Personal Development Archives - Page 13 of 31

February 22, 2021February 22, 2021

26 Things You Can Automate in Your Business

There are numerous things you can automate in your business. Some things you may have already thought about or started, such as email marketing. But others you may not have thought of yet, such as auto file generation, event registration, and more.

Social Media Marketing – Use software like Hootsuite.com to set up social media marketing sharing and engagement.

Blogging – Set up your email marketing software and social media platforms using software like Zapier.com to generate applets that will automatically share any blog you publish with your email subscribers and social media platforms using the right size image and everything.

Research – Use a combination of artificial intelligence, surveys, behavioral emails, tagging, and other tools to automatically deliver reports to you based on the criteria you set.

Tracking and Measuring – Set up Google Analytics or platform analytics to track and measure and create automated reports. You can use Zapier.com to automatically create a document that is filed away for you to check when it’s time.

Remarketing – Set up a pixel that autocrinally tells your customers when they left their shopping carts or that sends an advertisement just to them based on their behavior in your cart.

Event Registration – Let your customers sign themselves up for your events using the tools included with platforms like GoToWebinar.com or connect software using IFTTT.com and another tech.

Customer Care – Set up chatbots, customer questionnaires, and a self-service kiosk right on your site. Chatbots can be programmed to speak in your brand voice in a conversational manner and offer an amazing ROI.

Email Responses – Set up triggers within your email autoresponder software that delivers the right information that you’ve preloaded into the system to your customers just when they need it most.

Transactional Emails – Preload all transactional emails to your autoresponder so that they’re delivered based on what your customer does.

General Email – Set up automation in your email so that when someone signs up for your list or buys something, they get periodic emails based on their interests.

Invoicing and Reminders – Set up your invoicing tools to generate automatic invoices based on the criteria you set up, as well as sends auto-reminders. Most bookkeeping software will do this these days if you set it up.

Payroll – If you have employees, invest in payroll software or work with a payroll firm. They’ll provide the tools that allow your employees to enter their time and control various aspects of their pay independently.

Storing Records and Receipts – Purchase software that enables you to take a picture of your records and receipts so that it’s always there when you need it.

Bookkeeping – A lot of bookkeeping software today, even Go Daddy’s version, will automatically book your purchases and income for you. This can save hours, depending on the number of transactions you have daily.

Customer / Client Appointment Scheduling – If you’re a coach or someone who has to interact with customers and clients via appointments, let them make their own. Software like acuityscheduling.com lets your customers self-serve in more ways than one.

Bill Paying – If you have bills to pay, you can set up automatic payments for all sorts of bills so that you don’t have to think of them every month. You can do this via your bank.

File Backups – Everyone should be backing up all the time. Having an external drive isn’t really good enough now. Buy file storage online. It’s much safer, and set everything up so that it backs up automatically.

Calendar Sharing – You can automate your calendar sharing by using the right type of software for your needs. For example, if you work with a team that is spread out over the country, using Google Calendar that you can all view and see will help. You can also use project management software like Basecamp.com for this.

Email Inbox Management – Use software like boomerang.com to help you keep spam out of your inbox. You can also set up Zapier.com to organize your files for easier consumption.

To-Do List Development – Using Zapier.com, you can turn your emails or other accounts like Slack and Trello into a to-do list with the right commands.

Digital Product or Freebie Delivery – Set up your sales page so that when your customer signs up, they’ll receive the product automatically.

Lead Gen and Nurturing – When your customer gets their freebie, you can automatically deliver emails that build the relationship using Aweber.com or other autoresponder services.

Contact Management – Use a system that allows you to scan your contacts into your customer relationship management software along with tagging so that you can set up networking ops fast.

File Creation – Set up IFTTT.com or Zapier.com to create files and add them to your Dropbox from tasks, emails, and other triggers.

Help Desk – Use software like Freshdesk.com to set up an automated helpdesk for your customers.

