Running a small business is not for the faint-hearted. It takes guts and sheer willpower to stay afloat and still make some profit from it. From designing sales pages to chasing clients to sorting inventory, it often appears as if there’s really no end to the efforts required to keep your business running.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and need to take drastic steps to improve your business’ efficiency, this post will help you do that. The good news is most of these tips are easy to implement and can be done within a few days. 

Delegate All Unimportant Tasks

As the founder, chances are that you often have to wear multiple hats throughout the day. From calling vendors to chasing payments, and filing taxes… you do all these by yourself. 

Well, it’s time to become more efficient and seek scalable solutions. Just because you can do these things, doesn’t mean you should. As a business owner, you should look at all your daily activities and rank them thusly:

• High-value activity
• Medium-value activity
• Low-value activity

The only activities you should be doing are high-value activities. Figure out what those are, and delegate the rest. Hire people to do this remotely or set up an office if necessary. In case you’re wondering what high-value activities are, those are the income-generating activities.

Add Automation to Your Business

Any repetitive task can be automated. Find those tasks and look for ways to automate them. For instance, instead of individually processing payments, hook up your website or online store to a payment processor and let them handle that for a small fee.

You can also automate your marketing campaigns to generate revenue 24/7. Automation frees up your time and provides you with the benefit of being able to actually work on your business, instead of in it.  

Block All Distractions and Focus

Working on multiple projects or goals at once makes you feel busy. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re achieving anything. In fact, studies have shown that it’s better to consolidate all related and similar tasks and just work on them for one long stretch. 

So instead of working on sales for 30 minutes, fulfillment for 45 minutes, talking to prospects for 2 hours, and designing ad campaigns for 1 hour, simply batch the sales, speaking to prospects and ad campaigns into one long task. They’re related and have a common goal –revenue generation. Plus, you’ll be able to get a lot more done.  

Increase Your Trust Indices 

These days, many small businesses are run from various parts of the world. And while most customers and clients understand that, they want to be sure that you’re trustworthy. 

So make sure to put up trust indicators that’ll help put their mind at ease. These can be in the form of reviews, testimonials, real phone numbers, virtual business addresses like physicaladdress.com, trust badges, and so on. 

If necessary, put up your face on your website –could be in the form of videos and pictures. It’s good for building trust as people would be able to associate your brand with you.