It's really easy as an entrepreneur and business owner to want to do everything yourself, i know I've tried it and what it leads to is overwhelm and doing things badly or worse not at all. It's also common to forget about processes for your business as we can ‘do what we want' as entreprenuers but not having processes at all is draining in itself, you have to work everythong out and the inconsistency it leads to is just hard work
When oyu are looking at your processes and working out how you can save time and make it simpler don't forget you don't have to do it all, , give it to someone else that may even enjoy the process more than you
There are three ways to entrust tasks to someone else: Delegating, outsourcing, and automating.
Delegating Tasks to Your Employees
Delegating is as simple as finding someone in your business who can take over the task for you. It requires taking a regular task and mapping out each step so that anyone can learn to do it without supervision. The advantage is that someone already working within your business already knows you and understands your business goals, how you operate and what the expectations are.
A good example of something you can delegate is if for example, you have a Facebook business page and group, these require you to be there pretty much every day, monitoring, commenting, and interacting. You can easily get someone in your company to take over this activity rather than doing it yourself.
Other tasks that are easy to delegate include accounting, administrative tasks, data entry, IT, marketing tasks, customer service, and content creation.
Outsourcing to Someone Outside Your Organisation
There are several reasons you may choose to delegate to someone outside your business. You may not have the staff on-hand or you may not have staff that can handle the task you need to delegate. Instead, you can outsource to a skilled professional outside of your business
In addition to the same tasks as above, you can also outsource things that require specific skills like graphic design, copywriting, programming, telephone answering and other skills you don’t have the time to learn or resources to handle yourself.
For example, you may need to design eBook covers, advertisements, websites, and other visual content. It would take time to learn, so a better use of resources is to pay someone to do it.
When outsourcing, take some time to research and compare service providers before you choose one. The most efficient way to outsource is to hire a virtual assistant who can become familiar with your business and handle a great deal of work in one place.
Automate with Tech Tools
We can use tools to automate some of the processes we set ourselves each week and it's smart to explaore these, often people will say ‘I can't afford to that right now' and I understand where that comes from however when you find yourself saying that you need to ask yourself this question
How much does it cost me ie my time to do that process each week?' the answer is normally substantially more than the software will cost you it also keeps you sane not having to do that task over and over again
Things that can be automated include:
– Email – you can set up email systems to automate all sorts of things this is the one we use and it saves us 100's of hours per week
– Social media activity – there are lots of things you can do on social media from scheduling updates and blog posts through to searching and connecting with people
– Monitoring and analytics – Google analytics is a great start for this and will give you weekly updates in a summary of what has been going on
– Accounting functions like bill paying – a good accounting system will do a lot for you in terms of book keeping
– Customer management – CRM systems are really a must have but can be integrated to auto-update with information
– File back-up – Automatic backups of your computer files can easily be done by using a cloud-based file system like this one, putting on a cloud sync will mean its a job that doesn't have to be done manually, once its setup it just runs all of the time
Explore automation options and determine which of your tasks can be automated. Take advantage of free trials and use the software before you make a purchase. Don’t automate any area of your business that requires the human touch.
All of the above options require some time and effort on your part to set up. To delegate or outsource, you need to map out business processes so someone can learn them. Automating involves some time choosing the right tech option. But this is time you will save later once you have it set up and running smoothly.
Let me know how you are saving time
