5 Ways To Increase Small Business Efficiency

We have all heard the expression, “work smarter, not harder.” The phrase is catchy and sounds obvious. But if you are a small business owner, making a pivot from your current path can feel like a massive and exhausting disruption. Making any changes, even smart ones, can actually feel like working harder. 

But growing businesses need to run efficiently in order to create an advantage over nimble competitors. In today’s business environment, companies can’t afford to be slowed down by processes that aren’t optimized or systems that waste more time than they save. 

Because they don’t have unlimited budgets or large teams, small business owners have to make every minute and every investment count, whether that investment is in a person, platform, or technology. Replacing inefficient processes and practices can ultimately save both time and money.

Here are five areas to consider when looking to increase small business efficiency.

1. AUTOMATE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE

Automation for small businesses means using technology to perform business tasks faster and more accurately by involving minimal human intervention. Using technology to streamline workflows, simplify tasks, and improve operations will save time and prevent costly mistakes. Automation can also increase productivity by freeing up the time it would take an employee to do complex, technical, or tedious repetitive tasks.

For example, scheduling a meeting between multiple parties can become a complicated mess of email, texts, and back-and-forth calls. Using a virtual assistant enabled with automated software option like Calendly, ScheduleOnce, CalendarHero, or HubSpot Meetings can drastically reduce the time and tracking involved in finding available times for all parties. These programs can take care of all the pre-and post-meeting business like sharing the agenda, automatically setting up video calls, and sending follow-up emails with meeting summaries.

Nurturing leads and responding to customer service inquiries are also areas where automation can make a huge difference. Visitors to your website who are interested enough to sign up for your newsletter should automatically receive engagement through a welcome email rather than waiting for an employee to reach out. Initiating a conversation on your website using an automated chatbot might convert a potential customer into a paying one. And using a Customer Relations Management (CRM) tool to set up automatic reminders and renewals, send proactive messages, and offer self-service resources can more easily resolve customer service inquiries and save time for both the business and the client. 

2. USE ALL THE TOOLS

Having productivity tools employed in your business to help automate your workflows and processes can give you hours back to your workweek. But only if you have the right tools. As a small business owner, affordability and ease of use are critical to any business tool. When evaluating what tools are suitable for your small business, there are three main criteria to consider.

1. Must have an extended free version. Don’t waste time migrating information and setting up a program for your entire business that forces an upgrade after only two weeks. Or worse, invest only to discover it doesn’t suit your needs.
2. Must be subscription-based. Flexibility is critical when cash flows fluctuate—canceling or downgrading to a less expensive platform if necessary can be helpful when cash flow is light. Likewise, pivoting to a new software release or a product with richer features is also an excellent option.
3. Must be easy to use and have excellent customer support. Small businesses with limited resources benefit from quick setups and at-call service when necessary.

Some software products can help your business be efficient and more competitive. 

• PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Asana, Monday.com, Trello
• COMMUNICATION: MailChimp, Constant Contact, 
• SALES: Streak, ActiveCampaign, Zoho
• MARKETING: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Buffer, HootSuite, Canva
• CUSTOMER SERVICE: Help Scout, Zendesk, Zoho Desk

Identifying the right tools can help a business save money without sacrificing quality. Once your tools are in place and proven to improve efficiency, you can leverage them and grow your business more rapidly.

3. CONSOLIDATE TASKS

Small business owners know the daily grind all too well. Rushing from task to task, putting out fires, responding to incoming inquiries… it can often seem like you are continuously reacting to the events in your day. Instead of setting your hours and structuring your day as you would like, you find yourself going from one email to the next, pulled into last-minute meetings, and addressing every urgent or non-essential thing that falls in your path. Hours go by as you work in your business, leaving little time to work on your business.

Continuously responding to events is disruptive, distracting, and a bane to productivity. Focusing on completing tasks one-by-one over an extended period is scientifically proven to lead to productivity. Consolidating or batching tasks – what is known as time-blocking - allows you to take control and structure your day.

