The first thing to think about when you seek to make your days more manageable and more effective is the parts of your small business. What parts of your business are essential to your success? For each business, you’ll need to look at your own situation to determine it, but this can get you started.
Human Resources – If you hire or contract out to others, you’ll need to concern yourself with setting up, organizing, and managing all your HR. Having some knowledge of this even if you think you’re going to do everything yourself is essential because you should not do it all yourself, and there are laws to consider.
- Accounting and Finance – Every business must figure out how they plan to keep track of income and expenses and set up benchmarks for planning purposes. There is a lot you can automate in this area too.
- Marketing and Advertising – No business can exist if they don’t get the word out about their solutions.
- Production – If you have a product, whether physical or digital, the product has to be produced somehow. Much of production can be automated depending on the type of products you have.
- Information Technology – Most small businesses today do have to deal with technology in some way, which means you need to have a general understanding of the technology available in your industry to help you manage and do your business.
- Operations – The inner workings of your business are ripe for automation. It doesn’t matter if you sell products, manufacture products, or perform services, someone has to be in control of this work, and that’s typically the small business owner because they don’t typically hire managers, but you can.
- Customer Service – Even if you only serve five customers a year, you need to focus on customer care in order to keep your customers happy. A lot of this process can be automated too.
- Purchasing – This is a department that will often fall to the owner of a small business but exists as a separate department in a large business. In this department, you’ll want to figure out what the business needs, how much, when, and negotiate better prices, and so forth.
- Legal Department – This is one of the first areas to go for a small self-owned business, but it is still important to acknowledge this area. You always want to make sure what you do is legal and follows the laws.
- Business Development and Growth – This includes sales, marketing, project management, product management, and more. If you focus on business development, you’ll focus on how you can use what you have to expand your audience and make more money.
While in general, all businesses share the same fundamental parts, some businesses, especially home solopreneurs, may place importance on different parts depending on their goals. But these potential fundamental parts of your small business bare considering so that you can create a solid automation plan.