Surveying Customers – Use behavioral triggers on your website, in email, and on social media to deliver a survey to your customers.

Now that you’ve seen this list of ways to start automating, did it give you some good ideas? What do you want to automate? If you’re not sure about how to automate something in your business, I can probably help if you contact me.

February 22, 2021February 22, 2021

8 Things You Should Outsource in Your Business

As you learn more about business automation, it’s important to realize there is another way to automate your business, and that is by hiring someone else to do the work for you. Hiring experts to deliver work for you on your behalf is called outsourcing.

You can outsource to contractors, or you can hire employees. It’s up to you and depends on the type of business you want. Outsourcing to contractors allows you to hire experts for parts of projects without keeping them on payroll long term and is focused just on deliverables. In contrast, hiring employees puts you in charge of their time and gives you the ability to direct them more closely.

Legal Work – Most small business owners will not hire a legal person to work on their team as an employee. Instead, they hire a law firm on retainer and use them only when necessary. If you do have a lot of contracts and other needs for a legal team, this is your best answer to those annoying legal issues. It’s also nice to have someone on call that you can ask simple questions of and check over contracts.

Finance – Most small business owners can save a boatload of time, stress, and money if they find someone to help them with taxes, bookkeeping, payroll, and other issues with money and accounting. You can hire a bookkeeper, a CPA, an EA, or even an admin person to do the data entry to help remove some of these responsibilities, but this is where you really do need an expert, at least at first.

Technology Needs – Most small business owners hire people and use automation technology when it comes to their websites. Building websites, using automation software, and all that technology really does need someone who understands it all in a professional sense.

Marketing – Whether it’s social media marketing or some other type of marketing, hiring an expert will pay off. Experts know how to use the software available and know all the tricks of the trade to ensure the process works. When you outsource marketing, you free up time to do something you’re more knowledgeable and skilled at doing.

Graphic Design – Giving a designer ideas for your graphics is so much easier than trying to design them yourself. Even if you think you can deliver good ideas using software like Canva.com, it’s not going to be as excellent as an expert can make it, and letting someone else do the design will save an enormous amount of time.

Customer Care – No business owner should be handling their own customer care because it’s just too hard. You’re too close to your product or your service, and it’s too easy to get upset about issues. But an expert can help set up your customer care in a way that takes it off your plate for a lot less than you may realize.

Administrative Tasks – Track the admin tasks you do every day, and you can likely save a few hours a day if you hire a virtual assistant to do the administrative stuff all business owners have to do. Whether it’s managing events, performing personal errands, or other tasks as directed by you, this is a substantial time saving and can really turn your business on like nothing else.

Writing – Your business needs a lot of content for customer education, product information, and so forth. Whether it’s blog content, article content, sales page content, or internal content, a professional writer can help you with it.

Whether sales, marketing, finance, accounting, customer service, or helping manage a team, you need to outsource in your business. You may not have enough resources to outsource it all right away, but you should consider creating earning benchmarks that signal the time to outsource the task. When you outsource more, you free up your time to focus on what you do best.

February 22, 2021

3 Reasons to Automate and Outsource

As a business owner, it’s important to understand what your expertise is. If you’re spending time in areas that you lack skills or information, you may be making mistakes that you don’t even realize you’re making while sacrificing what you are good at doing.

When you understand the core business, you will know what you sell, who you’re selling it to, where your buyers are, and how to find them. You’ll also know how you’re going to distribute the product or serve the customer. Additionally, you know how you stand out from the competition, and you use that to your advantage by differentiating yourself in the marketplace.

Remove Bottlenecks

When you start to automate and outsource tasks in your business as you develop each process, you’ll start to notice that bottlenecks are a thing of the past. Because the truth is, in most small businesses, especially those run by people starting them from home with no business experience, the bottleneck is the business owner.

Sometimes lack of skill causes the roadblock. Sometimes they just lack desire or energy because everything becomes so overwhelming. But whatever the reason, if you are engaged in organizing and planning as business owners should do and focused on automating and outsourcing, ensuring that others are responsible for doing, you’re going to get more done.

