Women trying to build an empire or a brand often get stuck by putting the responsibility of every process on their shoulders. These day-to-day processes keep us working IN our business, when instead we should be working ON our businesses.

In this episode, Lisa takes a look at how to combat this, and how to scale your business with simple management strategies.

Things slowing down the growth of business

Every business has a load of processes and projects. It makes sense that you try to do the processes at the early stage of your business but for the sake of business development, you need to get rid of as many of these processes as possible to allow you to focus on projects.

Processes vs projects

Processes are never ending and happen regularly in any business – think picking and sending orders, answering customer inquiries, handwriting thank-you cards and so on.  These things are of course important BUT they don’t scale your business. 

On the other hand, projects that have start and end dates like creating a website, launching a new product collection, collaborating with another brand etc can help you grow and scale your business. 

Let’s be grateful for the processes as they are important, but doing them all on your own will keep you distracted and you wont have much time left to focus on the projects.

Your goal is to concentrate on the projects and outsource the processes.

Automation of your business

Automation is very important for business. Women building a brand should not try to execute all processes by themselves. You need to outsource some processes to other people.

3PL

If we talk about 3PL (third party logistics) companies, they need you to have minimum numbers of orders varying from a hundred orders a month to a thousand orders a month. 

If your order volume is less than that it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need 3PL to pick and send orders for you. However you do need to find something that works for you.

Employ people

Another option is renting a storage shed or your garage and employing a local teenager or a mum who can come in every day for 2 hours and pack and pick up the orders and send them to your customers.

Customer service

Customer service is another area that a lot of business owners spend a lot of time working on. So you need to automate that too. You can do it in various ways: 

• through different channels managing customer service like Shopify chat.
• employing the same person that is picking and sending orders for customer inquiries too.
• building an FAQ section based on the last six months of questions you’ve been asked.

Social media management

Lastly, the process of handling the social media content is time consuming and can often have you scratching your head for hours.  

Find a person to do that for you, a social media manager – it could be an existing customer, one of your girlfriends or the team around you that is picking orders or managing customer services. 

Automation of these processes will save about 50% of your working life that could be spent on focusing on the projects for the growth of the business. 

Another key thing here is to not get overwhelmed by the projects, thinking about a whole lot of different things to work on. 

Implementation

Write out all the projects that you want to do for your business. 

Every Monday morning, pick out three projects that you want to work on in the week. 

Here’s the important bit!  Make sure that you complete them between Monday and Friday and feel awesome about it on Saturday morning. 

Start with 3 new things the next Monday morning and watch your brand grow!

Podcast on itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/e-commerce-uncomplicated/id1616750205