When you’ve dreamed for what seems like forever of taking the leap and setting up your own business, it feels incredible when your dreams finally turn into a reality. For many business owners, the first couple of years of running a business is a very steep learning curve. The early days of launching and managing a business are often full of tremendous highs and some pretty stressful lows, at first the buzz of being your own boss and the excitement of getting your business off the ground provides all the adrenaline that you need to keep plodding away at your dream. You may find yourself working majorly long hours, which you were probably expecting, and earning less than you were when you were employed, which is also something that you probably expected to happen at the start.
However, one thing you probably weren’t expecting is just how little time you would spend doing the actual job that you love, and how much of your time would be spent taking care of the day to day running of the business. Answering phone calls, updating your website, keeping on top of your accounts, chasing invoices, fixing computer problems… the list goes on… and on!
If you’re feeling sad and frustrated that so much of your time is spent on the more mundane side of your business, and there’s not enough of your time left over to spend doing the thing that you love, it may be time to start looking for solutions to get you back to doing what you love. Finding other solutions for handling these more mundane tasks can be a huge relief and the key to falling back in love with your business and reconnecting with the reason you set up the company in the first place. In situations like this calling in some expert help can offer a huge relief. Leaving jobs such as IT and accounts to the professionals means that you can get back more time to spend doing what you’re great at, and growing your business too. Here are some of the professional services available that can help you with these day to day tasks:
IT.
Whether you love computers or loathe them, the chances are that your IT is going to play a significant part in your business in one way or another. IT systems are something that many small business owners don’t spend too much time thinking about until they go wrong. When your computer systems fail, you may find that your whole business comes to a grinding halt. Unless you’ve been backing up your system, you may be dealing with a whole host of problems such as lost work, missing client details and much more besides.
Calling in an it consulting firm to check over your systems and offer ways of updating and improving them could help to prevent you from significant IT disruption in the future, saving you both time and protecting your reputation with your customers.
Accounts.
It’s no secret that many small business owners find doing their accounts boring, and don’t keep as up-to-date with them as they probably should, but in the long run, this causes big problems and can make it hard to catch up and get all of your paperwork up-to-date. Not being entirely on top of your accounts is bad news for your cash flow too, as you may not notice if customers haven’t paid you, or are paying you late. If you don’t have a head for numbers, or simply don’t have enough time in your schedule to fit in doing your accounts it may be a good idea to call in a qualified professional to assist you, freeing you up to get on with other aspects of your business.
Social Media and Marketing.
Having a presence on social media is an essential part of the marketing strategy for small business nowadays. Social media is the perfect way to shout about the great things that your company does and to introduce your products to your target audience. Social media is also the ideal way to engage with your customers and allows them the opportunity to interact with your business via your social media platforms. While social media is a handy tool for all businesses, it is also extremely time-consuming.
To be successful at marketing your business via social media, then consistency and regular posting are needed. If social media is just too much of a drain on your time, or you’re not confident that you have the relevant knowledge to manage your social media platforms efficiently, then there are plenty of experts out there that can help you to get the most from your social media posts. A professional should be able to provide you with measurable results so that you can see which posts are popular with your customers. Getting an outside agency, or social media freelancer to help you should mean that they will create a specially tailored content calendar planning in your posts so that you know what is going to be posted and when it will happen. A social media professional should also be able to monitor your social media accounts for messages from customers so that you can achieve a good response rate and answer your customer’s questions promptly.
Admin Tasks.
If you find that you are always being interrupted by the ringing of the phone, or that your inbox has spiraled out of control, getting some extra admin help should be able to help you tackle these issues. The extra help doesn’t need to be a full-time employee; you could look into getting from a virtual assistant. Selecting a virtual assistant with professional admin skills means that they can take on a variety of tasks for you, from managing your inbox, calling back customers, ordering supplies, making travel arrangements and lots more all from afar.
Having someone take on these tasks may help enable you to focus on doing the job that you love without too many distractions.
