Control the chaos: The 1 thing to implement early to not hate your business
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Are you a DIY entrepreneur?
If so, you shouldn’t be.
At some point in almost every entrepreneur’s journey, they find themselves in this stage, where they are not only the worker bee who actually performs the service or creates the product for your clients, but also acts as the Director of Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Finance, and R&D.
Basically, you’re every level from associate to CEO, and it’s going to lead you to exhaustion or burnout. Or both.
This system works for only small businesses who want to stay small, but if you want to scale your business and your income, you have to control the chaos. And control it early.
How?
By implementing systems.
Many people believe the first step to scaling when they are in the DIY stage is to hire out – find a VA, a social media manager, etc.
But that can be expensive. And when you’re trying to save time while also generating more money in your business, systems or tools that help you automate processes that take a lot of time can be better investments.
Here are a few I use and love:
FINANCE
QuickBooks. I can not only track my income & expenses with this software (making tax time 10x easier and also allowing me to make better financial decisions for my business), but their app also allows me to upload receipts and track business mileage. The fewer systems I have, the better, and QuickBooks covers a lot of ground in this one software.
Profit First. Implementing this ensures you have enough money for taxes and easily shows you how much you have in your bank account to cover expenses. Haven’t heard of it yet? Check out the book here and when you have questions, come back and shoot me a DM or email.
SALES
Dubsado. I recently implemented this to help automate the process of bringing on new clients, and it’s been a game changer. My workflow essentially collects potential client info, schedules discovery calls, sends out proposals & contracts, and invoices for initial deposits. These were all things I was essentially recreating over and over again for each new client, so this has helped cut time down drastically.
Interested? You can get 20% off your first month (or annual package!) with code BRITT20.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Planoly. I use this software to schedule all of my Instagram posts. It ensures my feed is cohesive, and with a simple click of a button, I can post the image. It also has the ability to store hashtag blocks, so you can create a template hashtag group and add it to your post within a second. With a desktop and app, you can access it wherever, and it makes it extremely easy to batch your posts. You can pay for automatic scheduling or use the free version as I do and just post on demand.
INBOX MANAGEMENT
Email Templates. Find yourself writing the same email? Almost every platform has the ability to create templates or drafts that you can pull in over and over again to save time rewriting the same words. For Google, which is what I use, you can create canned email responses. They are fairly simple to set up and have saved me loads of time responding to clients or inquiries.
Boomerang. This Google add-on helps me to ensure that I don’t miss responding to an email or following up on one that I sent. Essentially, if you send an email, you can set this “Boomerang” reminder to put this back in your inbox if the recipient hasn’t responded in a certain amount of time. Same for emails in your inbox – you can set it to where if you haven’t responded or moved it out of your inbox into another folder, it will remind you that you need to respond. It’s like having a little inbox secretary ensuring you don’t miss a beat.
What systems or tools do you utilize that have been game changers?
