4 Ways I Created A Highly Efficient Business And How You Can Too
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Today, I thought I would share with you my top four tips on how I created a really highly efficient business. Now for those of you who know me, you will know that I ran an agency to support small business management for around six years. I had many team members and clients. A lot of people said how did you build such a highly efficient business? One of the main things that I’m known for is being really efficient.
But between you and me, the secret of my efficiency is that my superpower is having a really strategic approach to things.
So, I don’t just think oh, I have this idea. Lets go and do something with it or let’s just throw it out there to the audience. I really look at how I can bring it to life, but how I can bring it to life in a way that it’s going to be sustainable.
So how can I actually look at the entire process that we’re going to need to go through to bring this offer to life and mean I can still run the business, right? Because, you know, business is time consuming. And it can be really, really hard but I truly truly believe that I think that sometimes we make it harder just from our own decisions.
I think there’s so many strategies out there, especially in this online world, where it’s really easy to just pick up more and more.
But it’s not so easy to then understand and get yourself out of that pickle of having too much. You’ve got too much going on. You don’t know what’s working, you know, you kind of lose your clarity. And that’s really what I want to be talking about today is around how you can make sure that you do not do that how you can really create a highly efficient business and going to live forever. Because that’s what I stand for. Right?
I don’t want you to create a business that’s going to fall down in a year two years time, or you’re going to fall down into burnout. I want you to be able to create a business that is going to live forever. And you know, if you want to sell that business and that’s fine, but you want a Forever Business that’s going to be able to provide you that lifestyle and that life that you desire. So let’s get into these four tips.
So the first step in my efficient business journey was to streamline
I streamlined my offers, I streamlined my business process are streamlined my team. I streamlined the entire business and something that I talk about quite a lot is that streamlining is not a dirty word. Streamlining is a really, really amazing word. It’s an amazing, amazing activity that you should be doing in your business for process efficiency.
And this is where I say to you about all these strategies you know we can we can only take on so much. And when we have so many different things happening. It becomes overwhelming and we go down into procrastination. We start wondering, you know, I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know where to start. I’ve got these strategies. Maybe I should just outsource them.
What ends up happening is you outsource these strategies, and they don’t really bring you a return.
So you’re not only have you invested time in doing these strategies that’s bringing you know return whatsoever to your business,but you’re now paying someone else to do these strategies for you. No return.
So it’s really, really, really crucial to really get down into the trenches, you know, into your business of what is working and making sure that you’re streamlining what’s not working, and not always being led by your heart and I know as I am so so that by my heart I know it’s very difficult, but making sure that you have the right people is crucial.
And you know if you have someone that you love, and maybe they’ve been with you but you’re kind of outgrown them or you need something more, you need to make that decision for your business. And, you know, it’s just done in a right way. You don’t need to be horrible about it. It doesn’t need to be a scary thing. You just need to make sure that you are making the decisions for your business because that’s what you are you are a business owner. So you need to make sure that you have the right people. You have the right processes, you have the right offers. You have the right business.
Number two for your efficient business is alignment
Now, this is something if I’m completely honest, I missed for the first probably around three to four years of my business and that is being in alignment. And the reason that I missed this is because I missed a crucial step something that I bang the drum about now, but I missed this crucial step when I was starting out in business. And that was really, really working out what my vision, my mission, my values, what my business model was and how that came together. I really missed that out.
So when people said to me, Oh, you need a vision it was kind of one of those things I just saw. Okay, you know, where do I want to be? Yeah, okay, I’m on track for this. This is what I want to be doing, rather than actually really digging deep to find out what your real heart and soul is telling you in what your what your vision is, what your mission is, and in business and life and how you can connect the two together.
And once I’ve done that, and I’ve really done some work on that, everything became clearer.
This is when I then made the decision to close my agency which was a huge shock for so many people. And I made that decision because although the agency was incredible. My mission was so much bigger. And my mission is to really help people to build a Forever Business to build a business that’s going to live forever, that’s going to provide them the life that they want.
