6 Effective Strategies To Keep Your Business Organized
Staying organized is a challenge many small businesses face. Whether you have a restaurant, garage, or consulting firm, your organizational skills ultimately impact your productivity and bottom line.
Here are six effective strategies for keeping your business organized.
Invest in Functional Storage
Consider some of the pain points in your daily operations. How much time is spent looking for certain tools or wasted sorting through supplies? Investing in functional storage that’s catered to your needs can help you stay organized and improve productivity.
The critical thing to remember when purchasing functional storage options is to determine the specific use before buying the solution. For example, the owner of a small grocery store might determine that they need a better storage option for produce before it’s put on shelves. Rather than guessing how much storage they need, they would evaluate their capacity and feature requirements before purchasing bulk plastic storage containers. Plan first, then buy.
Create Designated Workspaces
Maintaining boundaries is a struggle for many small business owners and entrepreneurs. That’s why it’s so essential to create designated workspaces to keep things organized.
For example, a restaurant owner should have an entirely separate space for crunching numbers, making orders, and tracking inventory. An accountant who works from home should have an office or workspace separate from leisure spaces or high-traffic areas.
Creating a designated workspace mitigates the risk of important paperwork going missing while helping maintain a healthy work-life balance.
Put SOPs in Place
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are the secret weapon to keeping a business organized. Writing out the steps of each process within the company creates a strong referral point, highlights opportunities for improvement, and helps the business progress forward – even when a key player is unavailable.
Putting SOPs in place ensures your business stays organized and on track, even when you’re not there to oversee it.
Stay Ahead of Paperwork
Paperwork and administrative tasks tend to get put on the backburner in a small business. All of a sudden, those five-minute tasks become a mountain of paperwork that would take hours to sort through.
Discipline and routines are essential for staying ahead of the paperwork and maintaining organization. Set aside time each week for administrative tasks, outsourcing, and delegating as needed. Maintaining a weekly and monthly paperwork routine will also prevent surprises at tax time.
Know When To Delegate
Business owners tend to handle the brunt of the work themselves. Many factors influence a business owner’s apparent inability to delegate. For some, it’s a sense of losing control. For others, it’s the feeling that teaching someone would take too long, so they might as well handle it themselves.
Delegating repetitive tasks, particularly those that help with organization, can make all the difference in a business’s efficiency and productivity. For example, hiring a student to do monthly filing and tidying is well worth the nominal cost associated with it.
When in doubt, measure the opportunity cost of not getting things done or handling them as the business owner. In most cases, you’ll find that it’s well worth the ROI to delegate.
Use Smart Tools
Fortunately, there are many tools available to help businesses stay organized. Everything from cloud sharing to scheduling tools to social media posting software can help handle monotonous tasks while keeping things organized.
Again, identify the pain points in your business and determine which areas are a struggle. For example, if organizing all the tax paperwork throughout the year is challenging, consider using a cloud-based accounting app that lets you scan and store important documents in the cloud from your mobile device.
Staying organized doesn’t have to be an overwhelming task; it only takes a few minutes every day to stay ahead. When it comes to running a business, organization is synonymous with profitability, productivity, and quality work.
