bgenest, Author at Barbara Genest

May 28, 2021

What Does Productivity Mean to You?

When you think of being productive, what is the first thing that comes to mind?

Before you continue reading, briefly write it down in your journal or a notepad. Really think about your own definition before you continue. This way, you can be sure your perspective is really where it needs to be to run a productive business.

work space

Productivity has a variable definition and affects every aspect of your life, both business and personal. When you think about it, every decision you make and action you take affects your productivity somehow. Your health, creativity, journey in life, or direction of your business all depends on the type of productivity you produce.

In business, reaching the tasks required to achieve specific sales goals, gaining more subscribers or followers, or being the next innovator within your industry are a few examples of being productive. In your personal life, a few examples could include following a daily or weekly budget to buy a big purchase, paying bills on time or setting up auto-pay, or following a healthy exercise and diet routine such as meal planning and weightlifting.

While productivity can have variable perspectives and definitions depending on who you ask, it is vital to make sure that the procedures and strategies you implement lead to high rewards for your business or goal. At the same time, the effort you put into it is worth it when the results show it is worth it. This is the basic definition of productivity and can be measured with a simple math equation.

Productivity is equal to your output divided by your input.

If your effort is greater than the reward, it may not be worth it in the end. If you’ve determined the reward is good enough, then it is. All of this is really up to you to decide. However, you should use the math equation above in real life to be sure you are realistic.

For example, if you are a writer and you wrote six articles this morning in three hours, your productivity would be calculated as two articles per hour. You could further compare this number to your overall writing goal to see where you need to improve or work harder.

Another way to be sure you are the most productive is to create a list of all the activities you did each day and compare them to the goals you wish to accomplish. How do they compare? Do the tasks that you’ve chosen to do get you closer to your destination, goal, or job, support you in any way? Don’t be too shocked if many of the tasks you do end up getting you nowhere. It is easy to equate being busy to being productive.

Once you take a moment to evaluate your actions, you can change your plans and daily to-do lists to do what needs to be done to accomplish your business goals. Starting each day with a primary goal and to-do list, implementing proper time management strategies, and taking advantage of tools and technology are a few tips to improve your productivity throughout the day. Remember, if you want to run a successful online business or achieve any goal, improving your productivity is a must.

March 31, 2021

What is Business Continuity Planning?

To build resilience into your business, you’ll need to understand that your business continuity plan will provide the resilience necessary to overcome setbacks and disruptions in essence. Business continuity planning consists of examining your business for weaknesses based on known threats that may affect your ability to do business on any given day.

You’ll have to go through your processes, systems and examine what you do each day along with the resources you use (human and otherwise) to help you mitigate problems and issues. Business continuity planning includes:

Determining and listing possible types of distributions – You need to set up a plan for every eventuality that you can think up. Illness, lousy weather, destroyed technology, government regulations, and so forth are already known issues. Listing them out will help you figure out what you’re going to do for each of them automatically.

Studying your workflows – Part of the process includes having standardized workflows to identify bottlenecks and note the software and other resources you regularly use so that you can develop a plan if something within that system and process goes wrong. For example, if you outsource blog writing to one person and uploading the posts to another person, you can eliminate the problem of relying only on one person for everything.

Establishing key performance indicators – As you study your processes and workflow, you can also establish a few important indicators to track that can signal a problem or lead to a solution.

Setting up benchmarking – One key to overcoming a setback is to live by your data more than your gut. A combo of the gut with data is always better than just doing things without any idea of the metrics. For example, if you set up an emergency budget for your business that allows you to keep going during hard times, what is the number you need to meet? Do you know what your break-even point is?

Including redundancies – As you set up your processes and systems and examine your workflows, you can identify areas to create redundancies. For example, instead of using only one server space for your website, you can set up two, which will enable you to switch if one goes down quickly.

Developing plans – Using all the information you derive from a thorough study of your business and enabling you to keep going during hard times, you can use that information to develop concrete plans that you simply implement during a hard time instead of creating it from scratch.

