Put Your Business On Auto-Pilot !

Last week, I saw a great example of the need to have efficient business processes and put our business on autopilot…

My experience of effective process design and our recent focus on creating efficient business practices means we were able keep on top of the workload and still enjoying vacations.

If you live as we do - and run your online businesses while travelling the world - or you’d simply like to free up more of your time, then here are some of the simplest ways to put your business on autopilot…

Marketing

Plan out your ideal customer journey right from the start

This is one strategy I advise all my clients to do when it comes to marketing to new prospects and servicing clients. If you plan the end-to-end journey that you’d like each person (prospect and customer) to go through, this ensures each and every one of them will have the best customer experience when dealing with your business.

It also means you’ll be making your job infinitely easier by having all the necessary tools and resources in place and available at each stage, in advance.

Include all information a prospect needs on your website

To reduce the number of similar/standard requests you have, ensure that your website provides all the information a prospect is likely to need to make a decision. This includes your prices or at least a ball park range so that a prospect knows whether they’re in the right ball park. In addition, a well-written FAQ page can eliminate many of the unnecessary emails you get which are simply tentative enquiries for more information.

Use templated responses for prospect enquiries

For the times when prospects don’t read the information you provide on your site and still insist on emailing you, create a bank of templated responses that answer the most common questions and/or direct people to the relevant web page. You can personalise these but you’ll at least have the basic info you need at your fingertips without having to re-write it each time.

Use sign-up boxes and autoresponders

Still one of the most common ways to automate your marketing (and also one of the most abused), autoresponders are a great way to keep in touch with your mailing list and put this aspect of your marketing on hold. Personally, I’ve stopped using automated message sequences as I’m trying to move away from the typical ‘online marketing’ model and instead write a fortnightly business ezine packed with as much info and value as I can manage.

Either way, mailing lists and autoresponders are a fantastic way for location independent professionals to automate key aspects of their marketing.

Write and schedule blog posts in advance

Most of the popular blog platforms such as Wordpress let you write and schedule blog posts several days or weeks in advance. Make the most of this feature if you know you’re going to be out of action for a week or so and spend some time building up a bank of posts you can schedule whilst you’re busy.

Create 1-page documents & document templates

Putting together the following 1-page documents means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you need to email out the following:

• Company Overview & profile
• Media & PR profile
• An “About You” profile
• A template for press releases
• Complete price list of your products & services
• Portfolio document ( as well as your website)
• Terms & Conditions including payment terms

Whilst most of us web savvy geeks would go to a website to find this kind of information, our time in Dubai opened our eyes…many business owners there don’t yet bother with googling or websites - they’d much rather you send them through a document that covers the things they need to know. It just depends upon your market.

Customer Care

Provide a Customer FAQ Support Page

As with prospects, if you typically get the same sort of support requests from customers/clients then consider setting up a “customer support” section on your website. Depending upon the nature of your business, this could include Camtasia videos and tutorials, audio downloads and templates.

Outsource your customer service

If your business model requires 24 hour customer service and deals with simple queries that require no specialist knowledge (or knowledge that can easily be transferred), then consider outsourcing this aspect of your business. Either hire a VA or assistant to do this specific task or use specialist companies to do this.

Set the *right* expectations

This tactic is relevant for the entire way you run your business - including the time you take to respond to emails, the length of your emails, the time taken to respond to customer calls and more.

If you know you’re going to be travelling, busy or unable to maintain your usual level of service then inform people of this by using out-of-office autoresponders or informing clients in advance. If you typically offer a 3-day turnaround time, or you promise to get back to a client within a certain amount of time, then reset their expectations in advance if you know you’re going to fail to meet them.

Billing

Use recurring payments or get payment upfront

Chasing up invoices and customer payments is not only a time-consuming hassle, it also impacts your cashflow. Try moving to a pay-in-advance model or recurring, automated payments. I know that many of you might say “But no-one else does it in my industry” or something else along those lines but it’s your business so run it on your terms and if people don’t like it, they can go elsewhere.

Believe me, I know how hard that sounds (and is, if you’re desperate for work/money) but it’s worked for us - and even for Jonathan in the graphic design industry where payment upfront is not the norm.

Use online payment processors or forms of payment

Unless you have somebody who can pay cheques in for you, this is a MUST for a location independent business. Alongside the usual suspects such as Paypal, Google Checkout or your own online merchant account, you can also use a bank account which accepts international transfers.

To do this, you may need to find out the BIC or IBAN number for your bank and provide this to clients. There are usually charges to receive payments, so check these out before asking clients to do this and consider factoring this into your prices.

Personal Effectiveness & Admin

Use email filters

To cut down on the amount of email processing required to keep your inbox clear, use email filters to automatically direct things to the relevant folders. I have filters to automatically file the following emails:

• from Paypal confirming purchases I’ve made
• from Paypal confirming invoices/payment requests I’ve sent
• from different mailing lists I belong to

Identify & focus on mission critical tasks only

Here’s a harsh truth…much of what you do is probably unnecessary and wastes time. I know this is true because it’s true for me! I spend far too much time reading through my RSS feeds (in the name of research), checking out my stats (in the name of marketing analysis) and generally faffing around on the internet - and I know I’m fairly productive when compared to a lot of people I know.

One thing that travelling (and as we currently are having to do - paying for each MB of internet use) does for you is to focus your mind on only mission-critical tasks - these are the things which you absolutely have to do to keep your business running.

If you run a service-based business like we do, then putting your business 100% on autopilot may never be an option (although it’s something we’re currently working on!) but at the very least you can maximise the efficiency with which you do things and increase the time you have to explore your new surroundings.