Time is the most precious resource in the world. Nobody knows that fact better than the entrepreneur or business owner.
Being able to do more important tasks in less time is the equivalent of alchemy in the business world. And, it seems as if nobody has been able to come up with the perfect time-saving formula yet.
Considering how lack of time is such a profound issue, how has there not been a viable solution to solve it yet?
The truth is, most time-saving tips you'll read about these days barely scratch the surface of the root cause of lack of time.
What is the root cause of not having enough time these days? It's an overcomplicated business strategy.
The strategy is the foundation of the business. When it is a mess, it manifests in countless other messes that eat up valuable time every day.
You can automate tasks as much as you want, but it doesn't make sense to try and automate tasks if they are serving a long-winded strategy.
Therefore, the way that entrepreneurs and business owners can save valuable time is to simplify their business strategy.
Once they attack that root cause of the issue, the odds that they save a lot of time in the end increase significantly.
Simplify the strategy = save time.
If you're failing to get your daily tasks done due to lack of time, get back to the business strategy drawing board!
Not sure where to start?
Start simplifying your business strategy today by breaking it down into these 8 big picture ideas.
If you begin at a big picture level, you will help relay the foundations to free up time in your daily life!
Start here to simplify your strategy and watch your time free up like never before!
Why You Should Start With the Big Picture to Save Time
Most conventional business advice says that the key to saving time is to streamline basic processes.
While that advice holds some truth, it certainly isn’t the entire truth.
You can streamline to the heavens, but it's pointless and won’t do any good if you’re automating tasks based on a messy business strategy.
For example, it’s pointless to try and automate your marketing tasks if you haven't refined your ideal target market or nailed down and simplified your messaging in your grand business strategy plan.
Therefore, going back and having a look at those big picture ideas is the best place to start if you want to save time!
If you start at a big picture level, the benefits will go beyond just saving time (a.k.a. you will see an improvement in your sales success and bottom line!).
The benefits of saving time at work and in business in general are endless.
Don’t even think about automation until you get the strategy nailed down!
Start with the big picture, and then make your way down to the day-to-days of doing business!
How To Simplify Your Business Strategy to Save Time
Why is saving time important?
Time enables you to achieve all of your business goals.
Therefore, the more time you have saved up, the more effectively you can invest in your most lofty business goals.
Wasting precious time at work stops today!
Start here with these 8 big picture ideas to simplify your business strategy and save your most valuable resource on earth: time.
1. What is Your Vision Statement?
When you first took the dive into entrepreneurship, you most likely had to take a leap of faith.
However, taking that leap was probably ensured by a grander purpose for doing it. By purpose, we mean a vision you had of yourself solving some problem in the world.
Moreover, you had a belief in something bigger than yourself, and took the risk of taking a leap of faith because you believed that your vision would catch you at the bottom (or at least thought it was possible!).
Whatever that vision is and no matter how much time has passed since it first came into existence, it should always be the foundation of who you are and what your business stands for.
Your vision should always remain the bedrock of your business strategy!
Unfortunately, most business owners at one point or another lose sight of that vision. The day-to-day lifestyle of entrepreneurship makes it challenging to stay focused on it!
Therefore, the first step in simplifying your business plan is to revisit your vision statement and make any necessary changes to it.
Has your vision changed in recent times? No problem!
Updating your vision statement will reignite that internal fire to your business. It will help put you on the right path to simplifying the rest of your business strategy.
A business strategy is the foundation of a business. A vision statement is the foundation of a business strategy.
Updating your vision statement is like unlocking the door to saving time in business!
2. Who is Your Market?
Times change at an unbelievably fast pace these days.
One minute your marketing strategy is generating more new customers than you thought possible, and the next minute you’re scrambling to figure out where they all went.
When simplifying the marketing aspect of your business strategy, start by refining who exactly is your ideal customer. Be as specific as possible!
If you find yourself using the terms “anyone who” or “any business that”, then you aren’t getting specific enough!
For example, if your company sells SEO services and you have identified your target market as “any business that has a website”, then you need to do some serious refining!
