The Importance of Using Systems as a Business Owner

If you’ve ever looked at another entrepreneur and wondered how she manages to get it all done, the answer might surprise you. She’s got good systems.

It’s true. The most productive people all have one thing in common: they don’t reinvent the wheel every day. Instead, they’ve figured out the most efficient way to do every task, and create systems to do just that.

No matter what business you’re in and what projects you find yourself tackling, using systems will help you:

• Work faster and produce more
• Produce higher quality results with fewer mistakes
• Easily outsource the tasks you don’t like to do

The Magic of Templates

How many times do you answer emails from potential clients? What about responding to customer complaints? Or mailing your JV partners about an upcoming launch?

All of these tasks and more become effortless when you create fill-in-the-blank templates that you can re-purpose for specific cases/people. Templates can be as simple as a “canned response” in your email client or help desk, or you can use software such as Text Expander (for Mac) or Phrase Express (for Windows). You might even create a template document in Dropbox or Google Drive to house all your templates for easier access.

While templates will save you time, the beauty is that once you’ve created them, you can easily outsource repeat tasks like email. Simply instruct your Virtual Assistant how to use your templates, and you’ll be free to do more important things.

Checklists Prevent Mistakes

It might seem counter-intuitive, but when you perform the same tasks over again, it’s easy to miss a critical step. You might think you paid your associates this month—you might even remember doing it—only to look back and see it was never completed.

But when you implement checklists, it’s suddenly much more difficult to miss an important task.

You can easily create checklists for all your common tasks and projects using nothing more than a text document. If you’re managing a team, checklists in your project management system allow you to see exactly what tasks are complete, and which are still outstanding.

Templates and checklists turn smart business owners into productivity superstars, and it’s easy to get started. The next time you answer an email you’ve answered before, save your response. The next time you set up a new product in your shopping cart or create a new opt-in page, take the time to record the steps. These documents will make future projects easier and faster to complete, and best of all, you can hand them off to your VA to do instead.  Check out my list of services to see the sort of things I can do for you.

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