SME

Why business planning needs to be flexible

How business ideas can change!  I would probably have laughed if someone had told me even 12 months ago that I would have a free eBook and an eWorkbook with instructions on how to create a  filing structure for electronic documents and paper files.

ebook coverTwelve months ago I was working with small business clients at their workplace on a day-to-day basis, working with them to get some structure and organisation into their daily office work.  I’ve helped IT companies, health services, a B&B, garden designers, builders and a travel company among others.

Working with small businesses was also a big change for me after the many years I’ve spent working with corporates and government agencies to ensure the people in those organisations  were able store and find the information they needed for their work quickly and easily.

What I’ve enjoyed about working with small businesses is being able to work directly with all the people who need the information structure, not just representatives of larger workgroups who have to take the message back to their colleagues – who may or may not be terribly interested.

So while there’s nothing like the personal touch, I also realise that I can only touch people in a small geographical area.

And that’s how the eWorkbook was born.  Here was a way for me to work with small businesses, no matter where their business was located, so more business owners could benefit from my experience and expertise.

I’ve been delighted with the response I’ve had so far.  People are telling me that is written in plain language, is well laid out and it’s so easy to follow.eworkbook cover

When you buy my eWorkbook you get one hour of free assistance to get you started. So wherever you are in the world, you can still have some personal advice – maybe by phone or Skype for those I can’t visit.  I think that’s really important – it’s the personal touch and I do love working directly with people.

How business ideas can change!  I would probably have laughed if someone had told me even 12 months ago that I would have a free eBook and an eWorkbook with instructions on how to create a new filing structure for electronic documents and paper files.

Twelve months ago I was working with small business clients at their workplace on a day-to-day basis, working with them to get some structure and organisation into their daily office work.  I’ve helped IT companies, health services, a B&B, garden designers, builders and a travel company among others.

Working with small businesses was also a big change for me after the many years I’ve spent working with corporates and government agencies to ensure the people in those organisations  were able store and find the information they needed for their work quickly and easily.

What I’ve enjoyed about working with small businesses is being able to work directly with all the people who need the information structure, not just representatives of larger workgroups who have to take the message back to their colleagues – who may or may not be terribly interested.

So while there’s nothing like the personal touch, I also realise that I can only touch people in a small geographical area.

And that’s how the eWorkbook was born.  Here was a way for me to work with small businesses, no matter where their business was located, so more business owners could benefit from my experience and expertise.

I’ve been delighted with the response I’ve had so far.  People are telling me that is written in plain language, is well laid out and it’s so easy to follow.

When you buy my eWorkbook you get one hour of free assistance to get you started. So wherever you are in the world, you can still have some personal advice – maybe by phone or Skype for those I can’t visit.  I think that’s really important – it’s the personal touch and I do love working directly with people.

Download the free eBook to get a taste of what I can do to help you.

Filing is everybody’s business

Recently I’ve been working with a small group of people who manage the records for a medium sized business.  As soon as I arrived they made a point of telling me that in their newish building, they were located in an area with no view while their IT colleagues were on the other side of the building with views to open spaces and water.  This is somewhat typical of attitudes towards Records and IT teams and happens in a lot of organisations.

Locating the records team in this way relegates the idea of records and filing to the days of fling clerks in basements when no-one but he filing clerks knew what information was in what file.

Today it is widely recognized that records are everyone’s business and everyone needs to take responsibility for filing the information they create.

However it is still seen as tedious and nobody really wants to ‘do filing’. They’d much rather someone else did it for them.

Not so easy in the electronic age when individuals can create many documents or spreadsheets or presentations on a daily basis.  Everyone needs to know where and how to file their e-docs.

This is where a structure for filing documents is so important.  When you go to save a document or spreadsheet or a photo even, you need to find a place for it so you can find it again.  It’s also useful to file your document with other items on the same or similar topic.

A ‘Google’ type search on your documents will work if two conditions are present:

  1. you have allocated keywords from a standard list to each document so when you search using a particular keyword, you will find all the documents on that topic
  2. there are not too many items to be searched.

This approach is fine in a newish business when there are not many documents but falls over as more and more items are added to My Documents or a shared drive when it takes longer to search through them all or the search engine stops working because of the load.

Even in larger businesses where there might a person or group of people with responsibility for records and filing, their role is more to establish a process and system for you and everyone else to use to file items. They don’t ‘do filing’ except for the items they create themselves.

The other benefit of doing your own filing – electronic or paper – is that you will remember what categories you have used and you will know where to look for items when, at some later date, you go looking for a document that you know is there somewhere, or that you need in a hurry, or if you want to re-use some information you’ve already created.

Re-using existing document is a marvelous productivity booster – but that’s a story for another day.

