Are you tired of spending time repeating the same tasks while running your business? Luckily, there are several ways for you to automate these tasks so you can focus more on efforts that make you money. Whether you are working for on energy broker platform or managing inventory, automation can help maximize your time.
Let’s dive in to see what options are out there for you to automate your business.
Hire a Virtual Assistant
Virtual Assistants are becoming more popular for businesses when it comes to performing the most repetitive tasks. Contracting a virtual assistant, or a physical assistant if you have a physical location, frees you up to focus more on what really needs your attention. Assistants are great for cold-calling, responding to emails, setting up appointments, and more.
Outsource Other Tasks
You may own your business, but not be an expert in executing all the tasks involved with keeping it up and running. This is where outsourcing can save you time and money. For example, if you’re not good with accounting, hire an accountant. They’re guaranteed to get the books balanced faster than you are and with no mistakes.
Internal Task Management and Communication
When you have several different teams and can’t always visit each department, consider investing in a tool like Slack or Trello. These tools are super versatile and can accomplish a lot while you’re on the go or in the office. These leave no excuse not to be able to have a progress snapshot or check in with someone.
These project management tools utilize instant messaging, which are more difficult to ignore. Depending on the project and who’s involved, you can choose to direct message someone or create a chat room for everyone involved to discuss their contributions to the project.
They also have functionality that lets you assign tasks to individuals, keep notes in one place for each task, and update task statuses. Not only are tasks managed easily through these tools, but some also offer the ability to manage calendars to make sure no one misses essential meetings again.
Digital Communication
If you communicate with your clients or customers through email, you might spend a lot of time managing various campaigns and newsletters. There are several different software and web applications to help streamline these communications that keep from needing to do anything manually every time you want a message sent.
Services, like MailChimp, allow you to pinpoint when specific messages should be sent to your list of subscribers. Automating your email communications gives you a chance to get in the zone, create entire campaigns, pre-write newsletters, and leave it alone until the next session of mass creation. You can create multiple messages that are scheduled to send when you want and without you pressing the send button each time.
The same can be said about social media advertising you to for your business. Systems like Hootsuite are great for managing several social media accounts and scheduling appropriate posts on each. If you’re running a sale in a month, you can create and schedule those posts now instead of revisiting it when the sale is closer.
Analyze Processes
Lastly, in addition to the rest of these helpful strategies to automate your business, take the time to analyze each of the processes in your business. You can eliminate genuinely repetitive tasks that don’t need to be repeated or eliminate tasks that aren’t yielding results you want. You might find that you’re still spending time setting up automated processes that you wouldn’t know about if you didn’t analyze how your business operates.
