When businesses start out, the primary metric of success is winning clients. As businesses expand, they often suffer from growing pains. In fact, a study by the Small Business Administration reported that overexpansion coupled with poor management are two reasons for why businesses fail.
With the vast array of tools out there, it’s easy to find a quick fix. As businesses grow, owners may find themselves scattered in different places. However, having a truly unified business means keeping everything together.
Here are 10 telltale signs that it’s time to streamline the business.
One of the more obvious signs is needing to grow your team. More hires means more management. More management means more time dedicated to administration work. This can be a lot for an owner to handle.
Solution: Care must be taken to organize, plan and control operations. This may mean hiring an operations manager, or finding a unified system that keeps your business information together.
If famine is outweighing feasts most of the time, you might have a serious problem on your hands. The obvious fix is finding new business. We all know that it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Solution: Keep your clients on a retainer basis. Take the time to up set up retainers in a system that tracks hours, usage and billing. Having cash flow on a recurring basis can save your business from famine cycles.
The most important thing about having a streamlined business is making sure all of your data is connected. Having a cocktail of tools seems like a good idea, but it just doesn’t cut it when they can’t be mixed together. They can also get very expensive as you add on new tools based on features you need.
Solution: Integrate the tools using open API’s or some custom development. Tying together all of this data is crucial to driving business success.
For many of us, projects are a blend of emails, spreadsheets and deliverables. However, when your team is big and communications need to reach multiple departments of people, you might find yourself drowning in email threads.
Solution: Implement a project management system to optimize for planning, collaboration, document storage and task management.
When the business can’t run without you there, the other parts of your life might be severely neglected. If those parts are health, family and friends, it might be time to think about automating your business.
Solution: Work smarter, not harder. Automate as much of your job as possible in order to create more time for the things you enjoy. Set up automatic retainers to earn income passively and let clients help themselves with a client portal.
There’s only so much information one can remember. If you’ve got a business with multiple clients, projects, staff and other moving parts, you’re bound to let a few things slip through the cracks.
Solution: If you’re forgetting important details, set up automatic reminders to let you know when tasks need to be completed, emails need to be sent and work should be approved.
By having data scattered in multiple tools, inboxes and spreadsheets, error-prone entry is almost guaranteed. The problem here is that the data is disconnected - having one system for all your business information can tremendously prevent errors.
Solution: Keep your data in one place or tightly integrated. Optimize for a system that automatically tracks professional touchpoints such as email, meetings and more.
Invoicing should be a happy occasion. You’re high off delivering the project, the client is happy and you’re about to get paid for all that hard work. Unfortunately, it hardly ever is. Between tying together emails, timesheets and spreadsheets, the billing process is a nightmare.
Solution: Integrate your staff timesheets with invoices so that billing is just a matter of tweaking numbers, approval and sending off.
You know your clients are probably just busy and tend to neglect things, but you hate that they forget to pay invoices. What’s even worse is that there’s no guarantee they’ll pay you on time.
Solution: Give your clients online payment options and make it easy for them to pay you. Automate email reminders so that if they don’t respond within a reasonable timeframe, your little robot will chase it down and notify you when it’s paid in full.
You started this business because you wanted to enjoy the work you do. If actually running the business is making you tired, stressed and sick most of the time, then automation may save you.
If you believe in your business overall but simply hate the admin work, consider these tips to make running your business easier.
Read about how MintTwist automated their business with Accelo
Sources:
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1706110&show=abstract
http://www.businessknowhow.com/startup/business-failure.htm
