Organise Your Business for More Ease and Growth

Entrepreneurs are often drawn to the potential financial and lifestyle freedom of being a business owner. While that’s a great ultimate destination to be at, most of us don’t start out from that point. We start out being the CEO, CMO, CFO, Receptionist, Office Manager, and Janitor of our business. Juggling all these hats make biz-life balance an elusive dream rather than a reality that’s within reach.

That said, there are ways you can create more ease and growth in your business without working longer hours or harder. I’ve listed below some ideas on how to set your business and yourself up for greater flow and productivity. These practices helped me heaps during my years of serial entrepreneurship - be it running an e-commerce business or fintech startup.

1. Declutter your space?

Be it your headspace or physical workspace, make it a habit to regularly declutter it. You can’t sprint ahead with clutter weighing you down like ankle weights.

When it comes to clearing your headspace, journaling, speaking with a therapist, and brainstorming with a mastermind group are great ways to process the unprocessed in your mind. If you would like to gain a fresh perspective by disconnecting or creating distance, try?meditation, yoga, hiking, exercising, swimming, surfing, dancing, gaming, and so on.

For organising your workspace, make it a daily or weekly routine to tend to your digital and paper files. Create a filing system and backup process and keep to it.?

2. Develop processes, automate them, and document

Create processes that enable anyone new to your business to be able to run with it even if they had minimal training. After the processes have been put to use for a while and are sufficiently refined, automate and document them. This way you have created the infrastructure for your business to scale with more ease. The lovely Women Who Biz team has created this free list of 33 Tools to Launch & Grow Your Business. Download the handy guide here.

3. Build a business that can be run by your team

At the beginning of a young business, you might not have a large team, so having specialist contractors and a virtual assistant can free you up to focus on the business rather than being knee-deep in the everyday operations of the business.

Your virtual assistant can help manage your inbox, organise your files on the cloud, set up your meetings, and more. The specialist contractors can work on the areas which are more worthwhile for your business to have their attention and input than yours.

4. Leverage your network

Your net worth equals the value you create out of your network. Use customer relationship tools such as Hubspot, Zoho or Pipedrive to manage your customers, leads, payments and other critical information. From there, once you have your contacts organised in a system, identify your needle movers. Who are the mentors, connectors, finders, ambassadors, and experts you’ll need to reach out to for support to grow your business? Make it a point to connect with them regularly.

5. Save time with templates and by setting boundaries

Own your time. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day - using those hours with care can give you an edge over the competition. Always seek to be strategic on what you spend your time on and set boundaries where necessary on energy vampires or low-value tasks. Invest time to create templates on recurring tasks such as emails, social media captions, blogging, etc, so you can free up your plate for focusing on business growth.

Whether you choose to adopt one or all of the above, remember that growing your business with ease is possible if you're committed to setting up the systems and routines for it! If you have a great time-saving tip, please share them with us here in the comments below. I'd love to hear from you!