When drawing out your target market, ask yourself these questions:
- Who needs the solution that my business has to offer more than anyone else?
- What are the demographics and psychographics of the people who need my solution the most?
- Has my target market changed since I first started out?
Your answers to these questions will help you draw a literal picture of who your perfect customer is, whether they are a business or individual client customer.
When you know who needs your solution the most, understanding how to reach them and what they want to hear becomes much easier.
Not only that, but knowing your target market makes the more tangible aspects of your business strategy, such as your processes and deliverable, are far easier to tune-up and simplify!
Side note: If you’re the owner of a B2B business, know that your target market should be exceedingly refined if you want to make as many sales as possible!
3. How Do You Reach Your Target Market?
Once you have a grasp on your vision and who needs it the most, you can update the other marketing tactics in your strategy to reflect that. Specifically, you can update your tactics on how you reach out to your target audience.
When updating the how in your marketing strategy, consider the following:
- Where your target audience gets their information from
- What outbound tactics will most effectively grab the audience’s attention
- What inbound tactics will organically draw the audience in
Simplify and organize your how tactics as much as you can.
If you feel like knowing how to reach your audience is challenging, then you probably need to go back and refine who your audience is a little more.
The how element of your marketing strategy is the first step in having a killer sales process. And, having a killer sales process is often the difference between seeing results or hitting a wall in business.
4. What Is Your Marketing Message (& Competitive Advantage)?
Just as you narrowed down the who and how in your marketing strategy, you also need to narrow down the what!
Specifically, you need to simplify what message that your marketing will send out.
Warning: The what aspect in marketing is where many business owners make a tragic error! Specifically, they make the error of creating an overcomplicated message.
How do you know whether or not your message is simplified and refined enough? Ask yourself if it does these two things:
- It states the single most important solution that your business provides
- It demonstrates your competitive advantage
The thing is, your business is worthy of the most grand marketing message ever. However, prospects cannot digest a huge and elaborate message!
That is the thing about the human brain: it doesn’t have the ability to digest a lot of information in a little time. In sales psychology, we call this the monkey mind!
Moreover, the mistake that business owners make is creating a marketing message that is too complicated and elaborate for the human brain to digest.
For example, they try to convey that they are more than just an SEO service provider, but they also do some content creation and a sprinkle of marketing consulting. While they think it makes them sound better to provide several services, it actually weakens their message!
What would be better instead is for them to state the one thing that they are best known for (in this case SEO) and leave it at that!
Therefore, when simplifying down the what piece of the marketing strategy, make sure that it is concise enough for your prospects to digest quickly and easily!
They should be able to read one sentence and know exactly what it is that you do.
Additionally, your message should demonstrate your company’s distinct competitive advantage.
More likely than not, there is another business out there doing what it is that you do.
Why should they pick your business? What makes you and your team better to service their needs?
When it comes to your messaging, always think simple and straightforward!
If you can’t tell me in a single sentence what it is that your company does and what makes it unique, odds are that your message isn’t simple enough.
5. What is Your Sales Process?
It’s one thing to have sales skills, but it's a whole other thing to be able to put those skills to practice in a formulated process!
While all the other pieces of the simplified business strategy are important, being able to put a sales process together is perhaps the most important part (in addition to refining the vision statement!).
What makes having a sales process so important?
Think of it this way: Having sales skills is like saying you know how to be a good salesperson because you read a book about sales On the other hand, having sales processes is like showing you know how to be a salesperson by demonstrating that you know how to react in whatever situation during the sales process.
Processes = being empowered to put knowledge into action.
Skills alone = knowledge not put to use.
Moreover, when you have a sales process, you and your team don’t just know what to do, but how and when to do it!
You all know what to do on the fly in any given situation because you have a process laid out for handling it!
Having solid sales process that empower you and your sales team is what will save you time AND take your business to new heights.
DO NOT make the mistake of not investing in creating proper sales processes.
6. How Will You Manage Your Team?
You can be the best, most competent CEO on the planet. But, if your team isn’t pulling their weight, it makes it extremely difficult to achieve goals.
