If you don’t stop to evaluate how you’re spending your time running your business, you could be losing hours and hours to pointless business activities. Streamlining your business is an effective way to get things done without wasting those precious hours!
We all want more hours in a day, but what if it’s really about making use of tools and processes to cut down our time spent on admin to get us the extra time we want?
Streamlining your business is a crucial part of balancing your business and personal life. You deserve to enjoy all the good things in life, right? I’m about to share with you a few things I do to save time in my business and create more opportunities for life!
The first thing and the biggest time-saver is scheduling software.
How many emails and text messages do you spend scheduling calls with your clients?
You get the message, “Hey, I need to talk to you.” And you say, “Ok, I’m free here.” And then, “Oh that doesn’t work for me.” And back and forth.
Why do that? Get yourself a scheduling software, my favorite is Acuity, and save your time. It’s amazing just how much it can save you!
A friend of mine who has this great startup emailed me wanting to catch up and sends me a link to schedule a call with him on his website. Done.
Two days later, we jump on the call and get things done. It’s amazing.
If you’re selling your calls when you’re a coach or consultant, you can charge your clients right when they schedule with Acuity. How perfect! You don’t have to send an invoice or go forward and back to find the right time. It’s so simple and it makes life so much easier.
Next, do you have processes and templates set up?
Let’s talk about a powerful little thing: templates for your email.
If you’re bringing in a client, you need to guide them through certain steps. Those emails are pretty similar between clients, so ask yourself, do I have templates set up for that or do I write those emails over again for every client?
Go write some templates.
Then, move on to your processes. Client intakes mean you have to go through certain steps. For web design, you need hosting information, the url, logos, pictures, and all of that.
There are a lot of things that happen between the client saying yes to hiring you and the finished project. Between those two things are processes and I recommend Asana for this.
Setup your process. Set up all the questions. You could build a PDF or Word doc of all the questions that you need from a client. An online form looks great too. Google Forms are amazing.
Look at every single client who’s worked with you and ask yourself what questions you ask over and over again. Then make it a process.
Make sure you have those processes is in place, whatever works for you.
One of my favorite places to streamline a business is with Quickbooks online.
I know there are others programs like this out there, but I’ve been on Quickbooks for years and it works for me. Quickbooks allows me to import all my accounts so easily. I just tell them I have an account with Chase and they download all of my transactions. The only thing I have to manually enter is my Amazon account.
How much time would it save you if you could import your bank transactions and your bookkeeping files? No more typing it in.
Are you ready to start streamlining your business? Pick one of these tips to implement today!
Great strategy Yvi! I need to set up my email templates! I already have a welcome email template for clients, but I have not set up any templates for those early stage communications…Adding this to the top of my list!
And Gmail allows you (through their labs feature) to save and implement email templates right in Gmail <3
oh, that’s good to know! I’m sure if I do a little research, there are multiple services and platforms, that I use, with the ability to set up templates or other time saving automations!
Now that business is in full swing, I need to take the time and find the right automations for my biz!
In Gmail under settings, you’ll find “Labs” with some hidden extra features 😉