Make your business more efficient

We have helped many small businesses, so we know we can provide you with expert advice on filing systems and processes for keeping business records.

Now you too can benefit from our experience because we can offer you the opportunity to download our new e-book “Keeping Good Records for Small Businesses” that gives you clear step-by-step instructions on how to create a filing system to organize your business information in a package that includes:

  • Instructions on how to set up a filing system (an excerpt  from the e-book is attached)
  • A template to use to create a filing policy and a set of filing procedures tailored for your business
  • One hour consulting advice to get you started (by phone, Skype or in person).

You get all that in our package – usually for $297, but even better, you have the advantage of a special price of $147 for a limited time.

If your business has a filing mess you can follow the instructions yourself to sort it out. You can work at your own pace, to design and develop a system that is aligned to your particular business needs knowing that at the end you will have a system that works perfectly for your business.

For more information and how to buy your own reference guide to small business filing systems, go to www.makemybusinessefficient.com

Three options to grow my business

After many years of working with corporate and government organisations to organise their information resources so they are easy for staff to find and use, I’ve more recently turned to working with SMEs to assist them with organising their offices so that they can find the information they need when they need it.

When I started my business 10 years ago, the only advice I got was from my accountant who told me I needed to keep my financial records for seven years.  Nothing about how to keep them, what else I needed to keep (eg staff files) or how long I needed to keep them (apart from the financials!).

Two years ago I did some research and found that the situation for SMEs was much the same as it was 10 years ago.

So I created this business stream and now I specialise in working with individuals and small groups of people so they can get their email inbox under control, organise their electronic documents and sort out those piles of papers lying around the office.

Up till now I’ve been delivering this service personally and with one or two other specialists who I have contracted when I’ve needed them.  This approach is no longer sustainable unless I bring other people into the business.

It seems to me I have three options to grow my business and to give me an exit strategy.

  1. recruit suitable people to help me deliver a personal service
  2. develop training material for online delivery
  3. a combination of 1 and 2  by having training material for online delivery with personal service as backup support

I’m interested in your views on the options I’ve set out – are these viable? What other options could I consider? Please do let me know your thoughts.

The need for structure in your business

I’ve been on holiday in the South island of New Zealand for the past 2 weeks.  That’s why this blog has been silent for a while.

I took two cousins from England for a tour of the West Coast, southern lakes and Fiordland.  We spent a lot of time in rain forest and it rekindled my memories of other holidays in the area and of school geography about the structure of the native forests.

We saw the tall rimu, totara, kahikatea, matai and miro in the forest canopy, the ferns and mosses on the ground and the lower growing bushy trees in the middle.  It was all very lush and green. 

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What does gardening have in common with filing?

rengarenga lilies

Last weekend I was in the garden cleaning up around the rengarenga lilies that had been home to snails for some time. (If you don’t know these plants, they form low bushes of long fleshy leaves and a myriad of white flowers in spring and summer).

As I pulled off shredded leaves that the snails had feasted on, and scraped up the dead leaves that I’d left there to compost (but in fact had become snail birthing units and nurseries), I pondered on the wisdom of my strategy that effectively left the garden to its own devices.

Then my thoughts turned to other chores that are often left to their own devices and the mess that ensues. Take filing for example.

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Keeping your electronic files safe

Recently I’ve been working with some small business owners who don’t have any back-up system for their electronic business transactions.  I’m not talking about their financial transactions or stock inventories as they are usually captured in some formal system that is backed up off site or written manually by hand.

It’s things like the contact lists of their clients and suppliers, their business planning documents, correspondence with prospective clients etc.

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Male secretaries – whatever next?

Organising what’s in your office, on your computer and working out what to do with all that email isn’t the most exciting part of your business.  You’d much rather be working with your clients, earning money, networking with the aim of getting new clients and – well actually anything but filing papers or electronic files in a way you can find them again.

And as for those 2500 emails, well forget it; I’ll find the one I want if I ever need to.

There’s nothing new about filing.  It’s been a necessary evil for centuries. Did you know that secretaries existed in Rome before the Roman Empire? But men, not women.

Women didn’t get into office work until the industrial revolution on the 19th century.

Filing cabinets were developed in the US in the mid 19th century and this form of storage for office paperwork revolutionised businesses.

By the 1930s women began to dominate the role of secretary.  The role of Filing Clerk evolved through to the 90s when these roles were removed from organisations in the name of efficiency. Support staff such as filing clerks were seen as an overhead that contributed little to generating revenue.  The outcome of that was the filing devolved to front line people who didn’t know what to do and didn’t want to learn.

Now that has changed again since computers became widely used across all types of businesses.  Administrative support staff have a range of duties.  Fling papers, electronic files and email has become an important part of good business practices.

For small businesses however it’s often not possible to employ someone to do the office administration, especially when you’re in start-up mode.

