Showing all posts tagged time management

Time is a valuable resource in the business world. The best way to save time is to automate your business in order to enjoy a successful entrepreneurial life. While your hours working might feel productive, too many business owners do barely enough to stay afloat. For these entrepreneurs, automation is the answer. By removing recurring tasks from your to-do list and putting them on autopilot, you free up time to focus on big-picture jobs that can make or break a new venture. I’ve certainly been guilty of focusing on the right thing in the past. With that in mind, here are eleven time-wasting tasks to automate in business.

Email Marketing

Email marketing remains an incredibly effective tactic. Many consumers prefer email to other marketing channels, especially mobile users. While social media has become increasingly popular, there are many limitations to navigate. A great email marketing automation tool will allow you to set up trigger-based workflows, which you can leverage to nurture your leads. You can also use automation to respond to frequent emails.

Automate Your Business Customer Support Efforts

While email is useful in many areas of business, handling customer problems by email often isn’t as effective. Many customers will have similar questions and queries, so you’ll be repeating yourself frequently. What’s more, while you’re giving the same answers, you might miss emails from other customers with serious problems. Adding a chatbot to your website means that customers can find the information that they need without having to speak to you.

Utilise User Research

Whatever your business model, digital is how many customers interact with brands today. It’s the quality of these interactions that determine the success or failure of your venture. For this reason, you must carry out UX research. With a user research tool, you can automate the gathering of data across large populations easily. This tool also allows you to scale your research quickly, regardless of the size, level of experience, or level of expertise of your team.

Automate Your Business With Invoice Reminders

A business needs money to survive and cash flow is important. When a customer stalls with paying an invoice, it can put pressure on your finances, leaving you unable to cover overheads. After sending an email or two as reminders, you’ll find yourself composing less and less patient messages. This can damage the relationship you have between yourself and that customer or client. Because of this, you should instead automate those reminders, so that your message remains direct, yet polite. This is also a time-saving exercise which is often the main motivation for choosing to automate your business.

Streamline Making Bill Payments

Every business has overheads to cover, even home-based ventures. If you make payments manually, either by post, over the phone, or online, it’s time to streamline the process. Many banks and companies now offer an option to arrange automatic monthly payments. This means that the money would automatically leave your account on payday. Setting up these payments means that you’ll never miss a bill again, which saves time and hassle, as well as money.

Automate Your Business and its Tax Preparation

This is a big one for me! With tax compliance software, you can set up reminders for tax deadlines and important actions. The right software will also allow you access to accountants, who will provide useful guidance around tax season. Every entrepreneur knows how tricky taxes can be, but with this helpful tool at your fingertips, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. I use accounting and bookkeeping software to streamline these tasks for me.

Job Recruitment

Many entrepreneurs launch their ventures alone, usually from home. However, at some point, every business owner needs help. When your workload becomes too heavy to carry by yourself, you must hire your first employee. Job recruitment can be a complicated and drawn-out process. There are many stages you must go through, from writing job listings to training the new recruits. Thankfully, software programs let you send out job ads to multiple websites at the same time.

Automate Your Business Employee Payroll

Payroll is an essential business process that can’t go unfinished. However, it’s one that takes up a lot of time too. Thankfully, online payroll platforms allow you to automate many of the tedious tasks associated with payroll. These platforms also make it easy to make adjustments, like bonuses or salary increases. By adopting a fully-integrated accounting platform with payroll capabilities, you can automate payroll while keeping expenses in sync with accounting records.

Social Media Scheduling For Your Business

With nearly everyone on the planet owning social media profiles, it should be no surprise that these platforms are essential marketing tools. They allow you to share company news with your followers, as well as interact with them directly. The trouble is, between creating content, customising posts, taking pictures, and more, social media accounts take up a lot of time. However, with a social media management program, you can schedule account updates.  

Even entrepreneurs struggle to do it all. Fortunately, you don’t have to. With time being such a valuable asset, you should do everything you can to save it. Hopefully, with the advice above, you can automate the tedious tasks in your business, leaving you free for more important work. This is an ongoing process for me in my freelance business but I have already gained much more time that I “lost” setting these systems up.