounts of time of training and retraining employees.
We understand that the daily tasks of running a business can be time consuming, but hopefully with a few of our tips, your small business will be on its path to efficiency.
Do you have a success story for increasing your small business’ efficiency? We’d love to hear it below!
