6 Tips for Being a Productive Small Business Owner

As a small business owner, your most valuable asset is your time. Being able to manage your time effectively and efficiently so you can promote and grow your business is invaluable. Just like raising a child, growing and building a small business takes a village (The Wright Village). Keep reading for 6 tips for being a productive small business owner.

1.) Streamline Operations

Streamlining your operations is all about making a process simpler and faster. On a regular basis, step back and take a look at how your business operates and where improvements can be made. Don't feel the need to keep something that is no longer working just because that's how it's always been done. 

When looking at productivity, find the bottleneck that is preventing efficiency. This can be a person, a process, or a technology. For example, if every decision that is made needs to go through you, as the owner, that may not be an effective use of your time and may prevent a process from proceeding quickly. Find places where you can give guidelines for making independent decisions and when it is a necessity to involve you, the owner.  Inefficiency can also come from ineffective training of new employees or a piece of technology, such as a POS system or a slow website that is slowing down sales.

2.) Create Policies and Training Tools

Having policies, procedures, and effective training tools are important for productivity, communication, and uniformity of products and services.  Training takes a great deal of time and some owners feel that they are the only ones that are qualified to train new employees. This is false, and a time waster. You do not have to know everything, you just have to know where to find the answers or have someone who knows those answers. That is why having policies is a great reference when there is confusion about a process. Review your policies at least once every few months to make sure that they still make sense. It is also helpful to ask another person to review them for some fresh feedback.

Training tools are excellent resources because then the owner, or other experts in that area, can standardized the information that each employee receives. This can be in writing, educational videos, or large group orientation meetings.  There are many different ways to train employees, but a general rule is that it should also be efficient and not significantly impact day-to-day operations.

3.) Triage and Delegate

As a small business owner, putting out fires (hopefully not literally) is just part of the job.  Just because a problem arises, does not mean that you need to handle it personally or immediately. Know your priorities, and be able to triage problems effectively.  Safety should always be priority number one. After that, often the satisfaction of customers and employees is the next concern because if your employees aren't happy, your customers aren't happy and vice versa. Being able to retain good customers and great staff will help your business thrive.

Sometimes problems come in twos, or even threes or more. An effective owner does not run around trying to fix them all themselves. Have a team of reliable people that can help when the you-know-what hits the fan. Pay those people accordingly. Delegation can occur with even small tasks.  The more time you have available, the more likely you are to catch an issue before it's a problem. Providing employees with increased meaningful responsibilities such as delegation can not only help you, but give the employee a sense of job satisfaction.

When it comes to those that try to derail your triage process, remember, a lack of planning on their part does not constitute an emergency on your part.

4.) Hire the Right People

Hire employees that are humble. A humble employee is not above getting their hands dirty. There are times that the owner will find themselves mopping floors, manning registers, or restocking shelves. If you are willing to do it, then your employees should be willing to do it too. 

Hiring the right people also means diversifying. It is important to be surrounded by people who are NOT like you. Those with different educations, backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, and personalities can all add to a lively work culture. People who are different from yourself can provide knowledge and skills that you may not have thought of.  It also gives you the opportunity to have staff with attributes that compliment your strengths and weaknesses. For example, if you are an owner that gets anxious when times are slow, a less anxious and more upbeat staff member would be better suited for keeping morale high.

Hiring an assistant is also helpful for productivity. It may seem like an unnecessary expense, but once you have an assistant you will never go back. They can handle data entry, phone calls, other office duties, and be a gatekeeper for your schedule. Having an assistant will eliminate many minor responsibilities, give you an additional person to delegate tasks to, and allow you to not have to worry about the more routine operations that they can handle, such as bookkeeping.

5.) Review Your Goals

It is imperative that a business owner set short and long-term goals. See “How To Set Achievable Goals” To learn more. Once your goals are set, don't forget about them. Keep them where you can see them, and review them regularly. Always be thinking about new way that you can reach those goals.

6.) Do One Difficult Task Per Work Day

We all have tasks that we dread doing.  Plan ahead to get those tasks out of your head and off your list. Start the day with your most difficult task whenever possible. The beginning of the day is when you will be most effective, most efficient, and most likely to complete it and not push it off.

The same goes for tasks that are not regularly occurring. As an owner, there will always be tasks that we don't want to do. They may be difficult phone calls, maintenance, employee reviews, or anything else that you may be tempted to avoid. Get into the habit of taking on one difficult task a week. It's only one, so what is there to be afraid of? Once the task is done, you don't have to worry until next week. If you continue to handle one difficult task a week, they will seem less overwhelming and will become easier over time.