Steps to Success for Small Business That you Need to Know

Found this article whilst researching for information on growing a small business and strategies that can help. This article titled 9 Tips for Growing a Successful Business is written by Chris Seabury for Investopedia and in his words, covers the idea that to have success in business today, you need to be flexible and have good planning and organisational skills. Many people start a business thinking that they’ll turn on their computers or open their doors and start making money, only to find that making money in a business is much more difficult than they thought. You can avoid this in your business ventures by taking your time and planning out all the necessary steps you need to achieve success.

Be Organised

As Chris mentions, a good way to do this is to create a to-do list each day and as you complete each item, check it off your list. This will ensure that you’re not forgetting anything and you’re completing all the tasks that are essential to the survival of your business.

Organisation will help you complete tasks and stay on top of things to be done. Here are a few ways you can achieve this:

1.  Take control of papers and documents

If you don’t have a filing system or a digital archiving system in place, now is the time to build one.

Papers: Start by taking a look at all the paper you have lying around and make a keep pile and a discard pile. Shred the discard pile or recycle. File and keep pile. A > Z, 1 > 31 or 1 > 12 are the usual systems business use. Probably depends on which area you are filing for.

Digital: Create a new folder on your hard drive and call it ARCHIVE-FILES. From here you can create sub-folders for Finance, Procurement, Operations, Warehouse, Manufacturing, Sales-Marketing, Customer Service. Then sub-sub-folders from here, etc. etc. If you would like more help in this area, please send me an email and I’ll give you a hand.

2.  Use the Right Productivity Tools

We all have our favourite apps and tools that we use everyday, and some are probably more useful than others. do they still meet your needs?

Here are some areas where small business can find productivity tools useful:

Contact Management: Commonly referred to now as a CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Through this type of software you can keep track of your customers, managing contact information, orders made, last contact, email campaigns, etc. The setup is endless and most businesses swear by this.

Accounting & Bookkeeping: Streamline the way you invoice by taking payments and managing cash flow with tools like Quickbooks, Xero, MYOB, etc.

Project Management: A great project management app will assist by tracking tasks, sharing files, and collaboration with team members and stakeholders. There are many out there. I’ve used Monday.com, Asana, Trello and find them extremely user friendly.

3.   Get Your Computer Organised

This is really  important for any small business owner who does the bulk of their work. It doesn’t take very long before your desktop becomes cluttered with saved files, the Downloads folder is full of strangely named documents and it is becoming impossible to locate anything, both on the computer and in your mail box. This is really horrible for productivity and can also slow down your computer’s performance.

Following is a few things that you can do right now that can help you get your computer and mail box in order.

Set up a digital filing system: Before you can clean up your desktop you will need to set up an archive folder system with a hierarchy of folders.

This can seem overwhelming, but trust me, once you have made time to set this up and future proofed it, your productivity will increase immediately.

First, set up a folder system that makes sense to you so you can locate documents easily when you need them. Choose your organisation system carefully, and try to follow a common-sense type system because you will want to know where to look quickly, rather than remember where you put that damn file!

For instance, you could set up a folder hierarchy similar to this:

• BUSINESS-Archive
  • Corporate-Stationery
    • Email-Signatures
    • Forms
    • Letterhead
    • Templates
  • Customers or Clients
    • Customer-1
    • Customer-2
  • Finance
    • Budgets
    • Credit-Notes
    • Invoices
      • 2019
        • 01_January
        • 02_February
        • 03_March
      • 2020
    • Statements
  • Human-Resources
    • Development
    • Management
    • Performance-Pay
    • Resourcing
    • Training
  • IT
  • Marketing
    • Advertising
      • Conferences-Exhibitions
      • Google-AdWords
    • Branding
    • Business-Development
      • Competitors
    • Collateral
    • Digital-Marketing
    • Testimonials
  • Office-Operations
    • Legal-Compliance
    • Systems
  • Price-Lists
  • Resource-Hub
    • Document-Library
      • Brochures
      • MSDS
      • Product-Data-Sheets
    • Image-Library
      • JPEG-Hires
      • JPEG-Lores(web)
    • Warranties
  • Sales
    • Planning
    • Reports
  • Suppliers
    • Supplier-1
    • Supplier-2

The list can be endless, but do try to keep it to a hierarchy that can grow as you do in your business.

Help is on the way!

There is plenty of help out there, all you need to do is Google it. To save you a bit of time and effort I’ve included some of the articles I found whilst researching this subject. Most of them are from the USA, but easily adaptable to our AU electronic filing system.

• The Balance Small Business
• How to Geek