The Measure of a Little Organization: See how small shifts in organization can bring in more money

As leaders and entrepreneurs grow successful, the daily tasks and responsibilities mount along with the potential for making money – one way to measure success. Ironically, this success adds more duties that seem to take us away from what we love, and getting on top of them can seem impossible. But what if just a few small changes could help and be measured by something tangible, like the effect on money?

Three Key Areas | Bite-Sized Changes

Small changes can impact daily happiness, success, and the bottom line for individuals and businesses. Try something in three key areas that apply to virtually everyone.

Client Management – There's Always Follow-up

This covers the entire life of the client, from acquisition to execution of work, nurturing the relationship, and nitty-gritty administration, like billing. A common task required at every single step of client management is follow-up. It has been proven that following up with people as expected, whatever that means at any stage, closes more deals, which obviously brings in more money.

Immediate Action: Identify one piece of follow-up to document and automate. For example, after a networking event, follow-up to several new connections: data input, a custom email, back-and-forth to book something, and then the meet-up. Create an email template with a link to an online calendar booking system that you have pre-populated with available times.

Hot Tip: You reduce a 15-minute per business card task to maybe two minutes, plus now you can hand this process off to someone else.

Time management – a Dirty Little Secret

If you can find more time to do the things that directly bring in money, you will bring in more money. There are dozens of seminars, articles and tools for adopting other people's practices. The truth is you can only utilize them with a hefty dose of time-realism: understanding how you spend time and why. The dirty secret is we all do the things we enjoy first and delay the rest. We will build tasks we dislike up to be worse than they are and will never be satisfied that we do them well or enough. The weight of it zaps energy and directly or indirectly impacts money coming in.

Immediate Action: Identify a single, regular task that is always a drag (e.g., collections). Document how you perform it, when, and what's needed. Referring to your own written process will reduce time spent in the future and remove the emotion from it.

Hot Tip: It's okay to spend more time on your favourite things if you find a way to cover the rest. Documenting the process of something you dislike is the first step in giving it away.

Being Able to Find Things

From hunting for meeting details on your phone to struggling to retain talent because no one can find essential documents, the result is billable time wasted searching for something needed to perform properly, building frustration and a negative mindset. Spend a day tracking how long you look for things and calculate that by your hourly rate for a real eye-opener.

Start with a simple system change, like separating personal and business documents – the most common cause of frustration-fuled daily hunts.

Immediate Action: Create folders for personal and business in your 1. email, 2. paper filing system, and 3. computer directory. Use them to separate personal from business items (photos, email correspondence, receipts, etc.) daily, forever.

Hot Tip: It'll save you time immediately but also countless hours separating receipts at tax or expenses time.

Try these simple actions and see if they make a difference over a few weeks. Then, imagine making a few more changes. This could even be the start of an operations manual, and confident delegation. There are many opportunities to improve workflow and organization in key areas of business, which can directly impact the bottom line and more importantly, FREE PEOPLE TO SHINE.

The first step is to book a brief and complimentary inquiry session to determine fit.