Reduce Errors and Mistakes

When you work with software, fewer mistakes will happen once you set it up correctly. Even outsourcing to an expert will ensure that mistakes and errors are less likely to happen. The main reason is that you’re going to use software that is tried and tested, and you’re going to hire people who are experts.

The truth is, hiring experts or using automation software can reduce your errors and mistakes so much that the cost will produce an amazing return on investment. You’d probably spend a lot more time worrying over the issue than your customer service expert or the automation software will. But you’ll get superior results in the end.

Setting Boundaries: It’s Not Selfish to Go After What You Want

Spend Time on Higher Value Projects

This is the biggest reason of all to automate and outsource. Focus on your primary business, which is the core of your businesses’ existence. As a business owner, while you may need to do things in your business as a job, once you reach specific benchmarks, you should hand those tasks off to machines or to experts so that you can spend time on projects that produce a much higher value for yourself such as business planning and idea generation which is the key to business growth.

You live in an amazing time to be a business owner. You can find plenty of technology to implement in your automation plan and plenty of people to hire in your outsourcing plan. Figure out what you want to do, set your goals for doing it, and then follow through.

February 22, 2021February 22, 2021

How to Do More with Less

Many folks in western society have been taught by word and deed that being busy makes them a good person. The truth is, being busy does not mean that you are productive. You can be busy doing the wrong things. Getting more done with less implies that the impact you make is more significant than your effort.

Some ways to get more done with less:

Understand your key objectives – For any task, what is the point of doing it? Does this task actually impact any of your critical business objectives or the objective of the one task?
Automate – If you can document the steps you do for a task, you can likely automate a lot of it. From using macros within your documentation to implementing new automation tech, there is likely a way to do it.
Outsource – If you cannot automate it, you can likely get someone else to do it for you. As a business owner, you should actually make it your goal to outsource or automate almost every task in your business, with few exceptions.
Batch tasks – Once you’ve figured out what tasks you really do need to do, batch things together that make sense. The fewer steps you can take, the better. For example, if you need to do bookkeeping, save all your booking entries to do one day a week instead of doing it daily.
Avoid multitasking – When you are doing a task, do that task. Don’t do anything else that will take away your focus. No human really can multitask anyway.
Create realistic schedules – When you write your tasks into your calendar, it should make sense. If a task takes four hours, you need to ensure you really have four hours and not one. For example, include set up time, drive time, and all the time needed to finish the task as scheduled completely.
Do the hard things first – If there is one thing on your list you really don’t want to do, but you cannot eliminate it, automate it, or outsource it, get that out of the way first thing.
Track your time – When you first start doing things, it helps to track your time so that you stay mindful of how you’re spending it and so that you know how long any given thing really takes you.
Focus on money-making tasks – Note which tasks you do that generate invoicing or money in your pocket. These need to be done first thing.
Cut distractions – Set up your workspace to eliminate distractions and interruptions. Turn off notifications, your phone, the TV, or anything that can take your mind off what you are doing.
Use the right tools – Don’t skimp on investing in the tools of your trade. If a tool exists to use that helps streamline your business and eliminate busywork, you need it.
Know your top five – Everyone has off days, but if you create a list of the top five money-making must-dos for a basic day, then even when you have issues, you can focus on those top five tasks.

Remember that being organized in your business is part of what a business owner does. Business owners reduce risk in their business by organizing, planning, and generating new ideas that create new opportunities.

February 21, 2021February 21, 2021

What Do You Do All Day?

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate. But, in order to figure out how to automate your business, you first need to know in detail what you do all day long so that you know which tasks can be automated, should be automated, and even whether it’s something you should be doing at all.

In every business, you will have daily tasks, weekly tasks, monthly tasks, and even yearly tasks or quarterly tasks. The best thing to do is to get out a calendar and enter the items you know you have to do.