When it comes to crisis management, having a plan in place before anything happens is essential. A proper continuity plan will include actual plans in place for the things you know will occur, such as illness, whether governmental or other issues. While you cannot plan for everything, any of these ideas can be adapted to unknown emergencies when needed. The act of planning and putting in place this plan will make your business more resilient and even eliminate many of the pitfalls that cause more than half of all businesses to fail in their first three years.

March 29, 2021

Why Is Business Resilience Important?

It doesn’t matter who you are or how many resources you have available, something will happen within the next year, or so that will disrupt your business somehow. It may be a family matter, a purely business issue inside your operation, or it may be an external matter entirely out of your control – but it is going to happen.

Because of the certainty that disruption happens, having a plan in place that makes your business more resilient to these influences is imperative. The thing that causes problems is going to happen, and probably more than once. But no worries, if you have a plan in place, you’ll be able to build resilience into your business as you grow your business.

People Perform Better with a Plan

When disaster strikes, one thing is clear about human nature – if we have a plan that we’ve practiced, such as a fire drill, for example – it saves lives and property. If you have a plan in place for emergencies and other issues such as taking a sick day, you’ll naturally perform better due to having the plan in place.

To Safeguard Assets

As a business owner, you have numerous assets that you may not realize you have. Your email list, your website, the software you use, your products, and services that you provide are all assets in a way, some are more obvious than others, but future planning can mitigate the need to lose the critical parts of your business and life if something goes wrong.

This may come in the form of setting up the right business entity to protect your personal assets should the business fail for some reason, or it may come from another element in your plan, but it will work to safeguard your assets due to thinking about the potential before anything happens.

Increases Workflow Understanding

When you plan for disruptions, it requires that you develop standardized systems and plans for your business that designs workflows for yourself and your employees or contractors to follow. When you have a proper workflow, you will notice in advance the potential for disruptions and thus create a plan to avoid it. For example, what if your email autoresponder service goes out of business? What will you do? Have you identified an alternative that makes it easy for you to move over?

Disruptions Will Happen

Whether you get sick, or someone else does, or you experience a weather emergency, or killer technology destroys your business (after all, no one uses VHS tapes, now, right?), something is going to happen to disrupt your business. If you can accept that and plan for it, you’ll automatically start building a truly resilient business.

If you accept that things will happen to cause setbacks, whether parts of your everyday life, such as chronic illness or something out of a disaster movie (weather, pandemics, political turmoil), you can develop a plan that makes you more resilient personally as well as professionally. You probably can’t plan for every single thing, but the planning process itself will help you learn more about yourself and your business so that you can overcome, one way or another, almost anything.

What Is Business Resilience?

March 23, 2021

What Is Business Resilience?

Being able to pull yourself up after a setback and move on from it – not just learning but thriving in the process – shows resilience. You can demonstrate resilience by your actions after disruption regardless of planning, but real business resilience is baked in from the day you start your business through planning, organization, and persistence.

If you have a resilient business, you have taken the time to plan every aspect of your business, from the workflows to the big hairy goals you’ve set, to determine precisely what is essential so that you can maintain even in difficult times.

A resilient business can:

Adapt to Disruptions – There are always going to be setbacks and things that disrupt your business. It might be something internal with yourself, or it might be something external that you have no control over at all. Regardless of the issue, you can put in place planning to accommodate most issues.

Maintain Continuity – If you take the time to put in place plans to keep going in hard times, your business may not be super-profitable during that time, but it can continue until the hard time is finished.

Safeguard People – If you do hire people, sometimes disruptions come from having to lay them off, or from having them make a mistake or don’t show up. If you plan in advance for these contingencies, you can avoid disaster.

Protect Assets – Good planning, saving for a rainy day, and using the right tools can protect your assets when something goes wrong. A business that has trouble should not mean that your entire life is put in jeopardy. With the right type of planning, you can protect your assets.

Build Brand Equity – If a national disaster happens, which is a set back for all, but you can maintain business continuity even if it’s difficult and things change slightly, your business will build brand equity even then. Some of the most well-known companies today have survived the great depression, many recessions, and other internal and external disruptions.

