If you’re not constantly on the lookout for ways to streamline everything about your side hustle or small business, the first question you should ask yourself, quite simply, is why. It is the best thing you can do for your organization, as it quickens the production process, betters service provision, and it saves money.
The second question you should ask yourself in this instance is what you can do to your streamline your business’s many different areas. From accounting to communication to employee management, you should be looking to unearth all the ways you can sync your operations and improve efficiency.
Fortunately, that second question is answered below. Here are a few simple steps you can take to streamline your small business operation as a whole.
Set Up Branding for a Business
Building a brand that will cut through the clutter online is harder than ever. Of course, there are many things you can do to set up branding for a business, but here are three steps that will help you get started and stand out from the competition.
Research Your Target Audience
Your first step to setting up a brand is research. Know your target audience, and your competitors. You can’t make a brand that will resonate with your audience and stand out from the competition without truly understanding them first. To do research on your audience, start by googling the industry and competitors. Then, look at social media accounts or pages that your audience follows, and finally talk to some people in your target market.
Develop a Good Logo Design
Your logo is the first interaction that others have with your brand. It is key to building brand recognition, and eventually, brand loyalty. Whether you choose a ready-made logo or a custom logo you need something customers can recognize and associate with your brand. With the free Logo Maker online, you can get an order placed and download a custom logo design instantly. You can customize the fonts, colors, and brand name for free, and only pay when you are ready to use your logo.
But, your brand goes beyond just your logo. It’s how people perceive your business whenever they interact with you. That means branding is about cultivating an entire experience.
Come Up with a Catchy Logo Slogan
What is a logo slogan? A logo slogan is a short but punchy phrase that represents a company or product/service and communicates the benefits you would want your target customers to start associating with your business. A properly crafted logo slogan should be short and sweet, memorable, attention-grabbing, and emotional. Focus on Keeping the Slogan Simple.
A good logo slogan should resonate with your target audiences instantly. The reason behind this is that it only takes a few seconds to make a good first impression. Hence, you have to do your best to make capital out of this. Know that your target audiences might not understand a complicated slogan and you must therefore try to keep it simple.
When possible, use a few words and avoid cramming many ideas into a single sentence. Avoid using complicated and confusing words that might leave your audience guessing the message in the slogan.
Set up Strong WiFi
Critical to branding is the experience you give to customers, which means having a reliable WIFI service. Nowadays, businesses need strong WiFi to run efficiently. WiFi management for operators is critical to ensure the business can stay strong and continue growing. A managed WiFi solution for service providers is a great option because it can decrease costs, increase efficiency, and help differentiate you from your competitors.
Divitel has one of the best all-in-one solutions for service providers to make WiFi management for operators easy.
Update your phone system
Clear and concise communication is needed if you want to streamline your business. By doubling down on your communication efforts, efficiency will be improved no end, mainly due to the fact that information won’t get mislaid and scheduling conflicts won’t arise.
In this instance, updating your phone system is one of the best things that you can do. By getting rid of your traditional landline and opting to use a simple VOIP system instead, there will be no excuse for you and your employees not to remain in direct contact with each other throughout each working day. No matter where you or your members of staff are in the world when you use this kind of tech, you’ll be able to stay in direct contact. Other benefits of VoIP include:
- Voicemail box altering
- Call forwarding
- The ability to answer business calls at home
- Music-on-hold features
Use software that converts orders into messages
If your business takes orders, be it for a product or a service, then you’ll understand how annoying it is when information gets lost in transmission. When this does unfortunately happen, the whole operation gets delayed, and the customer is, nine times out of ten, left waiting for whatever it is they have paid for.
It’s never a good thing to leave your customers waiting, so you need to streamline your order process by using software that turns your orders into messages.
Cut waste when it comes to accounting
Accounting is tough as it is. Firstly it’s made even tougher when complications arise with regards to the times at which employees clock in and out. Secondly, when staff members either come in early or turn up late, it can have a massive impact on your accountant’s ability. Especially when you want to sort out the payroll quickly and efficiently.
Furthermore, in order to streamline your Accounting business, you should seek to cut the waste as much as you can. For example, one way to do this is to opt to use software that logs employees hourly, rather than momentarily. Something else that you could do is become stricter when it comes to the start times that you enforce. Additionally, if an employee doesn’t start exactly when they are asked to, you can reflect this in their pay if necessary. Make sure that on all your logs you present your finance logo.
Time Tracking
Time tracking features that small business owners can use and optimize their hours in a better way. Almost every time tracking app offers this feature, yet very few workers use the timer to record the exact time of a particular activity.
This may not be the most ideal way to work, but you can find out the exact time of a particular task. Finding the exact time of a particular task helps in future planning.
Knowing the exact time for each activity helps when developers have multiple tasks on the same day. If you know the exact time for each activity, you can manage your entire day and set up realistic deadlines! You can also set the schedule based on priority, interest, time consumption, etc.
I don’t know about others, but business owners must know time management 101. From graphic designers, creative logo makers, lawyers, and consultants, all are charging their clients on an hourly basis. Also, they offer packages designed based on hours, and the price for each hour is fixed.
For a business that is completely dependent on the productivity of designers, time tracking should be on the top chart. Knowing the exact task time is quite important, not just for a designer, but for the entire agency.
Make use of integrations & Chrome Extension
Almost all the major time tracking tools are offering integrations with various important tools. Side hustlers and small business owners work on various project management tools like Basecamp, Trello, Asana, etc. While working on such tools, a small business can directly track the time logo. Other payment integrations like PayPal can help freelancers, and designers get payments directly in the time tracking tool.
If you’re still unsure where to get started, check out this Trello Alternative.
Almost every time tracking app is offering its Google Chrome extension as its base feature. With Chrome extension, you save a lot of time jumping back and forth from your task to time tracking app. You can directly feed your time entries from such an extension. In many cases, the Chrome extension can directly fetch the tool you’re working upon and select the default project.
With app integrations and Chrome extensions, business owners can easily streamline their business and save a lot of time.
