Solid productivity is the only way a business owner is going to be able to grow his small business. Knowing what works and how to get there is key in growing and creating a successful business environment.
Sometimes, the know-how of being productive can get lost in the shuffle. As a business owner with a lot of ideas and projects swirling around in your head, it can be hard to establish what will work to grow your business moving forward. With that being said, here are five productivity tips for growing your business.
Create a Schedule with Clear Deadlines
Creating a schedule gives you a guide to your time. It helps you prioritize exactly what you need to be focusing on and what can be set aside for later as it is not essential to your growth at this exact moment.
Setting deadlines helps you stay on task. Have you ever sat down to take on a project and gotten side -racked to the point that the project has gone completed sideways and you aren’t even sure where you started? We all have! Setting deadlines helps you concentrate on getting it done without giving you the time to get distracted.
Set Up Systems That Work for You
As you grow you are going to bring on a team. It can be hard to let someone else start handling something you have down to a science. Setting up systems that work can give you the organizational flow that you need to be able to hand down that task to someone else. They can then follow the steps to process the assignment in the same fashion you were doing it.
Rid Yourself of Distractions
Distractions are everywhere and they happen even to the most focused person. A quick question from an employee can easily turn into an hour-long conversation that has nothing to do with work if you let it. Distractions greatly limit your productivity and hold you back from moving forward.
Set time where you close your office door and put your phone on silent so you can concentrate completely on the task at hand. It is also helpful to set a time limit to your deep-concentrated work so you don’t get bored working on one task for an extended time period and venture onto the internet to catch up on the latest news or social media.
Once you have accomplished the task you needed to, it is a good time to take a break. Taking a mental clarity break can help you be more productive for your next task because you won’t feel like you are doing nothing but writing or working figures on your computer. A quick walk around the office, a drive to Starbucks, or a short, friendly conversation with an employee can help reset your mental clarity and set you back on the path to productivity.
Automate What You Can
There are so many systems out there that can automate your work for you. Especially in the sales and marketing world, you can set up social media posts weeks ahead of time, so you don’t have to do anything. Emails can be scheduled to go out on a certain day at a certain time, so you don’t even have to think about it once it is created. This can go hand-in-hand with setting up a schedule. For instance, on the first Monday of the month you sit down and schedule all of your social media posts to go out throughout the month on an application like Hootsuite. This way you are generating leads and interest in your company without having to worry about it beyond that one time block.
Outsource
Along with automation comes outsourcing. Outsourcing can be the number one productivity boost your small business needs to gain quick momentum and growth. Quick Sprout tells us that every business needs to hire a good PEO because it will save them time and lots of money.
A Professional Employer Organization, or PEO, can handle all of your HR functions. This means you won’t have to worry about payroll, benefits, compliance or onboarding. The amount of time saved in those tasks alone will enable you to grow quickly. Additionally, instead of paying a handful of administrative personnel to handle each of these human resource disciplines, you are contracting with one company to do it. That means you aren’t paying salaries and benefits for employees and instead are paying a much smaller fee.
Finding ways to increase your productivity is essential in growing your small business. Being table to take your business to the next level and add on the necessary increased functions that a larger business will need is all dependent on what you do from the beginning. Having systems in place to succeed from the start will ensure your continued success.