Do you have systems in your business? Maybe you haven’t given much thought to what systems can do for you. Here are just three benefits: They can give you more time to be creative. You’ll have time to work on your business rather than just in your business. And, they will let you grow your business.

If you are like most of our readers, you’re a small business owner or solopreneur. At some point you’ll discover you can’t do it all. That’s the time to get started with systems, if you haven’t already.

How do you go about creating systems? I’m actually in the process of creating systems for some of the processes I do. My goal is to hire someone to handle some of our processes so I can devote my time to creating new products. To that end, I am writing down step-by-step how each process is handled. Yes, it is taking me extra time, but I know in the end it will pay off.

Here are just three ideas that you might try for your business:

Handling Fabric. After our last teleclass on organizing, one of our listeners contacted me about how she would start the year with her fabric organized and then the studio would quickly become unmanageable. It was something she repeated on a frequent basis. I suggested she write down her process for storing her fabric, i.e, develop a system for storing her fabric, and then hire a high school girl to come in a couple of times a week to get it back in order. This lets this quilter focus on what we could call her genius or brilliance.

Teaching or Media Requests. Do you scramble looking for all the materials to send when you get a request to teach or promote your business? Create a system to keep all those materials easily accessible. You could create folders on your computer or in your physical file cabinet to include photos, short and long bio, résumé, your brochure, anything that you are ever asked for. By keeping everything in one place, it will be easy to find. That means less stress looking for it or less time having to recreate something you find shortly thereafter.

Online Marketing. Are you sending out e-zines or updating your blog? Do you need to update your Facebook page or Tweet? Do you use a shopping cart and autoresponders? I have a couple of suggestions here. Create a schedule for doing this. For example, on Friday set aside several hours to write your newsletter, a few blog posts, and updates to Facebook and tweets. Many of these can be scheduled ahead of time. An assistant or virtual assistant can also be valuable setting up and maintaining these for you. That allows you time to work on activities that add to the bottom line of your business.

And, a big plus for creating and working the systems is you have lots of energy. And, when you have more energy, you’ll work at a higher level in your brilliance.

What ideas do you have for systems?

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Tags: Business planning, goals, Marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 10:07 am and is filed under Business, Marketing, Technology, The Professional Quilter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.