When summer rolls around, some home businesses pick up steam. Companies serving tourists may see an influx of customers to their areas. For landscaping, home maintenance, and other outdoor businesses, warming weather means that the busy season is about to hit. However, for various other types of home businesses, summertime is a slow season. Customers and colleagues take vacations or take off early to spend time with kids on summer break. Deals that may take a week to close in March might take a month to close in July because the people who need to sign off on it have staggered their vacations across several weeks.
If you find yourself with a more relaxed schedule in the summer, it can be an excellent opportunity to take a look at the systems and processes that you rely on every day to run your business.
To get started, consider these questions:
- Is my team in the loop on all decisions, regardless of where they’re located?
- Am I making sure that everything I need to do in a given week actually gets done?
- Are all my documents, contracts and important paperwork properly filed and accounted for?
- Do I have the real-time knowledge of my business’s finances that I need to make important decisions?
Although it’s easy to overlook the nitty gritty of how you and your colleagues stay in touch, how you manage your to-do lists, and how you keep track of company finances such as payroll, receipts and purchases, these details can have an enormous impact on your home business’s success or failure. Improving your home business’s operations is simple, here’s how to get started…
Get Your Team on the Same Page
Running a home business doesn’t always mean working alone. Sometimes it means working and collaborating with a team of remote, traveling employees or colleagues working on a nearby job site or even in a home office on the other side of the country. Although email and phone can be sufficient communication tools in many situations, in some cases it might not be enough. A study published by the Economist Intelligence Unit found that 44% of survey respondents pointed to communication barriers as a leading cause of delays or failure to complete projects and 31% said that communication barriers contributed to low morale.
At some point, every business may struggle with communication. Summer is a good time to take stock of what activities work and what isn’t working and to consider introducing your team to a group chat tool. One tool to consider is Slack, a popular web-based group chat team designed to give teams real-time communication no matter where they are located while also giving everyone an easy way to stay in the loop.
You can create threads for conversations happening around different topics—and give everyone a chance to know what’s happening at any given time.
Streamline Your To-Do Lists
At some point, every business owner has laid awake at night with a nagging feeling, a worry that there was something you were supposed to do that day, a suspicion that the thing was important and possibly critical to your business—only to wake up and see a customer sending angry emails because someone forgot to do that important task.
When you start missing important items on your to-do list, it’s a good time to consider replacing your old notebook with a better way of managing your projects. Using a to-do list app can help you organize your to-dos in one place so that you don’t have to worry about losing track of the one piece of paper with the phone number of that one person you meant to call.
Evernote is a tool that will allow you to keep track of everything you need to get done and to organize and prioritize your projects. You can also add the Evernote mobile app to your phone so that you can use the extra 15 minutes you might find while running errands to pop into your phone and see what’s on your list. Neat is another tool that can help you organize all of your documents so that you don’t have to add “look for paperwork” to your to-do list ever again.
Get a Transparent Look at Cash Flow
It might be easy to look at that growing pile of loose papers and crumpled receipts in the corner of your home office and ignore it. “That’s my accountant’s problem, not mine,” or maybe you’re your own accountant as a home business owner and you might tell yourself “I know the company finances, that can wait”. But leaving your bookkeeping until the last minute or handing your tax preparer a box of disorganized information can be expensive at both tax time and for the day-to-day operations of your business. Not only might you have to pay for more hours of your accountant’s time to prepare your taxes, but you might also fail to see cash flow problems until its too late.
One study found that 90% of businesses didn’t have a transparent view of their cash flow—and not knowing what’s happening with your business’s finances can make it impossible to make fast decisions to capitalize on opportunities by hiring or taking on a new client or avert disaster by paying off an unexpected bill.
The slow summer season can be the perfect time to upgrade or implement a new expense-tracking system. Using a cloud-based software, such as Neat, to keep track of all the purchases you make or expenses that you accrue for your business can give you a clearer picture of your business’s finances while also helping you avoid having to scramble at tax time.
Set Up Systems When Business is Slow to Run Your Business More Efficiently When You’re Busy
Summer can be a great time to relax and recharge so that you’re refreshed and ready to rumble when the busy season hits. It’s also an excellent time to take stock of your day-to-day business processes to improve your business operations. Considering a few questions about how your business operates, and coming up with solutions, can help you enjoy a more efficient and even more profitable business.