Recover Quickly – The future planning for disruptions will not be able to cover every single thing that might happen, but it can help you recover faster if you have at least given potentialities some thought and consideration.

Reduce Stress – Continuity planning in the face of disruptions inside and outside your business will also help you personally by reducing your stress. Anyone who has experienced setbacks knows that the wrong thing happening at the wrong time without any planning can make things worse due to the stress it brings.

To accomplish this, each business, even a small sole proprietor online business, or mom and pop store, needs to think about – possibilities in advance as part of the normal business planning process to develop disaster and disruption strategies that help avoid downtime and shore up vulnerabilities.

March 14, 2021

Free and Low-Cost Automation Tools You Can Implement Today

Now that you’ve read a lot about automation, you may want to give some a try. The good news is you can test out a few options for free. This list is not comprehensive. There are free trials for most software these days, mostly cloud-based, so do try out the free options for the solutions you want to try before investing your money.

Google Docs – Even if you are using the free Gmail and Google and not the paid business version, you can use Google Docs to keep your documents organized and easily accessible and shareable via the cloud.

Trello.com – You can use Trello.com for free to organize your business and manage your employees or contractors. Set it up so that your clients can assign work for you and set up projects.

Join. me – If you want to host online meetings, this solution might work for you. It will work great for discovery calls and onboarding new customers, and it’s free.

Zapier.com – This works on the “if this, then that” process just like the next offering. Combine them both so that you can take advantage of using the free zaps to get more done each day.

IFTTT.com – You can use this solution to set up applets or little programs to perform repetitive tasks for you. For each account, you’ll get a few free options, but you may have to pay to get more. It’s not expensive, though, and it’s more than worth it to automate those tedious tasks.

PayPal and PayPal Invoicing – Most online business owners must get a Paypal.com business account anyway these days. It’s the number one payment method, and it’s free for anyone to set up. They have impressive invoicing capabilities, too, including recurring invoicing.

Invoicely.com – It’s free and allows you to manage more than one business using this amazing platform. You can see all your finances in one place, making it a lot easier to keep track. Not only that, you can track time, expenses, and so forth while also accepting online payments from anywhere.

Apptivo.com – This all-in-one solution offers CRM, project management, invoicing, and more for your small business. They offer a free starter account for up to 3 users, with a more advanced lite version opening up to more members soon.

Mybrightbook.com – This 100 percent free accounting software is made for non-accountants, so it’s easy to set up. You don’t have to know what you’re doing, and you can automate your entries and more. Free.

Salesautopilot.com – While not free, you can use this system for less than 100 dollars a month, and it has a lot of amazing features such as dynamic landing pages, scheduled campaigns, behavior-oriented triggers, and so much more.

Recurpost.com – This app will automatically share any post that you want on a recurring basis. You already know that if you want people to read your content, you must promote it multiple times. This system can be set up to share on a schedule you choose automatically.

Hubspot.com (CRM) – You can use HubSpot CRM free with an easy-to-understand view of your entire sales pipeline. It even has unlimited users, and there is no time limit. You can use this system for free if you’re alone or have a large team.

Metigy.oglecom – This platform will help you plan and collaborate on your marketing calendar, content and assets, account management, and more. It has lots of learning resources to help you learn more about online marketing too. They have a limited free plan that you can use for up to 3 social profiles. You can stay free forever, but for about $25 a month, you can upgrade to the professional version.

If you use any of these solutions or another one, please comment below on what you use and why you like it. Sharing solutions that work for you is good for the entire community because there is so much out there to try that no one person can really find it all.

March 14, 2021

10 Ways Small Business Benefits from Smart Automation

All businesses benefit from smart automation. Automation today is not expensive. You can implement much different productivity-improving automation free and inexpensively that will not just save time but will save money and increase your revenue exponentially.

Increased Scalability – When you automate, even if you’re just one person, if you choose what to automate wisely, you’ll be able to scale your business in ways you may not have thought possible.

