How to Boost Earnings with the Work You're Already Doing

Running a more successful business often means looking for new streams of revenue. What many busy professionals don’t realize though, is that generating more revenue doesn’t have to mean taking on more work. It’s possible to boost your revenue (with the same amount of client work) by increasing your efficiency. How? It starts with improving your workflows, processes, and how you track time so that you’re more productive (and profitable).

1. Improving workflows

When you rely on several different tools to manage your clients and projects, you end up spending a lot of time jumping from platform to platform to input information. Not only do you often end up making double entries or having to duplicate work, but you also miss out on having one complete view of your business when all your info is siloed and scattered (making it hard to keep everyone in the loop).

If you’re at a company with many teams, or even many offices, knowing who’s working on what and being able to track how much more work people on your team are able to take on is really important. Using smart technology to seamlessly organize all of your client work in one place means not having to tap colleagues on the shoulder to figure out where things are at in a project, what they're working, or having to repeat the work you do in different tools. That way, you can save more time, be more productive, and profitable.

2. Streamlining processes

When you streamline your processes, you become more efficient. Greater efficiency means you’re able to cut down on the time (and consequently, money) you spend on redundant or unproductive business processes (like invoicing or billing, repetitive internal communications, and follow ups) and divert your attention to more profitable projects (like client work instead of admin work). 4MAT for example, a digital marketing agency in recruitment, was able to reduce costs with 15% better efficiency by winning more accounts without the need to hire more employees (with the help of smart technology) - making for a much more profitable business.

Finding a platform that can automate your repeatable processes and allow you to see very quickly, which of your projects are the most profitable (and which are less so) enables you to double down on the areas of your business that matter most. While all growing businesses seek out new clients and revenue, improving efficiency and utilization can dramatically boost profits from the work you’re already doing for your existing clients.

3. Tracking your time

When you track time manually in a business, you’re required to recall the amount of time you spent working on specific projects for a diverse set of clients often several days after the work has been completed. Without the right technology, tracking time for the work you do can be a real pain (and costly). When you don’t track the time on the work you do as you’re doing it, you’re leaking time - losing valuable billable minutes and hours that can quickly add up. By how much exactly? This study found leaked time costs businesses over $110,000 annually in lost revenue.

What’s more troublesome is that a mere 51% of consultants, marketers, project managers, and creatives track the time they spend reading and answering emails, with only 28% tracking the time they spend in meetings. These should be tracked automatically, but instead are being leaked and costing businesses heaps in lost revenue. Smart technology on the other hand can track the time you spend on all the work you do and translate it into billable time so that you can easily invoice your clients for it (and bring in more money for your business).

It's possible to boost your earnings without having to take on more work - all you need is the right platform to help you be more successful.