Getting your business organized provides clarity to ensure your business runs smoothly. If you don’t have an organized business, stress and other related factors can lead you to burn out. We had a conversation about this topics with systems & automation strategist Tiffany Marshall of The Systems Suite (formerly known as Clear Resource). Here are some nuggets she shared from a recent episode.

GET CLARITY IN YOUR BUSINESS

The world is so busy. There’s always something going on. There’s communication. There’s transaction. There’s noise. I don’t think that we really learned from the pandemic. But one thing that most of us can agree on is we realized how much rest our bodies needed. It was for the one time in our lifespan that we were actually able to slow down. Everything stopped. You could not go many places. But now it seems like things are three times as fast, since everything has started up again.

To have organization in your business, you need three things: sanity, clarity, and confidence. You need sanity in life.  In addition to sanity, you also need clarity in your business.. We spend too much time in our businesses doing things that we don’t like to do. It shouldn’t be this way. It is your business and you’re the boss.

You need to be clear on the following things: 

• What YOU should be doing in your business
• What your BUSINESS should be doing or offering
• What your business should NOT be doing, what you should not be offering. So you need that clarity and you need confidence. Um, there’s nothing like a business owner.

Next, you need confidence. There’s nothing like an entrepreneur that has confidence. No one will know what you have to buy. No one is listening to what you have to say if you don’t have confidence. Lack of confidence breeds disorganization.

SET UP SYSTEMS

There should be a step by step process in the way in which you do things in your business.  Your process should be able to teach anyone how your business should run.

Your process also teaches your clients on how things run in your business. What does this look like? If you don’t answer emails all day, your client should already know that because you have that system and structure in place, they won’t get a response outside business hours..

CREATE LINES OF COMMUNICATION

It is important that whatever you do in your business, make sure that you are building a line of communication via your email system. You want to make sure that you have lead forms in place. Some industries will refer to it as a squeeze page. You need to be making sure that you are getting the information of the people that you are communicating with before they become a client.

You can use your email tool as a way to communicate with your audience, current and former customers, business partners, stakeholders, and community partners. Your email list is a great way to go. And then if things stop again, you can also move the pendulum back in the other direction.

ENHANCE YOUR CUSTOMER CARE

Pull out a pen and paper. Send some handwritten notes. It’s a great time to enhance your customer care and service. Always keep your customer in mind. Ask them how are they doing. Assess and get a pulse of the people that you’ve connected with. They will remember you for this.

AUTOMATE YOUR BUSINESS

How does automation save you time? Automating your business gives you peace. Who wants to sit behind the computer all day and send the same emails? Without automation, you don’t have time to serve your customers and serve them with excellence because you’re doing so much administrative work. You didn’t start your business to be its secretary.

What should you automate? it’s the stuff that you don’t like to do. Maybe it’s creating invoices, sending that same email, meeting reminders, etc. Those are things that you should automate in your business. Get a system  that does that for you. One mistake business owners make is that they don’t know they need automation until it’s too late.

People wait until their video goes viral. People wait until they get 10 new clients at one time and they want to scream and say, “Oh, I need automation. I need systems right now!” Automation is not an overnight process. A systemized business takes a little time.

Imagine this. You launch your business. You have your website together, but that’s about it. You got cute social media graphics, and then the day of your launch, you go to your building. There are 300 customers outside, but you didn’t think of how you were gonna handle the internal pieces of your business!

So you look good on the outside, but you don’t even have the capacity to handle all these people. Every great business has a system in place. Automation is the key to scaling any business. Even if you have one customer now, act like you’re serving a million customers. Set your systems up at the beginning.

BALANCE YOUR LIFE

No matter what stage you are in life–single or married with kids, there needs to be boundaries and discipline. When we speak about boundaries and discipline, you must understand that you’re not the only one working hard. You’re not the only one with goals. What happens is many times in regular day to day life, you don’t really see that people have goals. You really don’t see that people are working hard unless you’re connected with them. That’s because there is a lack of boundaries.

Every day should be dedicated to something in your business and life. Schedule your time and stick to it. Separate your business and personal tasks. Be clears with the ones you love about those boundaries.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

If you feel like you’re doing too much, you are doing too much. If you cannot clearly articulate your process quickly, you’re doing too much. And if it’s too much for you, it will be too much for your clients. They pay you to handle a job, not to put them to work. And so less, it’s more. Simplify what you do. The more simple it is, the better for you and your clients. You’ll get paid quicker and you’ll get paid more because you’ll get more referrals. So keep it simple and it’s okay to rework things. Make it simple so that you actually enjoy what you’re doing.