Running an analog business is very time-consuming and frankly, it's kind of dumb. With all of the tools in the world that are both cost-effective and easy to use, there is no reason not to use the right tool for the job. The first step, however, is to make the mind shift toward getting things done.
In this era, running a business demands you to employ time-efficient processes and automate the hectic time-consuming or repetitive processes. In this podcast journey, I am sharing and exploring the best solutions for time hacking for solving things in our daily schedule when running our business. In my last episode, I shared how I had a mind shift and started trying to operate my business efficiently. So many things solved when I just started asking what is the best tool for this job? Once I start thinking that I found Housecall Pro, which is my go-to scheduling service and solves many of my business challenges.
Soon after that, I started to re-evaluate how I was doing everything. As my mind shifted, I started thinking of shifting or rearranging many other things. I started asking the question, what am I doing that I don't have to be doing? The first and most obvious thing for me was scheduling appointments. As we are a small company, I was answering phones and doing the scheduling from my house. We had an online booking function, but few people knew online booking was an option. For me, answering phone calls was not an issue. I am totally fine talking to our customers and answering questions. But it seemed silly to me to spend hours on the phone every day when all people wanted was to just book an appointment. It seemed like I was in the way. So it was time to time hack:
Operations: As I had to remove myself as the medium for scheduling appointments, so I started looking at things I could do to change how people booked their appointments. We had the online booking setup for booking appointments, so I knew it’s the way to remove myself from the middle. So, the operations part was done, as the customers could simply book an appointment online.
Sales: Working from home involves a certain amount of chaos. I have two bigger kids 13-year old and 10-year old. I also have a 3-year old kid. The bigger kids have started doing schoolwork from home due to this pandemic. It’s always challenging to operate a business and keep a balance in the house. To handle the sales part of scheduling, I decided to put on my message; “hey, I will give you a call back if you have a question and just let me know what your question is here. But if you just want to book an appointment, you can do that without me. You can go to our website and click the book now button, and from there you will be redirected to our booking software”. This strategy worked! I would see that I missed a call and then like ten minutes later, the appointment would just pop up. Customers wouldn't even leave a message because they just needed to know how to book an appointment. To make the online appointment process run smoothly, I had to spend time on the website because I had to explain and write things out a little bit to explain what services they were buying. I totally simplified it and made it a language that people could understand.
Marketing: The marketing part of scheduling was just adding the message on my voicemail and diverting the customers to the online booking portal that was automated and I didn’t have to be part of it.
The moral of the story is that you should start asking yourself what am I doing multiple times a day that I don't need to be doing. You should start seeing like I'm spending two unnecessary hours on this tedious task that I don't actually need to be doing. Then you can start to work on how to solve that gradually. I hope this episode was helpful to you and I hope that you can find a really awesome solution to whatever you are doing that you don't need to be doing.
Want more ideas? Check out my resource page at resources.timehackingradio.com