Effective Processes For New Businesses
When starting a business, you may not have the time or funds to create elaborate processes, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect them. Optimizing your processes is the key to scaling and growing any new businesses into successful entities, and it doesn’t have to cost you thousands of dollars to do it.
Here are some budget-friendly processes that will help you get your new businesses off the ground quickly.
Google Sheets
Google Sheets is a beginner entrepreneur’s best friend. This free software can help you organize finances, track receipts, document processes, record clients, and more. You can then upload it to Google Drive (also free) and, when you reach the point where you can pay for fancier software, you can use Google Sheets as a reliable backup system.
Free or Basic Plans
There’s nothing wrong with utilizing a free or basic plan if you find the software you want to use, and there are tons of great programs that are free for life. Here are a few of my favorites:
- ClickUp or Trello for project management
- Paypal, Stripe, and Wave for finances and invoicing (they will charge a small transaction fee)
- Slack, Voxer, and Zoom for communication
- LastPass to keep your important passwords
- WordPress for websites and landing pages (though, they do charge for a custom domain)
- Metricool for Social Media Management
- Canva for graphic design and marketing
- Google for email, storage, documents, analytics, and more
All of them are free, and you can use them to make your business more organized, efficient, and professional. And, when your business grows, so can your software.
However, you know your business better than anyone else, and it’s perfectly ok to ignore the gurus who say you “need this” or “should have that.” You can start a business without a fancy website, a million social media accounts, or a project management service. Pick what you NEED, and the rest will follow.
A Marketing Process
Once you have the bones of your business in place, you’ll need clients. The best way is to create a marketing process that you can implement almost immediately.
Email marketing and social media are the most common ways to draw attention to your new business, and most social media accounts are free to create and control.
For example, you can use Canva to create visual ads or announcements, Metricool to schedule them, and Google Analytics to track their progress. All for free!
Know When To Buy
Free tools are great when you can handle these processes manually, but there will come a point when you’ll want to automate (or delegate) these processes and free up your time. Some free software (like ClickUp) can still help you with that, but others (like Dubsado) will require a subscription to give you the features you need to grow.
Let’s say your time is worth $50 to $100 an hour, but you’re spending three or four hours doing something that Dubsado can automate for $40 a month (or less than a dollar a day). That’s a lot of missed money!
Buying the right subscriptions can save you valuable time, boost your revenue, and create a more streamlined process- but make sure you have the budget for it.
Final Thoughts
Starting a new business (or businesses) is exciting but also overwhelming. However, when you have optimized processes in place, they become the foundation that you can use to build upon and eventually grow your idea. Start with the free tools and save your money, then invest when the time is right. Easy peasy.
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