Small Business Workflow Problem – You Feel Busy, but Growth Stalls
Even when we are going full speed ahead as leaders and feel overwhelmed, our business growth can still stall. Small business workflow problems can cause this exact scenario. We share tips to solve your pain as an owner and create momentum again in your organization.
Imagine this scene: a small business owner has all their company swag and promotional gifts in their car, and they drive door to door to do drop-offs to their clients before everyone is out for the holidays – frazzled and battling the Winter weather with their arms full – trying to finish deliveries as quickly as possible…
This is a mental image you can visualize easily and quickly identify as an entrepreneur hustling, which is a concept synonymous with starting a new venture. That owner is personally out there doing the heavy lifting for their endeavor and making a name for themselves in the world! Look at them go!
But what about this scene: the multi-tasking yoga teacher who fits in the office work for her new studio between sessions – wrapping up emails right before evening classes, then waking up bright and early at 4:30am the next day to teach the day-break sessions her clients love, but none of her coaches want to pick up. She pretends to be as fresh and rested as her students, but she’s really running on fumes trying to handle both gaps in her staff and the admin work needed for her operation, all while living through sleep deprivation and subsequent delirium…
The second scenario is all-too-common, but it isn’t the one most patrons of businesses see, or notice with their services. They are used to seeing the first hustle out in the wild, not the behind the scenes burn of the owner holding it all together. That’s the hidden art of being an entrepreneur and the small business workflow a new owner has to solve: how to get it all done smoothly.
The truth is, there are many owners running on empty who need to find ways to maintain their base, keep costs reasonable, but still grow. They are making it look easy for YOU, their client, or customer, to make sure you feel fully taken care of.
This example is not to conjure pity for this yoga-studio owner. But instead, to describe a very real scenario entrepreneurs face at some point of scaling where they are wearing many hats. Even in businesses where the owner is not filling gaps as a provider of their service, they could be working six days a week just to make sure their operations have coverage – and yet, they are still burning the candle at both ends without proper recharge time and 60+ hour weeks.
This pressure to stay ahead of the curve – especially for owners of service businesses and recurring revenue model companies who have to serve ongoing clients and new – can make or break you as an entrepreneur. Finding a way to avoid the burn out, creatively reducing admin time, and organizing your most productive time for the most important initiatives become huge priorities.
Small business workflow challenges – how they hinder progress
What does time organization and avoiding overload relate back to as an owner? Small business workflow and mastering it for the sake of your business. This balance between fitting everything in, but not burning out, is the holy grail.
Without a set plan of action to accomplish your day, week, or next 90 day plan, the likelihood you’ll be off scrambling at some point to tie up loose ends is high. Chances are, you’ll accomplish a lot less than your potential.
Even worse, this frantic way of managing your business can become a way of life for far too long, because of the way an impossible working routine – and navigating it – steals all your attention from other aspects of your operation. It can be consuming and draw you in, even when you tried to avoid it.
Not all workflow issues are from a lack of immediately-needed systems, though. Companies experience sudden success and “big breaks” too, which require fast short-and-long-term infrastructure solutions.
When opportunity strikes, you want to answer! But the work has to fit within your capacity, and you need systems of managing your workflow smoothly – under all feasible conditions. Without a workflow solution to handle the surge, you could experience bottlenecks that prevent you from fully benefitting from the uptick in business and negatively impact your existing base.
The solution? Time-blocking for entrepreneurs
Having a busy business, and being busy as a leader, is not always an indicator of growth. For subscription service businesses, it is very possible to feel like your to-do list is moving along, or so much activity is happening, but growth still stalls for your operation. With recurring revenue, you see trends over long periods of time and phases of acceleration and holding in place – even with an upwardly trending company. You also see churn and periods where work is happening, but it’s in a vicious cycle and not going anywhere.
How do you take your business from feeling “busy, but stalling”, to “balanced and growing”? The answer is time-blocking for entrepreneurs, or organizing your available time into large chunks and tasks you need to accomplish. It’s a system of dedicating time to specific initiatives and working deliberately.
This tactic may seem easy, but the number of times owners fail to time-block efficiently and consistently is extremely high. Why?
The biggest reason I see with leaders is that they believe they can time-block, or organize their time into set tasks, while they are in motion, and they do not literally map it out. They are convinced they can remember it all and fit it into a single day. Or worse, they don’t have a running list, and they are taking care of items as they come up in real time – doing everything as it comes through.
Whatever the core source for frantic work, time-blocking – once executed well – will be a game-changing strategy for reducing admin time and streamlining your workflow.
How do you time-block your schedule?
First, a weekly brain dump, or a similar listing of open items as an initial step will help tremendously with time-blocking your schedule in a way that feels like progress is being made. You can time-block any tasks, important and not, so making sure you have categories factored in and various levels of time-sensitivity is essential.
Next, consider the working schedule you have the different categories that are most crucial to progress. For example, business development, admin work, and any labor you perform for your business can all be categories. Create different hubs that should be in your day.
