Running a business takes a lot of time and focus.
There is always something that needs to be done or taken care of to keep operations running smoothly.
The hard part for most CEOs and entrepreneurs, believe it or not, isn’t finding the time to do all of these things.
The hard part for most is allowing themselves to delegate and automate some of their responsibilities to others.
Trust us when we tell you, though, that the key to saving your sanity as an entrepreneur or CEO is to automate and streamline operations as much as possible.
Here are the most important tasks to streamline for your company:
1. Accounting
According to a case study for Hanesbrands done by experts behind the MasterTax payroll tax software, “Automation of the payroll tax compliance process eliminated all manual keying of data.”
Setting up software and hiring third parties to manage your accounting and taxes is one of the biggest time savers and stress savers you can implement. These software packages get automatically updated with the most up-to-date tax codes and regulations so you never have to worry about your numbers being correct.
And, because everything including payroll is automated, you never have to worry about issuing paychecks late because you got swamped with other work.
2. Social Media
You know that in order to build and grow your business your company needs to have a social media presence. You also know that monitoring and updating those accounts is incredibly time consuming.
Many companies hire employees or freelancers to manage the company social media accounts for them. If you don’t have room in your budget for that, however, you can still reduce the time you spend on Twitter, Facebook, etc. by using tools like HootSuite, etc. to automatically publish updates.
Just make sure that you remember to turn off automated updates during big media events (particularly tragedies) and nobody will know the difference!
3. Marketing Tasks
Much of your marketing will take place online via ad buys, content creation, and email. Like with social media, some companies simply hire someone or contract a third party company to manage their online marketing tasks, but that might cost money that you do not have or simply do not want to spend.
Thankfully, many web marketing techniques can be automated. Email marketing typically uses auto-responders to follow up with customers and clients. Content can be written in blocks and then published in smaller chunks via scheduled posting CMSs like WordPress.
4. Project Management
Having to sort through piles of notes and updates on a project is a waste of time. Automate this part of your day by using project management apps like Trello or Basecamp.
You can also use Evernote for this as well as for the other notes and reminders you’d normally jot down during the day. Using cloud-based solutions like these helps you streamline your business while keeping everyone on the same digital page about who is doing what and when.
5.Customer Relations Management and Support
If you funnel all of your customer correspondence through your email, it is going to take forever to figure out what you need to do and when you need to do it.
Using CRM software and support ticket software helps reduce the time and frustration of these tasks considerably. These software tools help sort communications for you so that you can respond to urgent requests and hot leads quickly and save the less urgent responses for later. Without these tools you will likely spend your entire day simply sorting and responding to email. Who wants that?
It’s natural to want to do everything yourself. This is your company after all. Soon, though, you will find that micro-managing and doing everything yourself will only burn out your momentum. Automate as much as possible. You’ll be more productive and far less stressed!
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