1. Define your potential ‘big wins’
When you’re starting fresh for your business, it simply doesn’t mean your goals will be set for you. You’ll need to set economic, personal, and retirement goals that are real and actionable. Take time to define the big wins for your business. This will make a difference in setting your sights on wins from the beginning. This is how you can train your employees to work for a big future.
2. Use the best tools
If you want to start smart, you should know the role of technology in accelerating the growth of a business. Grabbing the right tools can open new avenues for business owners to create more investments and close more deals. You’ll need tools to prioritize tasks, streamline communication, and track the progress of projects. You can use task management tool like ProofHub to manage work and handle project communication and HootSuite to keep your presence active socially 24/7.
3. Identify what not to do
It’s simple to plan what you need to do for your business when you start it. That’s an easy trap to fall into. Instead, identify the barriers.
- Do not waste too much time on your business plan
- Do not rely too much on paperwork
- Do not run after all opportunities that excite you
- Do not trust informal, verbal arguments
- Do not forego your salary
4. Declutter your email
If you have nearly 1500 unread emails, the clutter can drive your crazy. Emails have become the never-ending burden in modern business. Project management tools like ProofHub are great to reduce the email clutter in your inbox. It deals with those stacks of unopened emails and streamlines the discussion without confusing email threads. It brings your team, clients, and stakeholders to collaborate on common topics effortlessly in one centralized place.
Also, you can easily loop anyone in the conversation whenever required. Do not waste an exorbitant amount of time searching the required information from the cluttered email thread, instead, streamline your business using a project management system.
5. Optimise your day into productive chunks
There is one thing all highly successful business people do to stay organized: they all follow a work routine. When you have a lot of tasks on your to-do list, you may feel overwhelmed, it can be a lot time-consuming to manage the day-to-day tasks in business. This is why you need to batch the tasks. Take one of your big tasks and schedule out a chunk of your day to focus on.
Keep a consistent rhythm, group all of your similar tasks together and get those done in one chunk of time. Check and respond to emails at the particular time of the day, check social media network notifications and post a new update to your social media networks twice a day. Set aside a time for a service to pick up packages to do shipping and handling preparation. By doing this, you’ll be productive with the time without wasting hours shifting from one task to another.
6. Build word of mouth
Word of mouth is important for small businesses because 85 percent of their customers discover them that way. It is a way of marketing where customers are advertising for your business through their customer experience. You can surely not grow a tomato plant yourself, but you can water it, fertilize it.
The best ways to get positive word of mouth from customers include focusing on delivering incredible customer experience, using valuable incentives to get customers talking, providing exemplary services, building a presence (both online and offline), streamline the referral process, sponsor local events, and many more. Believe it or not, word of mouth can do wonders to take your business to greater heights.
And there you have it, keep it this way throughout the year. If you want your small business to grow this year, you need to make the big changes. You have surely not started your business to just let it stagnate, have you?
