Do More By Doing Less: 12 Quick Simplifiers
Do more by doing less
“Perfect is the enemy of good.” — Voltaire
Let’s say you’ve been running a business for several years now and you’re feeling overwhelmed by the amount of “stuff” to do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
What are some fast and easy ways to “simplify” things in your business and workload to make life easier?
Here are 4 areas with some “quick wins” to lighten the load in your business and work-life:
1) Finance simplifiers
Batch pay bills — Only process payables 2x per month (say the 15th and 30th). If a vendor is missed this week, then add them to the next batch process. Make it rules-based.
Chart of accounts — 99% of businesses would benefit from fewer line items on their financials. If you have more than 4-5 grouped expense accounts or 20-40 active line items in total, then you likely have too much (exceptions for much larger businesses).
Automate accounting — Find 5 transactions or vendors sitting in QBO to turn on bank rules for automation. Bank rules massively simplify the bookkeeping process.
Set a review cadence — With so many metrics and pieces of financial advice out there, what should you look at and when? Set a very basic review cadence of weekly, monthly, and yearly tools and metrics to look at it.
2) Communications simplifiers
Agendas — Do not hold meetings without an agenda shared ahead of time (a day in advance). Cancel standing meetings and only re-add them as needed (don’t schedule time for “status updates”).
Meeting times — Start with the agenda, then cut down on the meeting time itself. Ditch the default 60 minute meeting for 30 minutes (or even 25) and force more productive sessions. (Here’s a guide on improved meetings.)
Canned responses — If you use similar or repetitive email responses based on customer or vendor questions, turn it into a saved template (”canned response”) instead of re-creating it every time. Better yet, share that canned response with others on your team.
3) Ops simplifiers
Prune your product/service catalog — Bucket your offerings into a grid based on profitability and energy/effort (i.e. high and low). Cut, simplify, or raise prices on anything that’s low profit and high energy/effort.
Consolidate technology — When was the last time you looked at all the tools used in your business? Extra tools, systems, suppliers, etc. has a multiplier effect on your workload.
Customer buckets — Put your customers into a simple A/B/C list ranked by profitability and “difficulty to work with.” Protect the A relationships, upsell your B’s into A’s over time, and exit or wall off the C’s.
4) Personal simplifiers
Stop investments — Make a list of 5 recurring tasks, projects, or reports to eliminate (could be something on your plate or the “company’s plate”). I guarantee you’re doing something that could be eliminated.
Keep a zero inbox — This takes a larger commitment, but once you build the habit it’s wonderful. Use a few simple folder systems, automatically tag certain message types, and snooze or archive emails you want to look at later.
Society is great at saying “yes” to more and more, until we reach the point of exhaustion. Saying no to opportunities, projects, to-do’s, customers, etc. is significantly more difficult (but significantly more rewarding too).
Compartmentalization, delegation, and workload management are underrated skills in business ownership.