Business Spring Cleaning

Welcome to the third post in our series of spring cleaning.  Today I'm going to share with you about spring cleaning for your business.

Now I'm not talking about cleaning off your desks. I'm talking about how to create more margin in your business. I want to make sure that you're spending time on the tasks that are most important to growing and sustaining your business. 

Business spring cleaning helps you focus on what's generating revenue

Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule?  It's also called the Pareto principle. What that principle says is that 20% of your actions generate 80% of your revenue.

Think about all the things that you are currently doing in your business to try to get new clients. To try to get your client’s work done, and all the administrative things.  Administrative work doesn't make you any money.

You have to put systems in place to minimize the amount of administrative work that you're doing. But I think what happens is in times of stress, you kind of lean into inbox zero. You lean into getting all your paperwork done.  Making sure that your desk is organized.

Sometimes you need to do that to be able to move on to the next thing. And you might need that clarity.

What actions are you taking in your business to generate revenue?

This week I want you to think about what are the actions that you are taking in the business that generates revenue for you. This is important, especially when you don't know what to spend your time on, or what you should be doing.

You shouldn't be spending any more than 15% of your time on administrative tasks.

What are administrative tasks? 

• Paperwork
• Paying bills
• Making sure you're QuickBooks is up to date
• Going through your email
• Filing paperwork

By the way, you should not be doing your bookkeeping. Leave that to the professionals. You can hire someone by going to bookkeeperhireform.com.

Think about all those administrative tasks. And don't lump marketing into administrative.

Business spring cleaning will help you improve your marketing

Marketing is something that makes you money. If you do marketing well, you'll get more clients. You'll get more business and make more money.  So 85% of your time should be marketing, client work, or fulfilling sales.

With Bookkeeper Training School, I'm not doing client work, but I'm answering students' questions. I am going live.  And  I'm developing a new curriculum. Those kinds of things all go into serving my client and delivering my product.

So 85% of your time should be spent on marketing and delivering your product or service.  Whatever that looks like for your business. For example, if you're a bookkeeper and you're just starting, you don't have any clients yet.  

First, you need to figure out, how much time you have to work on your business every single week.  You will then take 15% of that time and carve that out for admin time. That's when you'll go through your email, reading articles, or education.

Then the other 85% of your time is spent on marketing and client work.  Remember that marketing and sales are things like:

• writing promotions
• figuring out who's in your chamber of commerce
• who in the chamber of commerce is your ideal client
• connecting with people through your preferred social media channel
• getting yourself known online
• scheduling posts to go live on your Facebook page
• spending time networking in Facebook groups
• doing a little bit of research on what's going on in your field
• researching what's going on in the business world in general

I think a lot of people get frozen when it comes to the marketing piece. Or you just throw 85,000 things out there. And you just keep doing it because you don't know what's working.

Business spring cleaning will help you figure out how people found you

It's really important to try to figure out how people found you. And if you're directing the conversations with them it's a lot easier to do that. So if somebody connects with you through LinkedIn and you found out your last five clients came from connecting with people on LinkedIn and sending them messages, then spend more time on LinkedIn.

If you've got to choose between Facebook and LinkedIn, and if all your customers are coming from LinkedIn, then spend more time on LinkedIn. Whereas, if all of your customers are coming because you're interacting on Facebook, then stay on Facebook and try to figure out where you found this person.  Maybe you got them from networking in a particular Facebook group.  Spend more time there.

It's really important to identify where your clients are coming from.

Keep track what you are doing

If you don't have a good handle on what you're doing in your business, then I recommend that you start tracking. It doesn't have to be perfect. Just write down what you did today.  What you did for the week.

Take a week to track how you're spending your time in your business. There's a free tool called Toggl that you can use. Or you can just write down what you did that day.

Then figure out, what's working, and what's not working. You might find out that you're spending all your time on admin tasks.  And you're not doing any marketing.  Or maybe the marketing that you're doing isn't working for you.  So you need to try something else. Try this for a week and just see what that does for your business.

Figure out how to get those lingering tasks done

The other thing I'd like you to think about this week as you're kind of doing that is what tasks are lingering on your list and how can you get them off.  One thing that I love about this is scheduling a power hour. I have an entire bonus in Bookkeeper Training School about my power hour.

Essentially a power hour is blocking off an hour. You're going to have a list of all those things that just keep getting carried over and over again as you rewrite your to-do list.  During the scheduled power hour, that is when you will do those tasks.

Schedule a power hour once a week.  Or you can schedule it as needed. It will help you keep focusing on what's most important in your business. This power hour will help you get things done. 

I'm excited because in a couple of weeks I have a date scheduled. I write this out in my Full Focus Planner.  This planner is from Michael Hyatt and Company.  It's a quarterly planner. And it helps me focus on what's important in my business. What I need to get done every quarter, every month, and every week. I absolutely love it and would love to have you check that out.

Recap on business spring cleaning 

• Remember that 20% of the things that you do are going to generate 80% of your revenue. So it's critically important to figure out what that 20% is for you and then figure out how we can get rid of the rest.
• Take a week to figure out how many hours you are working in your business and what you are doing during that time.
• Figure out what's working and what's not working.  And if it's not working, stop doing it.
• And then finally, what tasks are lingering on your list? Consider scheduling a power hour to knock those out because I'm telling you when you can get those things off your plate, it just makes life so much better.

I hope that you found something helpful. Please leave me a comment to let me know what you will be tweaking in your business.