As a business owner, it’s important to keep your systems and processes running as efficiently as possible – and that’s where automation and delegation come into play.
It sounds basic but it’s actually the most common reason why a lot of employees fail to be effective when working with businesses. It’s neither the lack of skill nor compatibility with team members, but an inefficient workflow and procedure that aren’t set up for success.
How do you implement systems and processes? Where should you start? And how can one be particular with what to automate and delegate?
Just like in any other business plan, hiring an employee requires a strategy. You don’t want to automate things you should be delegating, and you don’t want to delegate things you should be automating – otherwise, you’ll be wasting your time.
So how do you begin?
The first thing you need to do is map out the entire workflow of your business from a to z. Everything that happens from when you contact the client until when that is fulfilled. Whether you’re directly responsible for it or not, it needs to be included in the outline and you’re going to need a workflow for it. Effective task management is key to streamlining this process and implementing productivity strategies.
Once you have your workflow laid out, you can begin automating everything that you can. Before you can delegate, you first need to automate as many repetitive things as you can, particularly those that don’t require any decision-making.
Sending emails, email follow-ups, Calendly bookings, and other data entry tasks that seem to take a significant amount of time in the day.
It’s very important that you know exactly what can be automated, and outlining your workflow helps you with that which is why it’s the first step.
So how do you automate, exactly? The easy route is through zapier.com which is a tool that helps you automate workflows between two or more software whether or not you have coding experience. It’s a very user-friendly application so you can spend some time just playing around with it, and familiarize yourself with how it works before implementing it in your systems.
Once you’ve automated as many repetitive tasks as you can, it’s now time to delegate. Delegate to your employees, tasks that require human discretion or decision-making. Delegate to a team member or an administrative virtual assistant, whether remote or in-house, it doesn’t really matter – what’s important is you get your hands off the things that a business owner shouldn’t be doing so you can focus on either strategy or growing your company. Odds are you’re doing things that are out of your scope as a business owner, so divert your focus on revenue-generating tasks primarily in order to scale your business.
Focus on building your workflow – automation vs delegation. These things should be done in this order to make sure that your business is running as efficiently as possible. And then create SOPs around your workflow, effective task management, standard operating procedures your employee can follow so you’re assured the job will be accomplished accordingly even without you around.
From an operational perspective, it’s important to make sure efficiency is top of mind, not just for yourself, but also for your team members. At the end of the day, you know what’s best for your business – keeping yourself from things that don’t matter and devoting 100 percent of yourself to the things that do. Focus on revenue-generating tasks, and scale your company to the next level.
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