Small Business Organization in 6 Simple Tips

Organizing your small business right from the start is imperative to your success. Every business owner should have a clear understanding of their own operations, systems, products, services and finances. Even though things to change, it is important to have a daily and weekly map to follow to ensure your business stays on track. Almost 20% of businesses fail with in the first 18 months because they were not built on a strong foundation.

To keep your business from becoming a statistic, here are 6 tips to follow to get your organization into check:

Organize your workspace

If you don’t have a clear place to work, how can you expect to get anything done? Remember back when you had a paper to write for school and you found every excuse in the book to avoid beginning work on it? I know I often resorted to cleaning, and I typically found that once my desk was clean, I was more inclined to get down to business. This is one of those times when beginning your workday with a clean desk or office will benefit your productivity immensely.

Use a planner

Whether you’re into keeping your schedule of meetings and deadlines on your phone, outlook or on paper, make sure you keep track of all important due dates so that nothing passes you by. I’m a huge fan of going old school style and writing everything down in a master calendar so that I can flip through and see what I have coming down the pipeline up to several months in advance. It also makes it easy for my teammates to take a peek at their own upcoming due dates for posts on the blog, e-books or guest post exchanges.

Make to-do lists

Now I understand that not everyone is a list maker, so this might be kind of tedious in the beginning, but trust me when I say that your day’s productivity will increase and small tasks will not slip through the cracks if you document in the morning what you need to do that day. No job is too small to write down if it is important and needs to be done, so if you feel the need to write out a list of emails that you need to respond to, by all means, have at it!

Find your golden hour

I start my workday as early as possible so that I can settle into my own groove without the interruptions of others. It is within this first 60-90 minutes of my day that I get a hefty amount of my small, but many, tasks done and it sets the tone for the rest of my day. Some people are more productive at different points of the morning or afternoon, like, say, after lunch, so there is no one set part of the workday when productivity is guaranteed.

Have an auxiliary plan

Remember when I told you that I am a planner? Well, inevitably things will come up and a plan will change, so one must plan for the unknown- the X factors, if you will. A deadline might get moved up or a particularly important client needs a bit of extra attention. Perhaps a co-worker calls in sick and you must cover his or her job for the day.

Look ahead but be flexible

A long term plan for future projects will be incredibly helpful as deadlines shift and ideas evolve, so by looking forward into the next quarter, you can at least have a rough idea of where your small business is headed. Present plans and outcomes can have a strong impact on future plans- usually they offer lessons for the future- so, if anything, you can refine and improve your future plan.