For example, you have to pay quarterly taxes, and you have to balance your books at the end of the month. You must buy a business license each October or January depending on your location and the rules and laws in your area. Whatever it is that you know for sure has to be done, enter it into your calendar, blocking off the approximate time it will take you to do it.

But there are also the daily things you do that generate your income. When it comes to generating income, it’s essential to specify which actions you are doing that generate income and which actions you’re doing that support generating income. Go through the steps you take in your day and write down what you’re doing, step by step.

What’s Your Job as The Owner of Your Business?

Coaches Example

Ø Business: Coaches retired teachers starting a second career as independent course and project designers.

Ø Morning: Checks the mail, email, and Trello to find out if there are any fires to put out this morning before paying any bills due for the day. Calls her group coaching clients for the weekly hour Zoom group coaching session. Writes 7 product educational and nurturing emails for a new one-on-one coaching product to market to her group coaching clients.

Ø Afternoon: Records part of an online course in development. Transcribes the group call and sets up her part as a standalone presentation video.

Ø Evening: Answers coaching client questions for those who signed up to receive daily emails and schedules them to be delivered in the morning.

As you can see, this is just one day out of an entire year and is not representative of all the money-making tasks this coach does, nor is it a complete picture of what happens in the business overall. But it does give you a great idea about where to start automating and even outsourcing. Once you see what you’re doing visually written out, it’s a lot easier to figure out places that you can improve your process. Take the time to write out every process you do each day that you do them. Once you’ve documented the different activities you do each day, you can identify what needs to be perfected and then automated or outsourced or both.

February 18, 2021February 18, 2021

What’s Your Job as The Owner of Your Business?

As a small business owner, you probably think that you have a lot of jobs to do. Some people like to describe the job of a business owner as one that wears many hats. As the saying goes, sometimes you have on your salesperson hat, sometimes you have on your finance hat.

It depends on what is happening what your job is at any moment. However, your main job description as a business owner is to plan and organize the daily operations of your business.

On any given day, you may be responsible for:

Developing your business plans
Arranging financing
Hiring staff or contractors
Reviewing sales
Developing marketing strategies
Overseeing daily activities
Identifying opportunities

All of these jobs represent your main function as a business owner, which is managing your risk. In each of these jobs, you really don’t physically do anything other than analyzing what someone else did for you, whether it’s automation or human.

Therefore, when you realized that you don’t need to physically do the tasks that you design, your job as a business owner becomes a lot simpler and can be boiled down to risk management.

When you realize that your job as a business owner is really one of risk management, it becomes a lot clearer what your main function is as a business owner. Realistically, you may have to wear a lot of hats at first, doing the tasks defined for each, — but it’s your choice to do the projects yourself or not as a business owner.

In fact, one can argue that it’s best for a business owner not to physically do the tasks that don’t require them since you only have so many hours in the day. It’s always, or should always, be less expensive to outsource or automate where you can. But you do have to start someplace, and most small business owners start out doing all the tasks themselves.

In any case, it can help to understand that finding and setting up automation in your business is one of the roles you play as a business owner. By doing so, you’re going to reduce risks associated with your business because you’re going to ensure those tasks get done in a timely fashion by someone (or something) who knows what they’re doing.

The more you can automate, the fewer things you have to outsource, and the bigger and better you can build your business because you’re going to free up your time to do more of what an owner does instead of the tasks involved in each area. After all, one of the reasons you started your own business is so that you can have more work-life balance, right?

One can argue whether the idea of balance even exists, but it’s clear that if you’re doing the job of 10 people, it’s hard to find that time freedom, much less anything resembling balance. In fact, you’re very likely to get burned out if you’re a small business owner who thinks that you have to physically do everything in your business. Instead, realize that part of risk management is to find ways to free up your time so that you can devote yourself to discovering new opportunities for your business.

