Leveraging Automated Systems to Manage Your Business

If you’re in business, then the one resource you need the most is time – as time is, indeed, money after all… and the more time you are having to invest undertaking trivial tasks such as sending out bills and chasing up payments, or managing social media accounts, and the like – the less time you have to spend time working on the business at a strategic level.

The majority of business owners find themselves doing all sorts of tasks, and wearing many hats, where not only are they the chiropractor, for instance, they are also the accountant, marketing manager, cleaner and receptionist!  This can make business, and life, feel totally overwhelming so it’s important to put systems in place to manage your business so that you can get on with what’s most important.

The question, however, is “what is most important”.  Well, there are two core aspects of this – first, strategic direction… where you are working on the strategy of your business development, and the second, is billable hours.  For instance, if you are running an optical business, or are a chiropractor , as mentioned above, then the only time you are making money is when you are adjusting someone’s spine, doing an x-ray, and so on.

You need your time to be freed from the day-to-day management of your business so that you can spend more time with patients and have the peace of mind and freedom of thought to fully consider business strategy.

In this sense, you need to leverage automated systems and process – or, perhaps, employ a team of people to help you out.  The challenge, however, when it comes to getting other people to help is that human resource is one of the most expensive.

For instance, let’s say you needed some help with medical billing and claims… on the one hand you could hire someone, which would be a huge expense and liability, or on the other, you could automate and streamline the process by looking into Open Practice Medical Billing options that mean you can focus much more on the important stuff – with regard to your business, and billable hours, rather than the administration around getting paid.

In addition, here are three things every business should be leveraging in order to manage their business efficiently.

1. Email marketing

There are plenty of time-starved business owners still sending out emails directly to their customers, yet there are free and easy to use options such as those provided by MailChimp that can take the stress and strain out of this process – automatically following up with customers, and sending out emails based on various trigger-based scenarios.

2. Marketing funnels

A marketing funnel is something everyone has; it describes the process of the customer journey – whereby, people go from not knowing anything about you to becoming customers; which is a multistaged process of gaining attention, awareness, and engagement.  Online, which is where most business owners need to be focuing there are automated systems to manage this process such as Clickfunnels.

3. Social media marketing

We often live in a state of reaction when it comes to social media marketing, which can leave us feeling very tense and always switched on or distracted by such notifications.  There are several apps such as Hootsuite and Buffer that can help automate this task at zero to very little cost.