As a business owner, you are always thinking about how to grow and scale your company. You look at ways to finance new ventures, delegate responsibilities, and improve your leadership skills.
These are important ways to create freedom and build a healthy business. However, the biggest mistake we see when mentoring small business owners is that they take a bits and pieces approach to establishing systems and processes.
It’s natural to want to fix the urgency of the day. However, you may end up choosing a system where you spend a lot of time implementing without an optimal return on your investment.
Consider prioritizing the most important system to improve. For example, when I started working with one of my clients, they had already chosen a top-of-the-line customer relationship management system (CRM). It was a robust customer relationship management system that promised that they would get additional clients with the kind of automation that was built in. However, the system also required a significant amount of input. If all of the data points were inputted into the system, it had a significant amount of tracking and reporting that could be very useful to the business owner.
The challenge was that the company investing in this CRM didn’t have healthy financial systems in place to support the cost of this robust CRM system. They thought they could afford it and would grow into their new system.
Unfortunately, the new system also required a significant amount of manpower. The manpower would have been more effectively spent getting their financial systems in check and generating leads with a less expensive but equally effective CRM with a built-in follow up system.
When selecting new systems that automate or systematize your business, there are many things to consider, like cost, ease of integration, features, and longevity to name a few. Start by prioritizing which is the most important system to improve. You want to make sure that the system you identified that needs to be improved is the system that needs to be improved first.
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