February 18, 2021

What’s Your Customer’s Buying Journey

One of the first things you need to learn about your business is your customer’s buying journey based on the sales funnel. Big businesses like to call this their customer relationship management pipeline. They tend to use a few basic pipeline structures that follow their customer’s buying journey from awareness to delight.

The truth is that no matter what type of business you have, the basic sales funnel is the same and defines the buyer’s journey.

Awareness
Interest
Consideration
Decision
Delight

Map your customer’s potential journey so that you can visualize where you need to place touchpoints. For example:

Awareness – Sync your favorite apps such as Google Sheets, Aweber.com, and other apps using software like Automate.io or Zapier.com to deliver the right content at the right time based on the customer’s behavior.

Interest – Automatically deliver email subscribers content that teaches them about the products and services you offer via your email software as well as your website using auto sequences and conversational chatbots.

Consideration – This is when the buyer really wants what you have to offer, and it’s your sale to lose or gain. You can automate content delivery that asks for the sale, such as delivering a free webinar to them. Using the right software, such as offered by HubSpot Automation and others, you can even let the software generate new one time offers based on their behavior.

Decision – Depending upon the type of business structure you have, whether it’s a course or a physical product or not, you’ll want to help them make the choice to buy by setting up automated discovery call appointments. You can synchronize your website with scheduling software like Acuityscheduling.com to let your customers schedule their own call.

Delight – Finally, you can create a whole new funnel to use during the post-purchase stage in order to elicit customer delight. When you delight your customers, they’re going to make more purchases and recommend others to you. One way to do this is to automate the onboarding of new customers so that they receive enough information to want to stick with you.

People add different steps along the way to each of their funnels based on the path the buyer likes to travel on their buying journey. Each step is a chance to streamline and automate part of the process. To make your customer’s buying journey successful, you’ll hopefully lead them through the entire process past the point they decide to buy your product to include customer delight, loyalty, and advocacy when it’s appropriate.

February 15, 2021February 15, 2021

What’s Your Business Type?

Do you have a store where people purchase products, or do you offer a service like coaching?

Maybe you offer courses and classes, or you provide customer support or something else entirely? Whatever you offer, how you have structured your business is vital to determine before you start your automation plans.

If you have an online store that people come to in order to purchase products from you, the way you automate and run your business will be very different from the way someone who offers courses or one-on-one personal services does.

So, consider what your business type is.

Online Store

If you sell any type of product, whether it’s physical or digital, with a shopping cart, you have an online store. You may be selling books, content, and even courses if you’re selling them as a product without your extra coaching and input. Essentially if you sell anything online in a shopping cart, you have an online store and can use a lot of automation tips for online stores.

Virtual Services

If you sell any type of service, administrative, one-on-one coaching, and so forth that you perform at a distance, using your website as your storefront, you are a service-based business. As a service-based business, you’ll organize your business and market yourself differently from an online store where you don’t speak to the customers directly yourself and sell products directly.

Virtual Support and Consulting

You may also offer only virtual support and consulting without offering direct service. For example, you may coach your clients to create a sales page, set up a freebie, set up a discovery call, but you don’t do it yourself, you simply advise them on what to do, and the client with their team does it. This is an entirely different business structure than a business that does the services directly or delivers the product directly.

Virtual Training

If you offer classes and “how-to” information to your customers via courses, classes, and content, you have a business that provides classes either self-paced or teacher-led this is a training business. A training business sometimes needs more personal input and engagement than a storefront that just sells the complete self-paced course.

There are numerous opportunities for automation in each of these business structures. But first, you need to write it down. What does the composition of your business look like? What do you do for customers and clients, and how do you do it? Is it hands-off or hands-on, or a combination of both? The more you can document how your business works, the easier it will be to find ways to automate and outsource.

February 10, 2021February 15, 2021

The Fundamental Parts of Your Small Business

The first thing to think about when you seek to make your days more manageable and more effective is the parts of your small business. What parts of your business are essential to your success? For each business, you’ll need to look at your own situation to determine it, but this can get you started.