It’s even more important then to have a good system set up as part of your start-up activities.  Then you get into good habits from the beginning and as your business grows. We can help you for less than $500. Even your bank manager won’t blink at that as s/he will be well aware of the long-term benefits to your business of making that small investment of time and money up-front.

Simply filing

Last week I wrote about the amount of time wasted in businesses because people can’t find bits of information quickly and easily.

Following on from that, there are two important aspects to consider when it comes to organising your information.

First you need to store it somewhere – and you need to be able to find it again

It’s the finding it again that creates the most problems for people – at home or at work, in small businesses or big corporates.

You need a filing system that is simple, covers all aspects of your business and most importantly – it has to be intuitive to work for you and your team so that it becomes second nature. If it’s not you won’t use it.  Then you’ll be back wasting time hunting around for information you know you have but can’t find.

I want you to stop wasting that time and putting it to productive use in your business.  Problem is that you are concerned that if you put time into getting a filing system, you won’t do real work that brings in business revenue.

I can already hear you already saying Oh – I haven’t got time for that.  But hang on – how many hours did you say you were spending each week looking for information?

And how long will it take to set this up – I’d say 10 hours all up.

So think back to the figures I gave you last week about how the minutes spent looking for information grow into hours and the $ cost of those hours.

Now here’s the nitty gritty for this week about creating your filing system. There are two main ways – one is a formal system with a hierarchical structure. The other uses keywords that are meaningful for you and your team.

You may already have a keyword-based system – with folders for paper and for electronic files labelled with a word or short phrase that describes the content of those folders. These may be organised in alphabetical order or be grouped with folders containing similar information.

So you already have the beginning of your filing system.

As your business becomes bigger and more complex, you may end up with a myriad of folders that you have to wade through whenever you need to find a piece of information.

At this point you may need a more formal structure that has a series of sub-folders.  The trick is to have top-level folders with meaningful labels that can cover all the activities in your business.  Then you need to make sure everyone in your team uses the system every time they want to store some information.  Whether it is sales receipt or customer contact details – each of these must be stored in the same place as other similar bits of information.  Otherwise the system won’t work.

It entirely up to you to decide what will work for you and your business.  Once you’ve decided on what labels to use and how to organise your folders, then you can decide what sort of folders you want to use for your paper files, how to match the paper filing system with your electronic files and if you want to include email into the mix as well.

It’s all possible. It does need some time and effort up front though.  But I can guarantee you that if you set it up well in the first place, you’ll reap rewards through increased productivity within a very short space of time.  You might even reduce the risk of IRD penalties through late filing of tax returns.  Now there’s an incentive to sort out your filing systems and habits.

You might want to give me a call or email me to get some help to get started. I’ll be delighted to get your call or email.

What causes lost productivity in your business?

What activities come to your mind when you are looking to improve productivity with your team? Sickness? Long coffee breaks? Smoking breaks? Absenteeism on the day of major sports events?

But what about the time you spend looking for all your sales receipts at GST time? Or the time you spend rewriting a letter or report because you can’t find where you or someone else saved it on your computer system?

Has it ever occurred to you that this is another real cause of lost productivity?

This productivity loser is hidden or invisible because people look as if they are working as usual; they’re not missing from their desk or other place of work.  And they are working as usual.

But – working as usual includes spending time looking for information they need to work effectively but can’t find readily. And because this is the way it’s always been, everyone tends to accept it as the normal way to work.

Research has shown that people can spend up to 30 minutes a day looking for information that can’t be found easily.

Wow – just think about what that does to productivity in your business – time that could be spent on more valuable work that would add to your bottom line not subtract from it.

But that doesn’t happen in your business, you say?

Let’s look at it a different way

Analysis of the research findings indicates that the average person spends 10 minutes searching for a single piece of information. This might be sales receipts, supplier contact details (where’s that business card?), a monthly sales report.

On average this will happen 3 times a day.

10 minutes x 3 times a day = 30 minutes of unproductive time per person

½ hour x 5 days = 2½ hours per week

2½ hours per week x 48 working weeks = 120 hours (15 days) per year – per person

Now let’s put some dollars into the mix

For someone on $30,000 a year, this works out to more than $1,200 wasted each year.

For someone on $70,000 that’s almost $6,000 per year.

And add in more people – let’s say 5 staff

Five people each on a salary of $30,000 will cost you more than $6,000 a year by wasting valuable time looking for pieces of information.

That’s 4% of your costs for those people each year! Can you really afford to throw away that much money each year?  What else could they do with that time?

You can download this spreadsheet and plug in your own figures for your business to see how much invisible productivity wastage you have in your business.

Next week I’ll have some hints and tips for how you can reduce this wastage in your business.