Reduced Errors – There is no way around it, but machines, once set up properly, make fewer errors than humans. If you can set up an automaton that works, you’re going to reduce the errors you’re used to making and letting by. It’s not about perfection, though. It’s just about being able to do something simple without having to worry about the errors once it’s set up.

Better Customer Satisfaction – When customers get service fast like they want, and it’s accurate and timely, they are always happier with you—today’s customers like using self-service automation and don’t mind using chatbots at all.

Reduced Labor Costs – When you can automate instead of outsourcing, this is always a good thing because technology is cheaper than a human being. Your time is also worth way more than your chatbot’s time.

Better Work-Life Balance – Automating things even that take you five minutes a day can add up and save you so much time that you start experiencing that elusive work-life balance people love to talk about.

Use Resources More Efficiently – When you set up automation, it is always more efficient than human resources. Not only does it work more accurately, but it also costs less to start with than hiring a person.

Decreased Operating Costs – When you use technology to increase productivity, you can keep your operating costs lower because you’re not using extra human resources or your time, which is always more expensive than tech.

Improved Decision Making – If you have an accurate picture of the research involved, which using automation can help you with, you’re going to make better business decisions. Imagine if you set up a Zap to send reports generated in Google Analytics to a Dropbox for you to view every Friday – so much more straightforward than having to get the reports yourself.

Boost Productivity – When you have to do fewer steps to get to the deliverable, you will become super productive. Remember that there is a lot more to being productive than movement or being busy. Finishing projects and tasks makes you productive.

Increased Competitiveness – When you can get more done in less time and done accurately, you’re going to please customers more, and that’s going to make you more competitive.

When you decide to implement automation in your small business, choose from the things you do right now, already, that are repetitive in nature, and you can’t go wrong—no need to invent new things to do until you automate what you already do every single day.

March 14, 2021

The Importance of Testing Your Automation for Impact

Running a lucrative business is exciting and scary and thrilling all at the same time. You may feel like your head is exploding with information and that you are on fire with energy.

You feel on top of the world like you can do anything once you start generating money, but as you move up in the business world, you’ll start to realize you’re only one person and you really need to work smarter, not harder, so that you can be genuinely productive.

Not only that, you deserve a quality of life that includes not just earning a great living but living a great life. When you first start trying automation in your business, it’s vital first to understand why you want to automate that task, and secondly to know if the impact of the automation matches your goals.

For this reason, you need to test for impact. That means that you set up automation with a goal in mind, then check the numbers to ensure you met your intended goal. A few goals that you might be going for with your automation choice:

Improved Efficiency
Boosted Productivity
Better Accuracy
Easier Collaboration
Better Tracking of Progress
Easier to Notice Change
More Flexibility

You may also be automated in order to accomplish other things without hiring a huge staff such as:

Building your list
Engaging more with your customers
Delivering a freebie
Nurturing your subscribers
Creating social media buzz
Creating and organizing files
Paying your bills
Providing topnotch customer care
Booking your purchases

If you don’t know the point of the automation that you are setting up, it’s going to be hard to measure. Before you even research automation tools, know what and why you want to automate it and the result you’re hoping to experience. If you don’t know, it can cause problems because you won’t know what to test.

Let’s say that you want to automate your customer service with a conversational chatbot to streamline getting people to provide information to get them on your list instead of using the form you have used the last few years.

After you set up the chatbot and let it work for a while, you’re going to want to test whether your list building is happening faster once you set up the automation and if it is, are the people joining your list hungry buyers or not?

How has the change impacted your list? Are you getting more list members? Are you getting a higher quality list member? What’s different? What’s the same? You should be able to compare the numbers easy to find out. Checking the metrics is the only way you know for sure that what you intended to happen did happen. Remember, if the impact you expected did not happen, you might need to tweak what you automate or use other tools to get it to work for your needs.

March 14, 2021March 14, 2021

Project Management Tools to Try

When it comes to project management, the worst thing you can do is either use nothing to organize yourself or use a tool that you don’t understand enough to utilize fully. Try out a few different options to find out what works smoothly for you within your budget.

Smartsheet.com – If you’re accustomed to using spreadsheets to organize your work, this might be the system to work for your needs. It’s easily customizable, supports automation, but you do have to use other software if you want time tracking and built-in project management features.

