The first stage in solving this imbalance is to sit down and evaluate your internal processes, time spent on various areas and the income generated from each activity. Once you have undertaken these evaluations of your efficiency, consider some of the following as means to further improve efficiency

• Have a Plan
• Automate Processes
• Stock Management
• Time Management

Take time to sit down and evaluate where you are, where you want to get to and what you are going to do to get there. During the process try and establish firm goals for your business such as; increase customer base by 10% or cut costs by 20%.

By having a plan you can ensure that you are on track at any stage of the process. You can set down at the beginning exactly what you are going to do and then ensure that you stick to it, making minor tweaks as appropriate.

If you don’t know where to start consider the ISO 9001 process as a possibility. The process of acquiring ISO 9001 accredited status forces a business to take stock of internal processes, setting down on paper each process for use by anyone in the organisation.

Once you have your processes on paper look at how you could go about automating them. It may be that you could put in place technology to handle the process or processes for you, freeing up valuable time spent doing routine tasks.

At the most simplest end this could be using a mail merge to send out customer invoices, and at the other, it could involve bespoke programming added to the back of your website, handling all supplier and customer relationships.

As an example, one client of UKNetWeb had an e-commerce store with over 25,000 products from 150 different suppliers. They regularly spent six days a week on processing orders and dealing with suppliers. After analysing the processes and developing a custom back-end system we were able to reduce the six days down to one.

These applications can vary in quality with some offering higher levels of integration with other business systems than others. Ensuring that your package can work hand in hand with your website or accounting system can drive efficiency and cut costs.

These systems will alleviate many of the associated costs of carrying out manual stock counts, dealing with administrative errors and time lost from stock outs.

Whether your business is online or not, a good stock management system is an investment for your business that will continue to show a return for many years after its original implementation.

Time management software does exactly what it says on the tin – help you manage your time. By tracking and recording how time is spent you can see where you are wasting time and more importantly what activities actually benefit your business.

There are numerous packages on the market, from simple one user editions to full enterprise editions running across multiple machines or locations. The one we use here at UKNetWeb tracks time by the minute, has space for adding costs and expenses, has multiple users, has various task and client levels and a good set of wizards for generating reports for a range of factors.

The screenshot below shows the type of system we use, you can find out more about the package here.

If you’re just starting out in business, or act as a freelance consultant, it may be worth looking at some of the free packages available on the web. There are a number of free or low cost services to choose from here.