For example, setting the first few hours of your workday to check and respond to emails rather than one by one as they come in will prevent you from getting pulled from other tasks throughout the rest of your day. If you have customer service inquiries automated with a landing page, new clients get an immediate response which you can follow up with when you are in your emails.

Other daily time blocks that can help get actual work accomplished are:

• Content writing for social media or newsletter campaigns
• Tasks that set up new clients
• Sales follow-ups and outreach
• Project management (pick one project at a time, rather than one task bracket in multiple projects)

By blocking chunks of time on your calendar as best fits your business’ needs, you will be able to dive deeply into whatever you are working on without interruptions. Time blocking is a sure-fire way to become more efficient.

4. CREATE SYSTEMS

Busy and productive are two separate things, even though they are often confused and thought of as one and the same. Being busy does not necessarily mean you are productive. Sharp or dramatic increases in clients, product demands, and service requests can make you feel busy, but is your productivity optimized? Without systems in place, things can get out of control. Stress and pressure escalate, and balls get dropped. 

When looking to increase your business efficiency, look to create business systems. Checklists, outlines, and if-then structures create standard operating procedures (SOPs) that define the systems that can help optimize your business. Documenting processes and outlining how things are done in your organization can move your business toward perpetually achieving goals. Business systems and workflows allow you to transfer duties, automate functions easily, and delegate assignments, ensuring nothing gets missed or overlooked. 

Having business systems in place also creates consistency in your delivery. Consistency helps build trust because your audience, clients, and customers will know what to expect from your business and that they can rely on you. Once your systems are in place and are proven effective and efficient, you can leverage them, build on that trust, and grow your business more rapidly.

5. DELEGATE AND OUTSOURCE WHEREVER POSSIBLE

Outsourcing some business operations can also help your company run more efficiently. By delegating simple tasks, you can free up your time to handle higher-level tasks more appropriate for your skill sets. You can outsource just about any business function: bookkeeping, marketing, customer service and database management, etc. In general, you should seek to delegate small, tedious, time-consuming or repetitive tasks and tasks you are terrible at. 

But there is no one-size-fits-all strategy for what a business owner should delegate. For some, delegating comes easily. For others, their business is their baby, and they have difficulty handing the care of their baby to someone other than themselves. Doing everything with their own two hands feels like the only way things will get done. 

Using Freedom Maker’s free task audit can help you choose which tasks to delegate. Our tool helps each business owner reframe their struggles with outsourcing by reinforcing the idea that their time is more valuable than the small hourly fee paid to a virtual assistant to take care of outsourced tasks. Once a business owner sees the benefit of spending a small amount of money to save their valuable time, they are more likely to understand the long-term win for the company.

For instance, if you bill $150/hour, should you really spend that hour doing an administrative task? If you delegate it, you could bill more hours at the rate you are worth. Let’s say there is a recurring task - like creating your weekly newsletter. Each week, it takes an hour to do. You could delegate that and pay someone else $30/ hour to complete. While the virtual assistant works on your newsletter for one hour, you will spend that hour working with a client that you bill for $150. Therefore, you have netted $120. Additionally, if you had done the newsletter yourself, you would not have had time to work with that client. So by trying to save $30, you actually would have lost $120.

This is why delegating is critical to enhancing small business efficiency. Effective delegation can give your company an edge over your competitors.

Freedom Maker virtual assistants are practiced at executing workflows and business systems - and are even skilled in helping create and define them. Engaging a virtual assistant to perform some of your business’s systems or to help streamline functions is a great way to delegate as you scale. A virtual assistant can save you time and ensure nothing is missed or left untended. 

CONCLUSION

At some point in every business’s growth, leaders need to step back and evaluate what processes are working and which can be optimized for efficiency. While it can seem challenging to step outside of day-to-day operations, becoming entrenched in how things are often inhibits competitive advantage. Seek to increase efficiencies wherever possible, and reach out to Freedom Makers to get started!