3 Steps for Simplifying Small Business Management

Luckily, if you find yourself in this position, you’re not stuck that way. With a few simple steps, it’s possible to disentangle even the most unruly small business management systems. Here’s where you should start:

1. Shorten (or eliminate!) internal meetings.
2. Track your time during the day.
3. Invest in the right tools.

Of course, simplifying your small business management doesn’t happen overnight. In order to accurately determine the exact changes you need to make, you’ll need to make a plan and consider the current and upcoming capacity of your budget and team. With this in mind, you can then focus on taking action to help your business work more efficiently, save money, and build capacity.

With this in mind, let’s begin with a change that nearly every business can make to easily streamline management.

1 Shorten (or eliminate!) internal meetings.

In a Knowledge@Wharton survey of small and midsize business owners, 72% of respondents identified “business process complexity or decision-making complexity” as inhibiting their business’s ability to meet its goals. Cue our primary culprit: the internal meeting.

While great for getting input from various stakeholders, long, unplanned, crowded, and simply unnecessary internal business meetings slow down and complicate what could otherwise be simple decisions. Consider the following for every meeting:

• Evaluate if the meeting is truly essential. If a meeting can be condensed to a quick email interaction, do it. Additionally, decide who is essential for each meeting. Too many decision-makers at the table will complicate even the easiest decisions. Do you really need that hour-long full staff meeting on the new microwave policy or could you simply send out an email update? Decide what (and who) is necessary for synchronous conversation. Cut out the rest.
• Make 15-minute meetings standard. If you determine a meeting is essential, cut down on the amount of time you spend on it. It’s rare for any meeting to need thirty minutes to address an issue, let alone a full hour. But if you schedule a meeting for an hour, you’ll inevitably find a way to fill that time. Instead, change your settings on Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar (usually they’re set to 30 or 60 minutes) to make shorter gatherings (aim for 15 minutes) your company standard.
• Set a clear agenda. With a clear agenda, you’ll move through your meetings faster, because you have something to keep you on track. What are the specific topics the meeting will address? What are the goals of the meeting? What do you plan to accomplish? Dedicate a specific person to lead the meeting, set the agenda, and keep everyone on task. This person should make this agenda available to all participants beforehand. This gives everyone a chance to individually prepare questions and opinions proactively for a more productive meeting.

Internal meetings can quickly eat up your entire day—when that time would be better used to implement meaningful projects. Unsure how much time you’re actually spending on meetings? One way to get a complete, accurate picture is by tracking your day.

2 Track your time during the day.

Let’s be clear: Tracking how you spend your day isn’t (and should never be) about micromanaging or distrusting your employees. Rather, time tracking allows both individuals and organizations to better understand where and how they’re using their time.

Individuals. Time tracking is valuable to owners and entry-level staff alike. Individual contributors will quickly notice the burdensome activities that slow down or block their work. More importantly, managers and owners can then help staff prioritize their work beyond tasks that seem urgent only in the moment. After you track your time, score and analyze tasks based on relevant metrics such as execution and enjoyment.

Organizations. At the same time, time tracking across individual staff members can also be important at an organizational level. For nonprofit organizations, time tracking is crucial for allocating, acquiring, and reporting while on a tight budget. For for-profit businesses, time tracking is a necessary step to accurately assess growth and hiring needs across the business. Ultimately, with time-tracking data at your fingertips, you can study trends across your business, and identify areas that create slowdowns in processes.

Once you have an idea of where slowdowns occur, you can hammer out the specific ways to remove any blockers and simplify your business management. For example, a local boutique chain might find that by streamlining their stores’ POS system, they’d save time in the inventory and checkout process that could be reallocated to new projects. In general, focus on what to cut (like those pesky meetings!) and where you can streamline processes with integrated tools.

3 Gaining a Productivity Baseline

In the same Knowledge@Wharton survey, 58% of small businesses pointed to technology as the main driver of complexity in their business management. But that doesn’t mean you should keep your business in the Stone Age. Instead, you’ll want to choose the right technology and automation for your business’ needs. Consider tools to manage the following:

• Time. As we mentioned above, tracking time is crucial to simplify and streamline your small business management. Luckily, you no longer have to track time with pen and paper. Instead, use customizable time tracking software that can seamlessly integrate into your existing systems. As you decide on the time tracking software that’s best for your business, consider how you want employees to log their time, the industry you operate in, and the reports you plan to run.

• Payments. The right point of sale (POS) system can make a huge difference to your business. Ideally, pick a POS system that’s designed for your sector. For example, Rain has a POS system made specifically for quilt and fabric stores that includes “purchase order integration, image-filled product catalogs, and comprehensive inventory management (kits, fractional yardage, and pre-cuts).” In general, the POS system that you choose should be able to accept a variety of payments, keep inventory across sales channels in real time, track both in-person and online rewards points, and generate strategic, insightful sales reports. 

• HR. From recruiting to training to calculating payroll and employee benefits, human resources keep a business running. But for small businesses without a dedicated human resources (HR) department,HR can be a huge challenge. Either the owner is saddled with these tasks, taking up the majority of their day—or they simply don’t get done! Because employees don’t want to wait for their paycheck, this can have a serious impact on a business’ employee retention. Turnover drains your organization of both talent and money. According to RealHR Solutions’ guide to employee retention, a single departing employee costs an organization an average of $18,591. Break this cycle with a human resource consulting agency or HRMS software solution to streamline your HR management operations. 

Now that remote work is becoming more and more common, the digital tools you choose for your business are all the more important for connecting staff in different places. As a best practice, use tools with cloud storage to support reliable and secure access to important documents and information from anywhere around the world.

Even as you implement these changes, the work doesn’t stop. In fact, these steps are just the start. As you simplify your business management, continue to evaluate your processes and tools, making changes and cuts as needed. Good luck!