Wrike.com – This is the PM system used by big businesses like Paypal.com and Hootsuite.com, but it’s not overpriced, so you can afford to use it too. This is a true all in one project management system that allows you to collaborate not only with contractors and employees but your customers too.

Monday.com – This platform is very helpful in managing tasks and creating impressive and effective workflows. It’s really billed as an online collaboration application, but you can use it to manage projects too. It’s very customizable and easy to understand.

Easy Projects – This cloud-based project management software works for small and big businesses. It allows you to work with anyone interested in the following projects. You can give permissions that keep people notified of the action being taken.

Zoho Projects – Competitively priced, cloud-based, fully-featured, and intuitive. This is really a standard in project management. It’s especially good with individuals and small teams. It’s responsive and not really hard to understand and set up. Try the free trial.

Basecamp.com – This option has been around for a long time. It is a popular choice among virtual assistants, graphic designers, and others who want to be able to let their customers sign-on and assign work to them in a project management system. It’s easy to understand and has tons of features you’re used to in a dedicated project management system.

Trello.com – If you think visually, you’re going to love using Trello. You can organize your workflows and teams, or you can just use it for your own organization. There are many public free and premium templates you can get too. What’s more, is you can use it free.

Honeybook.com – A super popular choice for virtual assistants and service providers, this easy-to-use platform helps small business owners get control of their processes and manage clients from start to complete projects, including proposals, contracts, project tracking, and payments.

LiquidPlanner.com – Manage projects, tasks, and human resources, and more with this fully featured project management system. Track tasks but also track resources, including HR, to best keep your company lean and mean. While this one is a little more expensive than some of the other choices, it’s well worth every penny because of what it can help you do for your business.

Asana.com – People who use Asana are fans of it and love to brag about using it. It’s a unique online collaboration tool that helps improve your workflow management. It’s not really a full project management since there is no time tracking, but many service providers love it and use it regularly.

Quire.io – This project management and collaboration tool can help you launch your projects fast. Users love the fact that it’s super intuitive and easy to understand how to use it. They use Kanban boards, which many people love, to help get organized.

Almost any of these choices will work for most small businesses to manage their projects and keep their work organized and on task. Being productive is about using your time wisely. Don’t use a system you don’t grasp almost immediately. Test it out, and if it’s too hard to get, move on to another one so that you are using what works with your way of thinking.

March 14, 2021March 14, 2021

Don’t Forget That You Can Automate and Outsource Your Home Management Too

While we are so busy talking about business automation, remember that you can boost your efficiency by also automating and outsourcing your home management too. The time saved will allow you to get more done that you really want to do for yourself, your family, and your business.

Lights – With a smart house set up, you can fix your lighting so that it stays at a specific level of natural light. For example, if you close the shade and the light has reduced, the lighting in the room automatically compensates. You can also turn on lights via a motion sensor at night when people are using the toilet and so forth.

Door Locks –Using automated door locking is a great feature and helps you get in your home with packages. You can also lock your front and back doors or garage using your smartphone instead of checking physically.

Security Cameras – Setting up security in your home with cameras can also be automated once it’s set up. You can film the parts of the house you want based on motion, lighting, sound, and other criteria.

Blinds – Close your blinds based on how dark or light it is outside. Even if you’re not home, the blinds will close, which can make your home less likely to be broken into but also reduces the time you must take to raise and lower the blinds on your own.

Heating and Cooling –Setting up your heating and cooling to be based on the ideal temperature for you based on the room and time of year will not just save time but money too.

Filling Your Tub – Newer smart homes come featured with a smart bathtub that can be programmed to fill up at the right time without you ever going in there using your smartphone or the control dial. Set up a hot bath when you’re outside sledding with the kids to save time and get warm faster.

Starting Your Coffee – If you like to drink coffee in the morning or at any time, set up your coffee maker to automatically brew your coffee for you. When you get out of bed, you will eliminate a few steps from your day.

