Hi there!

This morning I took my own advice and worked on one strategy!  I had a meeting scheduled with my graphic designer for early afternoon to finalise design concepts for my sub brand Queen of Foodiness. I have an event booked mid-May and was keen to collate everything we had discussed so we could fast track to the next phase of going to print. 

Prioritising this one task meant I had to put on hold other marketing and projects I am working on and keen to fast-track.  Which really set me thinking about the day to day actions small business owners undertake every day that could be automated or outsourced.

But before you can automate or outsource you first need to find a systematic way for accomplishing the things you need to do so you can open up more time for the things you want to do.

So how do you do that?  First you need to ‘optimize’ before you can automate and outsource your professional tasks so you can focus on the work that only you can do best in your business.

Create a system that ANYONE can operate and run for you, go from
Technician to Master of your life!

Optimise
Have you ever had a bad experience outsourcing something? Most people would say yes, and a lot of times the reason for that is because people look to outsourcing as the first step. It's about the mindset, the way that we're set up, the systems we have in place, the milestone checks, everything that goes along with that.

Tools are great, but technology will merely amplify habits - if you have good habits, technology is going to make it better.

Optimisation is about identifying what we're doing in the first place, identifying the steps in a process. A tool to assist you with the detail is Process Street which is essentially a checklist.

Automate
How amazing is it that you can automate something now, that say only 12 months ago a person had to do.  Automating is something that we can set up so we don't have to think about it ever again. It will just run, it's scalable, it could be free or very cheap, and doesn't rely on a human being. 

Depending on your business model and operational requirements, two tools to check out are IFTTT a free tool to get all your apps and devices talking to each other, the other is Zapier, which is the easiest way to connect and integrate any popular web service.

Bottom line, we as human beings really cannot multitask, the neurological definition is context switching back and forth between tasks, all day long, and it is exhausting on our brains.

Outsource
If you give a task to someone without proper instructions, that hasn't already been made efficient, you're not only making their life more difficult, you are going to make your life more difficult and the process will break down at some point.

Document every task, provide a checklist or ‘how to guide’ so you can make it easy to run.  This will help understand what is involved, how to track, what KPI’s to be looking at, what questions to ask and how to take the data and make improvements on each one.

Recap on steps to get you started:

• Figure out which tasks you need to do yourself and those which can be automated or outsourced.
   
• Simplify the workday by eliminating repetitive tasks.
   
• Discover all of the automation and outsourcing options at your disposal.
   
• Build, test and improve your processes.
   
• Coordinate and streamline your apps and applets to ensure they’re running smoothly.
   
• Find, on-board and train a virtual assistant.
   
• Establish processes and communication tools to optimize your work with your virtual assistant.

To your success...