Ryan Mitchell Oregon | You have been accepted to speak at a professional conference and the organization wants your materials and slides in 2 months. You have added this task into your marketing calendar and today you will start working on it. And – business is booming! In fact, you just heard from a potential client who has decided that she would like to start working with you next month. This means she needs your welcome packet and invoice. And you received a notice while checking email that one person bought your book and another person purchased some materials from your website. You realize that you need to take care of these things immediately, so instead of working on your materials, you take care of these items.
Ryan Mitchell Oregon | Stopping to handle product fulfillment, client management and accounting are HUGE time zaps! Not only can they disrupt working on projects that will bring in money for the company, but are actually costing you money! How is this so, you ask? If you consider what you charge, you have to realize that that is what you are spending for your OWN work. So, if you charge $100/hour and spend 3 hours on the tasks above, you have just cost the company $300.
Hire it out When growing a new business, it is scary to consider hiring people, but when you consider the savings AND that this then frees you up to make MORE money, it’s almost a no-brainer (I didn’t say it’s not scary, though!).
Ryan Mitchell Oregon | If you find an assistant who can not only answer the phone, but also do your entire client billing and scheduling, what is that worth to you? Many assistants might charge between $20-45/hour, so you again are saving money if you had to pay your assistant for 3 hours for them to take care of these tasks, while you write your speech and work on other programs, services and products for your clients. And today that assistant can either be right there in your town, or across the country!
There also comes a time when you will be ready for a bookkeeper to handle all of the accounting for your company. If your business is NOT accounting/bookkeeping, this is another task that can be hired out. Imagine not having to ever go into your accounting software, again! The same thing is so with an accountant, which, if you are already in business, you should have, anyway. Take advantage of the expertise that these people have to help you grow your business.
Ryan Mitchell Oregon | Using technology The final important aspect of managing your time is taking advantage of the technology that is available, today. Examples include:
Autoresponders
Shopping carts
Assuming you already have a website, just as essential is an autoresponder. The LAST thing you want to spend your time on is manually sending out emails when someone buys from you or signs up for your newsletter! And this is not what you want to be paying your assistant to do, either. An autoresponder is a program that automatically sets up to send particular people emails. When you sign up for a newsletter, or you purchase something online, if you receive an email, that usually has been generated by an autoresponder. Most assistants today can set up autoresponders.
Although it’s free and easy to set up a PayPal account and generate ‘buy now’ buttons for your website, once you offer more than one item on your site, it’s time for a shopping cart. A shopping cart works much like a shopping cart in a grocery store: If you want to buy more than one item, you put it in the shopping cart, and when you’re ready to buy, you ‘check out’, thus pay for all the items at once.
Ryan Mitchell Oregon | What is important to know about shopping carts is they must coordinate with your merchant account. Again, this is where a knowledgeable assistant can be INVALUABLE. Not only can they perform tasks that would take you hours or days to learn, but while they’re setting up such systems for your company, you are again making more money by seeing clients or working on new products and services.
Ryan Mitchell Rex Putnam 