Parker's Points
June 2004
10 Ways To Leverage Your Time When Running A Business
When I use the word leverage I mean that you expend a certain amount of energy to accomplish multiple tasks or you conserve your own energy for other parts of the business. The objective is to save energy so the owner can focus on the most important parts of the business.
- Find new ways to automate your business. Example: Use QuickBooks to do your bookkeeping and write your checks. One input and two jobs completed (checks done and bookkeeping entry made). Create messages to contact groups of customers using a contact manager or Outlook. One message reaches many people.
- Hire people who share your vision and values so that they can do the job you have assigned to them with little supervision. Have a good training program, clear objectives and a detailed process description (operations manual #3) so that the employee can do the job as effectively as you would do it.
- Have an operations manual that details all your business processes/systems with specific measurements for each system. This way you will know if your business is running efficiently. Spend time understanding the problems there are in the processes that are under performing.
- Work from your strengths and delegate the jobs you are not good at to others. Hire someone to do the tasks you dislike.
- If you are responsible for marketing for your company and write articles for publications, use your ideas in multiple ways. Take one topic and write an article for an industry journal, enhance the article for a presentation, and if possible use the same material in a book.
- Use every customer interaction as an opportunity to "educate" the customer on your newest products, services and/or specials. Plan what you are promoting each week or month and let all your employees know about the promotion. Train your employees to mention the promotion to every customer they speak to.
- Get others in your network to market for you. Be clear about what you have to offer so that they can articulate your benefits easily.
- Create a brand identity. The brand identity represents you and your business to others even when you are not around.
- Have an advisory board, R and D team, and/or customer panel to help you make improvements to your business. Use the knowledge of your target market to create new products and services to sell to your customer base. Create demand as you do market research. Chances are if you listen to this group, some of them will become your customers.
- Package your products and/or services in different ways. Offer a tape and a workbook together for example. Then you might offer a live workshop and include the workbook and the tape. In retail give products that are used together a more attractive price.