For me right now, writing and content creation, communications (internal and client), social media channels, and marketing research are all key areas I am working in, and they all have a number of sub-tasks that fall within each category.
This next step is more custom to your original list and number of categories: consider how each item, then category, fits into your week and the available time you have to perform tasks for work. Do not try to stretch your working hours to go impossibly long time frames in this step – just focus on blocking off sections of time in the available hours to perform each category of work.
Now, you can fit in sub-tasks, as well as look for any tasks that overlap, are similar, or can be done as a combined unit. When this occurs, you have a chance to optimize your time and get multiple items done at once – take those opportunities! In the book Atomic Habits, this is called “time-stacking”, and it’s an excellent strategy that can improve your efficiency and save admin time.
Going back to your original brain dump list and the categories we fit into open schedule blocks — is there enough time for everything?
In many cases, yes! Everything fits if some thought is put into it and staged out. If your answer is “no”, the least crucial items to your operations, sales, and immediate goals should be filtered out and put on a “circle back when possible” list, or a list for further planning and delegation.
Notice, we should NOT filter out items that are simply longer term and not “right now”. If a bigger item contributes to an immediate need, it’s a priority to work in now. We should start with what makes the business grow and the essentials, then work backwards.
Admin time for entrepreneurs – the secret burn
Within this plan, your admin time should be well-plotted to reduce the amount of back-and-forth you do with operational tasks per day as an owner. Like social media checks and glances in the day, emails and texts for business owners can be an equally consuming time-killer.
Have set times to engage with email and phone communications that are regular, but planned. This strategy will leave you with more open time to perform the initiatives that matter for your business and are producing a deliverable, rather than continuing note-passing-level communications via text in real time.
You will be amazed at the amount of time you save by organizing your admin check ins to 2-3 times per day and limit the amount of time spent. Chances are, you will still get all your communications done, you just won’t be able to stay in that space as long as is typical. And the ultimate desensitizer for the most obsessive urge in us all – yes, you will end up leaving unread messages in your work email at the end of the day sometimes, and that is okay. It will be there tomorrow.
Just like your admin time as an owner, you should always schedule in your thinking-time and business development time as a regularly recurring event.
Having these dedicated blocks exclusively for engineering solutions could be the type of workflow solution that solves the yoga teacher’s problem in our initial example. Sure, she may have to stand in as a sub for the early-morning, or evening classes that do not have another coach at some point when someone is out. But if she had a set time every week, or couple times a week, to create solutions for hiring and for covering classes at peak times coaches do not want to teach, she can free herself of the time-suck she is experiencing by wearing so many hats at the same time for her business.
Why small business owners struggle with workflow solutions
The reason so many owners fail at this workflow and time-blocking process is because it is truly difficult to step away from the immediate distractions and handle what will contribute positively to the future. Simply enough – we get caught up in the here and now. As people, we are conditioned to react to the item in front of us, before completing items that have long-term future benefit. An active business has plenty of distractions to throw at you, so you must build a buffer and protection for your time in order to truly optimize your initiatives.
If you are stuck in a cycle of feeling busy as an entrepreneur, but you are not feeling comparable results in your growth rate, chances are that you are in need of key small business workflow systems to stop the endless spin of busy-ness. Within the figurative tornado of your operations and workload, a stop point has to be added where we halt the round-and-round cycles and generate solutions that go a level deeper to the source of woe.
This is where workflow comes in and why it is so powerful for generating growth.
Organizing your time through the process of time-blocking and finding where you can and cannot consistently accomplish the items you have planned for yourself gives you the framework needed to complete growth initiatives. Thinking ahead, rather than reacting to what is happening in your business, gives you control on the next step. You, as the owner, can take back the priorities and more effectively triage what happens next when we take a step back.
It takes a little discipline at the start to commit to a weekly brain dump, auditing your schedule, and finding how to make everything fit – or edit your schedule down. As an entrepreneur, your business depends on it, and you have the power to summon the motivation to stop your own spinning and create a positive change trend.
Reducing admin time and creating a path for growth – in conclusion
In the life of an entrepreneur, creating consistent schedule-space for your most important initiatives leads to a path of growth for small businesses – especially providers of personal and professional services.
The key for leaders is mastering your workflow as a major priority. Your ability to organize your time is a definitive factor in your success and ability to complete the tasks that matter – those that put you ahead and grow your business.
Time-blocking for entrepreneurs is a skill we stress at AstroCat, and it is just one of the ways you can create a plan of action that truly works for business growth.
Unsure where to start? Dive in and give this workflow system a try with a weekly brain dump where you purge your mind of everything you need to complete. Then, organize your list into a plan of action, or start categorizing tasks into different themes that match time-blocks you are planning for the week.
If you are looking for more ways to improve your business results and create growth, contact us about our executive coaching sessions for leaders! We create a custom plan of action for your goals and help you optimize your workflow and productivity.
It’s our joy to help entrepreneurs reach for the stars!
