MyProjectTracker – The Blog

Business owners are swamped, especially small business owners who have to juggle everything at the same time internally while trying to focus on growing and building their customer base and retain existing customers.

Business owners, what should we be doing?

These are the things I know that I would like to be spending more time on. To me, they are the most important things towards the development and eventual success of my business.

• Networking (Offline needs more work)
• Product development and research (constantly evolving and being shaped)
• Services development (providing some value add for our customers)
• My customers (nothing more to be said on this one!)
• Nurturing my team (we’re only small, but it’s important that the team are all pointed at the same goal and are happy in getting us there)

Many of us succumb to losing ourselves in the mundane, yet important, aspects of running our business. While we need to;

• Pay the bills
• Understand our finances
• Be able to keep an eye on all our customer deliveries
• Invoice on-time
• Chase up the debts
• Pay the salaries
• …..

When we focus on these items, particularly when things are not necessarily going as well as we would like, it is very easy to lose sight of our primary reason for being in the business in the first place.

So what should we do as responsible business owners?

The most important thing you can do it to examine how you undertake the internal management functions in your business.

Key question: Are you operating efficiently?

• Have you a process for each internal management function? I.e. how do you keep track of all your customer projects, your finances, when the bills are due, the bank balance, training requirements, office management.. the list is endless (or so it appears!)
• If you do have processes, have you simplified them as much as possible?
• Can you get at information to understand your business quickly and easily so you are not spending countless hours trying to find the answers in spreadsheets and emails?
• Can you delegate or outsource?
• Is there software out there to help you manage your business more effectively?There is by the way, you just need to do a bit of research to find the right tools for your business.
  • Understand where your pain points are and hunt around for the right solution for your business. There are lots of web-based software solutions that are very reasonably priced (and free in some instances) that can help you along.
  • Another advantage to software is that if you have no business processes in place for managing yourself or your business, the software can actually drive that process creation for you with minimal effort on your part.

You can be more efficient. Take the time out to take stock of and then to streamline your internal operations and focus on doing what’s important to growing and developing your business – exceeding your customers expectations through great service.

What will you find when you examine how you are operating? Can you be more streamlined?If so, tell us how you did it, we’d love to hear and learn from you.

Photo : pfly

Tags: business management, Entrepeneur, networking, Project Management, SaaS, Small Business, time management