Strategies For Scaling a Small Business Operation
As a solopreneur or budding business leader, you only have so many hours in a day to accomplish your crucial business tasks. Your small operation can get messy pretty fast as more possibilities fall on your shoulders. You can only do so much within 24 hours, and that’s why you need to learn some of the top strategies that will help you free up your time and maximize your profits at the same time.
Treat your business like a process
You can start optimizing your results only with a clear understanding of the value creation process. Each company performs a series of crucial steps that need to be followed in order to create a profit. So take stock of all the activities you perform daily. It’s best to put them on a whiteboard so you can see them better. Now mark that 20% of activities that are responsible for 80% of your results. You will see that out of 10 tasks that you put on the board, only two or three of them are most directly responsible for your results.
Concentrate only on this top 20% of activities (which are usually the hardest ones to perform), and get rid or delegate the other 80%. Now you’re on your way to skyrocketing your productivity. But remember that it’s best to use the “Eat That Frog” philosophy (stop procrastinating) and tackle the hardest task first thing in the morning. This will give you more energy and motivation to maintain high-performance throughout the day.
Automate everything you can
The days of doing everything manually are over. Now you have amazing tools you can use to save tons of time. For example, if you’re managing a small team, one of the top small business apps you should use is Trello. It’s a project management tool that’s absolutely free. It will allow you to build a repeatable business process and be in touch with all the stakeholders.
Another app you may check out is Zapier. It has hundreds of “Zaps” that create automations between different apps, by hooking to their APIs. The best thing is that you don’t need to know coding for this. It’s a plug-and-play solution. So, for example, it enables you to post your new article on social media channels automatically once it goes live on your blog.
Get help from freelancers and the gig economy
It doesn’t matter if you want to build a new website, perform in-depth keyword research, or get your latest blog post edited, there’s someone on the Internet who can do it at an affordable price. Let the experts do the miscellaneous tasks while you focus on your areas of excellence. At some point, you might even want to hire a general virtual assistant (GVA) that can manage all sorts of tasks for you and work on a part-time or full-time basis.
By using the ideas above, you’ll be on your way to reaching the business success you always dreamed of. You can’t do everything alone, so it’s high time for you to start using leverage and scale your business!
