Essential Business Tools & why you need them

 In fact, everything boils down to time management: you’re either using your time wisely or you’re not.

In business, being effective often starts by doing the things you need to do faster and better. This requires organisation: you have to be ale to organise yourself and your day effectively to get the most out of your time.

Technology comes in handy here: there is a treasure-trove of tools that can automate repetitive tasks and even help you do those tasks that are unique (in other words, the ones you can’t automate) much faster than you otherwise would, whilst reducing the potential for error.

Even if your field is manual-intensive, for instance if you’re a garden landscaper, you can – and must – use technology wherever you can to support and improve the tasks that you do.

Always being on the lookout for tools that can help you organise your tasks will make you into a more effective time manager.

Whatever business you’re in, you should adopt the mentality that there are better ways to do the things that you do, and that there the ways of doing things will always improve and become more efficient in themselves as technology improves.

Invest some of your time from now until the rest of your business life in exploring new ways to perform better and more efficiently.

When you find something that works well, implement it into your business processes and move on to the next weakest area until you can improve either all of it or certain parts of it. Then work on your next weakest area after that and keep going until your business processes run a little better than they used to.

Then start again from the beginning. Wash, rinse, repeat.

If this seems tedious, realise that working inefficiently is even more tedious. Doing the same tasks over and over again for years and then discovering that there was a better way that would have saved you hours at a time is should-wrenching – it means you left money on the table; you could have earned more in the same amount of time. When this happens, you’ll wish that you’d put up with the ‘tediousness’ of exploring new ways of tweaking things.

Let’s look at the math, taking a fictional business task that takes 1 hour to complete:

1. Business task = 1 hour.
2. Profit this task brings = £50
3. How many hours you can spend on this task per day = 4 hours (you need to spend the rest of the time running your business).

• Profit per day = £200 per day
• Profit per week = £1000 per week

The above is a simplified view of things to help keep this example nice and simple. In reality you need to find the work first, so that you can perform the task that makes you money. This equates to more time devoted to marketing and less time devoted to working on the money tasks, at least until your marketing starts to pay off.

Now look at the same example in a more efficient scenario:

1. Business task (working more efficiently, using some efficiency tools) = 30 mins.
2. Profit this task brings = £50
3. How many hours you can spend on this task per day = 4 hours

• Profit per day = £400 per day
• Profit per week = £2000 per week

That’s a difference of £4000 per month!

The ‘tedious bit’ is in finding the tools that help you deal with each task more efficient. If you invested 1 hour per week (let’s say the last hour of each Friday afternoon) in finding tools to help you improve your work flow, you’d be trading in 4 hours per month for an extra £4000 to your bottom line.

That’s 4 hours for £4000. Each one of those ‘tedious’ hours is worth £1000 to you.

Still tedious?

In the next few posts in this series we’ll look at the 5 essential business tools that you need to take your time management to the next level.