A lot of people I speak to get the concept of doing more with less. Except there's a common follow up: "Yeah... but how?"
Especially when you're a high achiever and your whole live is about hitting higher goals and doing more.
So I thought I'd just run through some of the ideas we've implemented both inside our business as well as with our clients.
You could consider...
• Leveraging your product or service to require less of your personal time.
You could utilise technology (online delivery), or look at ways to incorporate groups rather than 1-on-1.
• Upgrading existing clients into more valuable offers that are also more leveraged.
• Training and systemising your team so that they can take on more responsibilities in the business.
• Using technology to handle the brain intensive calculations and repetitive elements of your business.
This one tip helped a client go from 30 clients a week to 50. All in the space of a fortnight because she had more time to handle their unique requirements — all while her overall admin time went down.
• Developing a standard in-house process for handling your work.
This one helped a client of ours go from being maxed out at 80 clients to now working with over 200. Streamlining the process now means they can extend capacity to working with 500 clients at once.
Instead of having to hire a heap more staff to interface with clients, they've actually been able to reduce staff overhead.
• Identifying the work that causes 80% of headaches.
How could you develop a process to handle those headaches?
For us as an agency, 80% of our headaches are caused with back and forth requests with clients.
Things would get lost in email, Slack, Skype, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp.
Client priorities would change and we'd be constantly getting urgent and last minute requests.
I've always been a fan of task management personally, yet I never really formalised it inside the business.
So, we implemented a system as a team to streamline things.
For our clients to submit requests to us, as well as to communicate with the team and handle the back and forth discussions.
We educated the clients on how to see their work in progress and get updates.
The team's response to all this? Finally! This is great. Can we put more process and checklist into the system?
For me, I was far less stressed worrying about the status of each project. The work that needed to be done and the outstanding items were all in one place, clear as day.
Just one simple idea and one piece of software started saving us hours upon hours of work on each project.
We did less work chasing things up while delivering many more projects — we were far more efficient.
We also set a MUCH higher standard of service to our clients as they could see exactly what was in progress and exactly the status of their work at any time.
So what does that one idea look like for you?
What's the one change you could make in your business to be able to achieve more with less?