Go back to the drawing board and simplify how you will manage your team. Consider the following questions:
- Will you insource or outsource most of your work?
- How will you organize project management and business operations within your teams?
- How will you keep your team motivated and up-to-speed on your processes?
First off, consider whether or not you want to hire a team of your own or outsource.
Both options come with there own pros and cons.
For example, when you hire your own team, it’s usually easier to monitor workflow and quality control. On the other hand, it is often more costly and time consuming.
Outsourcing team members usually provides a new level of expertise to the company, and saves a considerable amount of time and money. However, hiring freelancers and contractors requires a certain trust, because they often work with little oversight.
Second, what management systems are you going to use to fill your team member’s days with things to do?
How are your going to make sure that your team members have a full to-do list everyday?
Lastly, how are you going to keep your team members in on your company and its vision?
It’s easier said than done, but keeping your team in line requires that you:
- Have solid leadership skills (particularly during challenging times)
- Keep your team up to speed with best practices (i.e. creating sales processes)
- Get everyone invested in the company’s vision and mission
When it comes to simplifying your strategy, keep in mind that it involves more than just making sure that you are on top of things!
7. Do You Have Growth Tactics in Your Strategy?
Saving time by simplifying your business strategy is how you empower yourself as a business leader to drive business growth.
More time = more opportunity to scale higher.
Once that growth inevitably starts to kick in, will you be prepared to manage it?
You’re not finished simplifying your business strategy just yet!
If you want to take your business to the next level, you need to implement the kind of practices today that reflect where you want to be in the future!
For example, if you want to to see your social media presence skyrocket in the future, hire the right person today who will help you build the kind of profile that will get you there.
The way to prepare for growth is to take control of it and create it yourself!
With that said, don’t forget to put in your business strategy tactics that you will do today to get the results that you want for tomorrow.
It’s like they say: “If you want to get the best, show up like you are the best!”
How much longer will you wait until you demand the best for your business?
8. How Will You Automate Business Processes?
Now we can move on to the mainstream way to save time: streamlining via automation.
If you’ve properly simplified your business plan up to this point, then creating an additional strategy to streamline from here on out will be easy!
Only move on to trying to automate tasks once you have the majority of your business strategy simplified! The strategy plan will give you a much clearer picture of what exactly needs to be automated.
Remember, it’s pointless to try and automate tasks based on an overcomplicated business strategy. It will do the opposite of save you time!
Here is what you should do, step-by-step, to automate your processes:
- Create small goals or tasks based on your simplified business strategy
- Find the right templates, systems, and people to help you automate your tasks
- Monitor and measure your progress
First off, break your simplified strategy down into small goals.
For example, if part of your strategy is to implement a new sales process, then set goals/regular tasks such as:
- Scheduling meetings for a new sales training program
- Posting on social media feed on a daily basis
- Sending emails out to your target prospects every other day
Next, find the right tools to help you automate your tasks. Think things like project management software, accounting software, and online filing systems. Or consider hiring an assistant to help manage your workday.
One popular way to save time with technology systems is to invest in a digital marketing software to automate regular posting on your social media channels.
The idea is to find tools and people that will carry out the implementation of those goals for you. Time management is of the essence!
Lastly, what isn’t measured isn’t managed! If you aren’t regularly checking in to see whether or not your newly created automated systems are truly helping you save time, then you’ll never know if all of your hard work to streamline is actually paying off.
With that being said, regularly schedule meetings with your team to check in on whether or not processes are running smoothly. Also, use solid tools to measure saved time!
The idea is to free up as much time for you so that you can spend more time investing in business growth and improvement!
Final Thoughts on Saving Time in Business by Simplifying Your Strategy
There is nothing more valuable in this world than your time.
The more of it you have, the more opportunities you have to achieve your business goals!
Therefore, simplify your business strategy based on these 8 big picture ideas. Once you have your strategy in check, you can automate your business processes to save time (and money).
Of all the things in this world to stand in the way of your business success, don’t let wasted time be one of them!
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