Paying Your Bills – Just like you can set up your business bills to be paid automatically, you can do the same with your household bills. Setting up automation for saving, bill paying, and so forth not only saves time but will help you stick to your budget better.

Sending Birthday or Holiday Cards – Do you like to send your friends, family, and perhaps business partners cards in the mail? You can use a service like Send Out Cards or Postable.com to automate this process by setting up an account and the criteria.

Yard and Housekeeping – It’s not hard to hire people to help you keep your home clean and organized, from landscaping to basic lawn care to keeping your home clean and shiny without lifting a finger. You can find what you need through sites like Thumbtack.com and Care.com.

yard and housekeeping

Childcare – Even a work at home mom needs time away from the kids. You can find a mommy’s helper, or you can hire a childcare worker or teenager to help you with your kids using Care.com or other online sites.

Grocery Shopping – Using a service like Instacart.com to get your groceries delivered can save hours of your time and help you avoid last-minute purchases, thus actually saving money over shopping yourself.

If you have a voice assistant like Google or Alexa, you may already have the ability to automate some of your home life. Take a look at what’s available with your particular assistant and the tools you have. When you eliminate personal steps in a process and turn it over to a bot, you save time and generate an opportunity to do more with that time.

March 11, 2021March 11, 2021

Tools to Help You Automate Competitor Research

As you start and run your business, one of the most important ways you can improve your offers is to study your competition. But competitor research can be time-consuming. That might not be as big a deal for a giant corporation, but for a mom-and-pop business or a sole proprietor, it’s a lot. You still need to do it because learning about your competition will help you differentiate yourself.

Google Alerts – This is a free and simple way to start your competitor research. Simply set up your Google Alerts to search for product names, content type, search terms, and type of update. Set up separate alerts for each. You can also use Zapier.com to automatically pull the information from email and put your results in a document for you to review when you’re ready.

IFTTT.com – This stands for “if this, then that,” which defines the parameters of a task process. First, you do this. Then you do that, and so forth. You can make these as straightforward or as complicated as you desire.

Zapier.com – This is really just another “if this, then that” option that creates little programs they call zaps to automate a process. For example, you can set up an appellate or a Zap to automatically create documents for you to review later.

Ubotstudio.com – You can set up UBot Studio to do a lot of tasks for you that will amaze you. For example, you can use Ubot to create and manage blogs, open accounts on social networks, post status updates and blog posts, and more. You can even make it upload videos to every single video site on the web with a touch of a button.

Rivaliq.com – Use this platform to audit competitive communications, identify trending topics and content, and even study your competition’s data. Compare your competition’s top content against yours so you can find a way to stand out. You can set up automation that causes your account to follow specific hashtags and even create a report about it.

Sproutsocial.com – Use this platform to perform a social media competitive analysis. They even provide a free template for your use. Truly understanding your numbers is an important part, and Sprout Social helps you do that.

Semrush.com – This is a fully-featured marketing system more than a platform. You’ll get training and tools to use in all aspects of your marketing, including competition research. Determine what your competition is doing so that you can find gaps in their coverage, which will give you a door to stand out from the competition.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider – This platform can allow you to observe what competitors are doing, who their customers are, and what resources they are investing in. You can find out a lot of information from this bot crawling a competitor’s site, but you can also use it to crawl yours and get advice.

Similarweb.com – This is a great platform to use to search your competitor’s website so that you can learn about trends, gain insight into their traffic so you can learn where to distribute content and information. It gives you a 360-degree view of any company you want to study.

Kompyte.com – This competitor analysis software will capture the changes your competition makes to their website so that you can find out what they’re doing in real-time to attract and please customers. Knowing this gives you insight into what you need to be doing too.

RPA (Robotic Process Automation) – Much of what we’ve mentioned really is already RPA. All RPA involves is training bots to perform the tasks that you used to do manually, such as saving files, wait for and alert you when a specific email comes in, processes orders within a certain monetary perimeter. If you do it on a computer, the bot can do it when programmed.

To choose the right tools to help you research your competitors, figure out what you want to know, and the process involved in determining it. Then you can find the right software to help you make light of the job.