Ultimately, although the agency done that, to some extent, it just done a part of it just on a portion of it. Whereas actually there’s so much more to building an efficient business. And that’s why I made that decision to step back. Because I was not in true alignment with having the agency and what my mission and my my vision was. So that’s where that decision came in. But that’s what you will find when you start looking at your alignment for your office and where that sits with your values andyour mission.
You’re going to realise that there’s certain aspects of your business that aren’t necessarily living in alignment, and that’s where the disconnect comes in. And it’s a really rubbish place to be so you really want to make sure that you get yourself out of that disconnected state and back into a business that ultimately you are fully aligned to and it’s your passion. It’s what you love. And you know it’s what you’re amazing at.
Number three is automation
Now, don’t leave me I know many of you be thinking tech automation, not for me. Now, automation does not need to be this really scary face you know start off small. And this will become so much easier once you’re streamlined because at the moment.
The reason you will feel for this fear around automation is because you have this huge business that you haven’t streamlines that you have all these strategies and these things and then you’re looking at automation of I’ve got to automate all these things. Know, make sure you’ve streamlined and then move into the automation part of it and start small.
And you know if you’re automating your prospecting journey, for instance, if you’re doing one to one work and you offer free discovery calls or you know strategy calls, make sure that you’ve automated those calls. If you do a intake form, make sure that intake form is automated along with your call. You don’t want to have to have someone sat there waiting for a call to come through a call bookings happens and then they have to send off a form and then I have to chase that form. Just make the form part of the process. And that’s what I mean by automation.
Although automation can become a lot more complex, it doesn’t need to be at this moment in time.
So don’t worry about that. And if there are any elements of it that you don’t feel too comfortable with or you’re not too sure. Once you know that this strategy of process works, then you can pay someone on a project basis to come in and do that automation for you if you so wish.
The one thing I would say if you do that is to make sure that they have some sort of maintenance package or a way that you can get continued support from them because sometimes especially when you’re integrating certain tools so as an example here, Zapier, sometimes those automations can come break or disconnect and you need to reconnect the platforms and things like that.
So really depending on where you’re at in the kind of tech side, either get them to create a video that walks you through what you need to do to reconnect and to keep that that automation maintained. Or see if they have kind of a package where you can pay them a monthly subscription or something to just make sure that everything’s running as it should be, and for them to make any edits. It’s entirely up to you. But it all becomes more manageable. Once you’ve streamlined Can you see here where that first step is core.
And lastly, but not least for an efficient business, is Systemising
A bugbear of mine that people say Systemising is SOPs. Systems are so much more than just soft and you know, that’s the processes written out and documented. You need to be looking at a system is how it all comes together, how that entire process and strategy comes together.
That’s what this system is and you want to be making sure that you’re noting down the tools that you’re using, how that automation comes together, how the actual journey looks, what that looks like. So when you come to review your processes your systems, you can make sure that you can clearly see what’s going on.
Because the last thing you want to do is to create a system and then forget about where the moving pieces go.
Because, you know, you end up in a massive mess if you do that and then you don’t end up maintaining it and it ends up becoming this big headache that you need to try and sort out and then most of the time when people are in that that frame of mind what they’ll do is bring a VA on or bring someone on be like, can you fix this for me and then the VA is I have no idea what’s going on here. You know, because they’re it’s not documented.
It’s not it’s not actually mapped out in a way where someone can really figure out what’s happening. So making sure that you’re Systemising but for the entire process the entire strategy on how things come together is essential. And that to me is around systems that systems you know systems is so much more than just documenting processes. It literally is the core elements of that particular strategy in that particular department that you’re going to be you’re going to be doing the task or doing the process for.
I hope that this helps build a highly efficient business and clears up a few things . As always if you have any questions then feel free to reach out to me or just pop them in the comments below.
