Work Smarter To Achieve More In Business
Do you want to create the life of your dreams? The team of your dreams? A business that works for you (not you working for your business)?
As a coach, I love helping my clients level up and become clear on where they want to go.
Have you ever heard the phrase, "Work Smarter not Harder"?
It's about having a clear strategy in which you prioritise your most important activities which allows you to feel more productive and satisfied, rather than overwhelmed and frustrated. It's about finding better ways to do your tasks. It's about sticking to one task and completing it, rather than doing 5% of a number of tasks and not really achieving anything.
One way that you can achieve this is learning to say no more often, and not overcommitting yourself. As someone that frequently overcommits and finds it difficult to say no, here are some of my top tips to learn to manage this:
- Clarify your priorities - what is really important to you?
- Pause before you say yes - this gives you a chance to check your schedule, think about your workload, and decide whether saying yes will get your closer to achieving your goals.
- Learning to say no - sounds so simple, but this is a skill that needs to be practised repeatedly.
- Delegation - ask for help! You don't always have to do every task yourself!
- Negotiation - it's ok if a higher priority task pops up. Go back to your priorities and renegotiate your prior commitments.
Create A Plan
Not having a business plan is likely to cause short term stress before you even get to the longer term stage of your business.
Some of the risks of not planning in your business can include:
- 💰 Cash: not anticipating your start-up costs = risking running out of cash before you even open your doors
- 👁 Vision: not planning your vision and mission can cause overwhelm with all of the options and choices
- 😞 Losing current and/or potential clients due to the quality of your goods/services falling short
Set Goals
If you're feeling overwhelmed by all of the little details of reaching your end goal, it might help to break it down into bite size pieces.
When visioning your optimal business, the next step of figuring out how you'll reach it can seem daunting. It's okay - this is normal! Here are my 3 steps to reverse engineering your business plan in order to break it down and make it easier to implement:
- ✏️ Identify your desired outcomes and goals: looking at the key functional areas of your business and the outcomes you want to achieve in each area is a good place to start. Here, you can identify the gaps you need to fill which then become your goals!
- ✏️ Create strategies to bridge the gaps: your strategies will now become your how. Will you need a marketing plan for daily social media posts? Will you need create some Google ads? Make sure to track and measure the results of these.
- ✏️ Map out the time in your diary: assigning time each week to work on the proactive strategies in your plan will keep you on track and directly impact your results!
Measure Your Success
People commonly measure their success by the revenue they generate, however it's important to assess the whole picture in order to see progress and measure success.
When looking at your revenue breakdown, where can you leverage your systems to generate more turnover with less effort (thus, reducing your time and direct costs, increasing your gross profit!)
A mistake that I often see is to try to increase the number of leads when in fact, this may not be the problem.
Here are my top 3 ways to build your revenue (that actually work!):
- Increase your conversion rate - can your sales process become more efficient? Do you send any educational material out? Can it be improved?
- Increase average dollar sale - here we can use the classic "Would you like fries with that" strategy.
- Increase number of transactions - repeat business culture will continually generate consistent sales revenue for the future.
Learning is the 'L' Plates to 'Earning'
If you stop learning, you stop developing to your fullest potential. Successful entrepreneurs and business owners know the importance of ongoing professional and personal development so they can be the best they can be.
Aligning your learning with your goals is the perfect stepping stone to get there and achieve them.
So whether that be in business or your personal life, review your goals and how you are currently tracking with them and then decide what you can learn in order to tick them off!
Stay Accountable
Being held accountable by someone, is the glue that ties someone's commitment to their results.
Without it, there will be a lack of quality, productivity, and engagement.
If you don't have a business coach, you could ask a mentor, spouse, friend or colleague to help you stay on track to achieving your goals. I always recommend writing down your goals, which will automatically increase your chances of achieving them.
When the goal posts move, you can always re-assess and re-prioritise along the way, but writing down your goals regularly (and tracking to them) is a great first step.
If you want to discuss your goals with me and see how I can help to keep you on track, contact me for a friendly chat.
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