Balancing full-time employment around trying to make your business work in the background is by no means no easy feat. So firstly, if this is you, I want to say give yourself a massive pat on your back. Often as we get more focused on our goals and our business grows the tasks needed to be all things to all people can get a little overwhelming to say the least. At 1 Less Stress Connect we work with clients daily on productivity secrets and how to build a business that works and can grow around a job family and their commitments effectively (believe me it is possible).

Simply put, if you are not finding great ways to make it all work then chances are overwhelm is creeping in, and a confused mind will often walks away or procrastinates. Now I do not want any of those two things to be the path you take so I am going to share my top 5 secrets to help you build your business around employment and more importantly make it work. Before I get on with this guest blog for The Write Copy Girl, I encourage you to get your pen and paper to the ready and more importantly get ready to start implementing.

Setting Clear Business Goals

Building a business around employment requires a lot of focus to make it work, however without clear goals your focus will be somewhat blurred. Think of driving a cart and looking through a smeared windscreen it will take you a lot longer to reach your journey. This is why you need to set clear goals with clear time frames and chunk it down by adding milestones that you can measure your progress.  You would be surprised how many clients we speak to that do not even know how much they want their business to bring in income wise on a monthly basis. This is the start of not having clear business goals. Without clear goals you will be easily taken off course and come the end of the year feel like you have made little progress.

Value-Rank Your Ideas

As entrepreneurs, we often have an idea a minute well if you are anything like me. Sometimes these ideas are brilliant, but everything has to be in it’s season. Jumping from project to project will take you off course and result in you not giving your focus to any one thing. As they say focus goes where energy goes, so if your focus is split all over the place you will never master anything. Our tip is to value rank your ideas and place them in what we call an ideas bucket. I have this in my notes on my phone and my online business system and revisit when the time is right.

Have Themed Mini Days

It is so hard to stay on track and efficient when you have a multitude of tasks and commitments. What we suggest is have themed days that will enable you to have set days to complete specific days. i.e. Monday: admin day, Tuesday: new client lead generation day and so on to meet your business model and objectives. Having themed days will ensure all areas of your business are being given time and ensure productivity reducing that all easy trap of being busy but not productive.

Free Up Your Time By Automating Certain Areas Of Your Business

We used do a lot of manual tasks that take hours every week. One of them was tracking performance of our products. However, now we have built in automated systems in our website which has these key functions to keep tabs on all our products and the analytics behind it to give us more informed insights which helps steer future projects or new releases. Have great automated sales funnels in place help ensure clients come to you instead of the other way around, this will save you lots of time.

Consider Hiring Or Outsourcing Certain Tasks

This might not be for everybody. But for those of you who are bogged down with a lot of repetitive work, you might be losing valuable time that you can instead invest in more strategic matters or just time to re-energise yourself.

Try hiring somebody to take a lot of your manual work and you can focus on generating more income for the company. There are many websites that you can find freelancers like UpWork,  PeoplePerHour, Fiver (we promise you will feel so much better in the long run).

Take some time out weekly to work ON your business and not IN your business to start getting the jigsaw pieces of your life and commitments fitting perfectly together, do this and you will be well on your way. If you would like further help on maximising your efficiency in your  lunch hour then download our free e-guide…