Human Resources – If you hire or contract out to others, you’ll need to concern yourself with setting up, organizing, and managing all your HR. Having some knowledge of this even if you think you’re going to do everything yourself is essential because you should not do it all yourself, and there are laws to consider.

Accounting and Finance – Every business must figure out how they plan to keep track of income and expenses and set up benchmarks for planning purposes. There is a lot you can automate in this area too.

Marketing and Advertising – No business can exist if they don’t get the word out about their solutions.

Production – If you have a product, whether physical or digital, the product has to be produced somehow. Much of production can be automated depending on the type of products you have.

Information Technology – Most small businesses today do have to deal with technology in some way, which means you need to have a general understanding of the technology available in your industry to help you manage and do your business.

Operations – The inner workings of your business are ripe for automation. It doesn’t matter if you sell products, manufacture products, or perform services, someone has to be in control of this work, and that’s typically the small business owner because they don’t typically hire managers, but you can.

Customer Service – Even if you only serve five customers a year, you need to focus on customer care in order to keep your customers happy. A lot of this process can be automated too.

Purchasing – This is a department that will often fall to the owner of a small business but exists as a separate department in a large business. In this department, you’ll want to figure out what the business needs, how much, when, and negotiate better prices, and so forth.

Legal Department – This is one of the first areas to go for a small self-owned business, but it is still important to acknowledge this area. You always want to make sure what you do is legal and follows the laws.

Business Development and Growth – This includes sales, marketing, project management, product management, and more. If you focus on business development, you’ll focus on how you can use what you have to expand your audience and make more money.

While in general, all businesses share the same fundamental parts, some businesses, especially home solopreneurs, may place importance on different parts depending on their goals. But these potential fundamental parts of your small business bare considering so that you can create a solid automation plan.

February 4, 2021

WALKING WITH A PURPOSE

One way to make walking not only healthy but also beneficial is to find charities to walk for. Basically, the way it works is you find the charity and set up the walk by asking your friends and family to donate to the charity based on the number of miles you walk. This type of walking gives you extra incentive to get in shape, stay in shape, and keep walking.

Use an App

A great app for this is called Charity Miles. Basically, you just download the free app, which is suitable for both Apple and Android operating systems. Set up your account and choose your charity. It will track your movements and report to the system. When you walk, it tracks it and sends the earnings to your charity of choice. You can find sponsors through the app as well as by asking friends, family, and small local businesses to sponsor you.

Link – https://charitymiles.org/

Seek Out the Charity

If you already know what charity you want to walk for but you don’t want to use one of the apps, you can reach out to start your walking for a charity event by contacting them directly to work out the details. Some charities already have yearly walking events that you can join and sponsor in your local area. You can look for more charities at ACTIVE.

Link – https://www.active.com/

Set Your Goal

Set your walking goals based on how much money you want to make and how much buzz you want to create for the fundraiser. You can make it challenging or fun depending on the audience you want to attract. Some people prefer a leisurely walk with food and lots of talking, and others want a fast walking race.

Be Aware of Your Fitness Level

Before you start, you want to know about your fitness level. Can you walk for long periods without an issue? Even if you can only walk 30 minutes at a stretch, you can still raise money for your favorite charity, but knowing this level can help you set more realistic goals.

Train for Your Fundraiser

One way to ensure you meet your goals is to train for the fundraiser. If you want to walk a 50K for the fundraiser, you should work your way back from the date of the fundraiser and set up a training program that gets you to that goal when you’re ready to do it. For example, you may want to add 100 to 1000 steps a day until you can make it.

Be Ready to Motivate Others

When you are doing a charity event (even if you’re using the apps available to do it), you’ll make more money for your organization if you motivate your sponsors and your team if you have one by training, ensuring you are prepped and ready, and having high spirits about your goals and what you’re doing.

Don’t forget that there are already yearly walks for many charities. You can find out more about walking for charity by approaching specific charities directly or using Charity Miles or ACTIVE mentioned in this article.