Time is money. Running a business is all about making as much money in as little time as possible. If you take too long to close deals and make sales, then you’ll never reach your peak. Unfortunately, this is a problem that plagues companies all over the world. You waste too much time in your business, usually concerning yourself with things that could be avoided. 

The fact is that businesses are complicated things. You have a lot of different pieces moving at the same time. But, some pieces are more important than others. So, when you have to devote time to the less important things, you don’t have as much time to focus on the more significant issues. 

Bearing that in mind, what tasks are the biggest time-wasters in your business? If you look below, you’ll find some examples of common tasks that you’re spending way too much time on, and how you can rectify this. 

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Answering Calls

How many minutes do you spend answering phone calls every day? Let’s say each call lasts an average of ten minutes – you’d only need to answer 6 calls a day to spend an hour on the phone. That’s 5 hours during the working week! 

Of course, calls are important as they can help you generate leads or close a few sales. But, they definitely take up way too much of your time. Sometimes, you don’t even get a lot out of a call – it could just be someone ringing to ask a question. Instead of answering the calls by yourself, you should look into a service like Ruby Receptionist which provides you with a virtual receptionist. Effectively, you’re outsourcing your call answering duties to someone else. Whenever your business number is called, a receptionist answers it. 

This way, you don’t miss any calls, but you can devote more time to other things instead. This frees up hours in your working week, meaning you might have more time to meet with clients, can devote extra hours into your marketing strategy – and so on. 

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Replying To Emails

Your business will probably get a lot of emails every day. Naturally, you don’t have the time to reply to every single one. It takes a while to compose an email and send it to one person – let alone producing multiple and sending them to various people. 

Again, as with phone calls, you can’t ignore them. But, there’s a simple solution to this; automate your emails. Send out automated replies when someone emails you; this shows them that their email has been received, and it can also provide them with additional information that might help them solve their query. 

You could even start scheduling emails to go out at particular times – and send them in bulk to numerous recipients. Now, instead of composing one hundred different emails, you only have to write one, then decide on when it needs to be sent out. It streamlines the entire process, giving you more time to focus on what matters the most. 

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Paying Your Employees

Your team needs to be paid, but this can take up a considerable chunk of your time. If you have a rather large group of employees, then you need to go through each one and make sure that they’re paid the correct amount at the right time. Fail to do this, and you end up with disgruntled employees who will make their grievances known. 

Once again, you can solve this problem by automating it. There’s software like Deluxe that makes payday far more efficient. Everything is handled through the software, so you can select the payday and make sure that all payments are made on time, every time. You barely have to do anything, which gives you one less task to worry about. 

Admittedly, paying your employees is a task that only comes around once a month for most business owners. But, if you pay people every week, then it’s a more frequent concern. Either way, it still takes up a portion of your time – some people spend the entire day getting everything ready. By automating it, you save this time, and you also save yourself from needing to hire someone to specifically take care of the payroll system, which is a bonus!

Think about how much time you will save by automating these three tasks. Your workload starts to lighten, which means you can devote your attention elsewhere. As a result, you put more effort and time into the things that really matter. This means you can give your business a boost and make more money than ever before.