Leveraging Tips for Small Business Starters

I think the three most important issues new business owners face are
i) Time
ii) Money
iii) Employees

As we all know, time is money. If you were aware that for every 15 minutes that your business's IT system goes down, your company loses $1000, I'm sure you will see the need as to why leveraging your IT support during start up is essential. In the Information Age, getting data is critical.

In business, we need productivity. This means your time, or more accurately, your employee's time need to be used as efficiently as possible to maximise the returns of your business. To maximise your employee's time, leveraged systems need to be in place. Just as your employee's time is a leverage, your employee's skill is also a leverage. According to R.Kiyosaki, we need to work with or indeed hire employees or partners that are 'smarter' than us. By doing this, we leverage training time, or even worse, time spent recovering from rookie mistakes. Notice that I did not say anything about 'reducing cost' as a way of leverage. Whilst a business needs to be cost effective, to maximise time, we must spend our business dollars in the right leverage.


Below are a few things I learnt when I started setting up my first business.


1) Location and facilities.

For small business owners, serviced offices are a very efficient form of leverage. Most serviced offices are already in renown locations and offer front desk and administration services. These services should be included in the total cost per month. As with anything else, you will need to do your research and consider a lot of factors in choosing your serviced office. You will need the basic services such as parking, furnishing, IT support, reception services, telephony, Internet, conferencing etc rolled up into the monthly costs. Be wary of serviced offices that charge extra for services such as faxing, photocopying etc These can roll up into huge costs at month's end.

You need to determine if you are a client or staff driven organisation. If clients will need to come in on frequent basis, choose a convenient and easily accessible location. If you are a staff driven company, such as asset managers, your choice is wider and you may substantially reduce costs by going a couple of miles from the city center.

Avoid the temptation of getting your own office and fitting your computers, getting and Internet/phone provider etc Whilst this may work out cheaper ( and I doubt it), the time that will go into keeping track of bills, supplies and maintenance might work against you and your employees use of time. The less time you and your employee spend worrying about IT and maintenance, the more time that can be leveraged towards being productive in business. The right serviced office can be a great leverage tool for your business .

2) Get an Administrative Officer

..Or what we all know as 'admin'. An admin is responsible for filing, updating supplies, invoicing, software updates, reception, telephone answering etc. I can't imagine why a sales employee should be doing any excessive filing or answering calls about stationery and so on. These are ad-hoc duties. You need to figure out which members of your team are the key players and shift their ad-hoc duties to admin. Filing is laborious and time consuming, but admins are trained for this - your sales employee is not; which makes the ad-hoc duties take even longer. If you run an estate agency, your sales team should be getting leads, conducting viewing and closing sales. The paperwork is passed to admin who will in turn keep a tabbed filing system with easy accessibility. The right administrative officer can be a great leverage tool for freeing up time for your key player while still sorting out the 'necessary clutter'.

3) Get with the information age.

I once wanted to buy a lead on a property quite reasonably under priced. It took me 5 minutes to get the email, read the email, and try to pay for the lead. I was told the lead was purchased 2 minutes earlier.

You need to find the right technology for your business. It can be what makes the difference between a 'good company' and a 'great company' or indeed between a productive one and another that's just 'getting by'. There are thousands of companies that offer overpriced 'new age' technology, there are others that are free or for next to nothing. Do you have ways to update your client of your product? Is it concise and straight to the point. Do you offer updates by automated sms? Can your employees receive there email on the go? Have you looked into Internet telephony to replace your huge monthly phone bills?

The right technology can put your ahead of others in the same field. Now when there is a lead, I am updated immediately via my blackberry email or rss feed. I then pay for the lead..with a text message.

4)Create a system & Employ people smarter than you

This might sound a bit contrived but yes, employ people you don't have to train. In future, hiring trainees might be a good idea..but not for your first small business start up. A business should be a 'set and forget' with the right people working on your system. A system is a set of protocols that your employees need to observe. McDonald's have a system for cooking hamburgers, your company needs a system for achieving the final service or product. Once this system is in place, hiring people who know even more about your system drives productivity. You wouldn't even need to be there and you can start using your time to create more ideas and invest money into other businesses. In this respect, you are leveraging off other people's skills.

This also includes third parties that work with your company such as accountants, brokers, lawyers, estate agents, software companies etc. These companies have to supply unquestionably superb services. They should be able to work seamlessly with your company without you or your employees using valuable time on the phone asking why the tax returns are not completed or why the staff's salary payments are late. The third parties you work with an be a good leverage on your time and productivity. Research and ask for references before committing to their services.

5) Cut uneccessary costs.

Knowledge is money. OK, it's power but you know what I mean. I see business phone bills all the time and they are alarming. I only have one word VOIP. Voip is now so sophisticated that they now come as home phones and wireless handsets. Calls are typically a cent a minute to landlines. a cost you can easily offset by getting an national number that you are PAID a cent a minute for. You do the maths. Get a blackberry on an 'unlimited' price plan if your business involves peak client calls. This can be easily bundled with unlimited emails and data transfers for just a bit extra per month. Whatever you do, don't call mobiles from your office land line. Stationery supplies can be 4 times more expensive on the high street, Shop from retail office stationers instead.

The bottom line is, do your research before overpaying for a service you could have gotten for 10 times cheaper, and just as efficient. For you business owners with employees that need to travel frequently, keep that expense sheet monitored by admin. Cristal is NOT an expense.


Finally, there are a thousand and one ways to leverage. However, the greatest advantage of leverage is time. The more time you and your employees have to focus on productivity, the higher your turnover.