Utilizing Workflows to Minimize Your Costs
Your team is your most valuable asset. Each rockstar saves you time, runs your systems, and helps you grow your business far beyond what you could do as a one-person operation. They make it possible for you to serve a larger number of clients, market and sell your services or products, and help you keep your finances in order. But are you overlooking what your team could do to help you minimize costs?
As a business owner, it can be easy to focus a bit too much on the high-level strategy and overlook the details that can make a huge impact on your bottom line. Setting aside the time to manage these details – to map out your workflows and communicate 1:1 with your employees – results in a team that is equipped to innovate, collaborate, and help you become even more profitable.
This takes intention on your part, but there is good news: you don’t have to do it all yourself! You can delegate large parts of the process to various members of your team. There are parts that you will have to take on yourself, of course, but you will find the results will help you grow your business in amazing ways!
Understanding Your Workflows
You likely have processes laid out for most things that happen in your business, whether that involves onboarding a client, processing your billing, or managing a specific service. These systems are what makes a business run smoothly.
Have you taken the time to lay out each step of these processes, to figure out how much time each person will spend and at which stage? Unfortunately, many business owners would answer, “no.”
Others might answer that it seems like overkill – after all, your team knows what they’re supposed to do. That’s why you hired them, right?
Mapping out your workflows may not be an easy process (though there are ways to streamline it), but it is essential if you want to run a profitable business and build a team that thrives.
When I owned a law firm, I found that mapping my workflows helped me gain a much better understanding of how many hours each member of my team would put into a case at each step along the way. Granted, this doesn’t make much of a difference when handling one case…but law firms don’t just handle one case!
However, mapping this out for one case equips you to extrapolate the work hours for 20, 30, or 40+ cases. This process helps you gain a clear understanding of what each member of your staff is doing at any given time – and anticipate when each person will reach their limit so you can hire strategically.
This is such an important aspect of managing growth that multiple clients came to me and asked me to do a Workflows workshop, so we are now offering a 6-week Boot Camp intensive designed to help you and your team work through this process effectively and efficiently, saving you money and helping you make wise hiring decisions!
Communicating With Your Team
When your team is small, you will find that it’s easy to stay in communication with each person; as you grow, however, this will become a challenge.
This is when things start to fall through the cracks.
To solve this problem, I encourage you to implement quarterly reviews. This gives you a dedicated time to focus on each team member, solve any issues before they become problems, and discover what that person would like to focus on.
By being intentional about understanding your workflows, you can easily pinpoint which employees may have the bandwidth to take on these additional responsibilities. This can help you find innovative solutions that can help your team find more satisfaction in their work – and help you become more profitable!
For example, you might be in need of someone to edit videos for your social media – and you happen to discover during a quarterly review that one of your team members loves to work with video editing. For an additional 5-10 hours per week, they could take on that project! This would allow you to fill the need immediately and not have to hire and onboard someone new. In the process, you end up saving money and your team member gets to work in their zone of genius!
Innovative Solutions
When you have a clear understanding of your workflows and strong communication with your team, it’s a lot easier to map out solutions that will minimize your costs.
These solutions might involve delegating the building of certain systems to various team members, or they might result in collaborations that will drive your business forward. They might even help you find solutions you would not have otherwise thought of!
Calendaring in the time to map out your workflows, manage your team’s workloads, and keep open communication with each member of your team will bring incredible benefits and help you minimize your costs – which will result in an even stronger, more profitable business!