Showing posts with label time management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time management. Show all posts

Tuesday, 2 October 2012

Time management for your small business

If you run your own online store and are the sole employee, you may not have all the time you need to efficiently run your business as you may have other commitments such as a full time job.

As you have so much to do in order to make your ecommerce store a success each and every day, how can you manage your time effectively to ensue you make the most out of every second.

Plan out a schedule

Everyday you should have a clear schedule of what needs doing on that particular day. In addition to planning everything out, you should also prioritise which are the more important tasks. For example, you may have a backlog of orders that need to be completed that are a much higher priority than say writing the latest article for your blog. Having a schedule allows you to have a clear direction regarding what needs to be done each day. If you are unorganised then your business will be the same and you will limit the success your business can achieve.

Stick to it

Creating a schedule is one thing, but actually sticking to it is another thing altogether. This is where your own self discipline must comes in to play. Your self discipline will reflect how much you want your business to be a success. If you badly want your business to a success, you will put as much time into it as you need to in order to make this happen. The best way to stick to a schedule is simply through repetition  Once you have created a daily system for your online business that works well, it becomes easier to stick to that system because you are used to it. 

Work weekends

No one likes to do it but sometimes if there just isn't enough time during the week you have no option but to work on a weekend and obviously when running an ecommerce store, weekends are when you are going to carry out a large number of your transactions. However, if you do have a quiet weekend with very few transactions, there is no harm is carrying out some of the minor tasks that you would usually do during the week. These are tasks such handling all of your correspondences that won't take up all of your weekend but allow you free up a few hours during the week. 

Organisation Tools

While these won't complete any of the tasks for you, you can use organisation tools to help sync up the various processes for your business, allowing you to keep everything you do organised and structured making the tasks easier to complete. If you have a smartphone another option would be to sync up all of the emails, social media and other correspondence for your store on to your phone so that when you have a few minutes free at work or are on your lunch break you can quickly answer them all, keeping your customers happy and freeing up time for you to spend on other areas when you do get home.

Get some help

Although you may want to keep your total costs down to the minimum, sometimes your workload is just too much that it begins to affect the overall running of your business and you have no option but to hire someone to help carry the load. However, you don't have to hire them on a full time basis. Depending on how badly you are struggling with the workload, you may find that you only need some help a few hours each week to help complete orders or carry out other tasks.








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Friday, 17 August 2012

Make a profit while enjoying your weekend

It's Friday and I'm sure many of us are looking ahead to the weekend, thinking about the various activities you're going to take part in or just taking comfort in the thought of being able to relax for a few days away from work. However, when running a small business, you need to remember that running an online store is a full time job and that doesn't just mean Monday to Friday. Depending on the type of store you run, working only during the week is going to result in you missing out on huge amount of traffic.

However, just because your store needs to be open everyday to make sure you achieve the maximum number of sales, it doesn't mean that you need to spend all your time sat at your desk working, not having any free time to relax and indulge in various activities. To do this you need to be able to effectively manage your time, ensuring your online shop doesn't suffer.

All at once - When a customer places an order on a weekend, they know that most likely, the product won't be shipped out until the first working day of the following week. This means that you can check your orders on a Saturday afternoon for example, package them and have them ready to ship out first thing Monday morning. While this may take you an hour or two, doing it all in one go is better than staggering it throughout the day as the orders come in, meaning you don't have any time to do anything else. Any orders that are made on Sunday can then be processed, packaged and shipped on Monday.

Employ someone - Depending how big your online business is and how much money you are making, you may think about employing someone to run your store on a weekend. This will give you the free time to enjoy your weekend. However, when deciding to to employ someone you need to spend time to ensure you employ someone who you have full confidence in and that you know will be able to handle all aspects of your store. At the end of the day, any problems that occur during the weekend are just going to give you a headache when you return on Monday morning so you need someone who will ensure everything runs smoothly.

Automate messages - The easiest way to still run your business while enjoying your weekend is to setup automated email messages for the weekend. When a customer purchases an item, an automated message will be sent to them letting the customer know that their order will be processed first thing on Monday morning. While the customer wants their produced to the processed and shipped as soon as possible, letting them know when their order will be processed stops them becoming frustrated by the lack of forward progress over the weekend.

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