How to Organise your Trade Business

Organisation

A word whose use has been exhausted in society today. It’s a word that is forever on our minds as we try to cram as much into our tightly packed schedules as we can.

I’m constantly getting emails and ads popping up on my socials asking – how do you organise yourself? What secret do you use?
Friends commenting on my tightly packed schedule and questioning how I fit it all in. And the answer to these persistent questions – if I can be blunt – is that you can not ever truly be organised. You will never be able to ‘fit it all in’ as there will always, be a never-ending list of tasks to cross off, projects to manage, jobs to sort and people to call.

I’m betting that you’re reading this thinking, “WTF, I thought Smal Fish Business Coaching was meant to help with this part of our businesses- the organisational part.”
And you’re not wrong. That is our job. But our job is also to help you understand the realities of running a business. And these can sometimes seem harsh. However, the sooner you come to understand that the importance of a successful business is to accept the hardships and push through them towards the obtainable goals.

This brings me to my first order of business.

The word – DECIDE

A significant word in our vocabulary. Decide means, in the words of the Oxford dictionary:

To come or bring to a resolution in the mind as a result of consideration.
And; to make a choice from a number of alternatives.

However, as Oliver Burkeman conveys in his book 4000 Weeks; Time and How to Use It the origins of the word (from the Latin word decidere) are a combination of the words ‘cut’ and ‘off’ meaning that when you decide to do something you are cutting off all other possibilities of which there are an endless amount of.
So the first job you have to do is to decide what matters. I often refer to this as
opportunity cost. You will never be able to fit everything in– it’s impossible, we’re finite creatures so you have to make decisions. You have to learn to prioritise that which is more important to you, and to the success of your business. Weigh up the cost of different, often simultaneous opportunities and decide which aligns with your priorities. This might be for the business, for you, or for both. Refer to your Vision Statement and strategy to help you stay on track.
The tough part is the need to push away that immediate gratification your mind is forever seeking and think about long-term benefits. Our judgement, especially as business owners often gets foggy in regard to what should be prioritised. So choosing to always put out those small fires instead of doing the bigger jobs is something you need to learn to resist.

But what does all this have to do with organisation? I’m getting to it.

Once you decide what your priorities are – those important tasks that will propel your business forward you can begin organising (here we go) yourself and these priority tasks of yours – your big rocks I like to name them.

So you’ve chosen your priorities.

Now you have to organise them and yourself so can get some sh*t done. This is
something we constantly procrastinate on as these are more often than not the
harder jobs.

So, you probably all have a diary, hopefully, use an online calendar (get one if you don’t). I’m hoping you all have a job management platform that organises the large-scale physical work you do. However, we’re talking about those metaphysical jobs the ones that you can’t quite grasp yet.

How the hell do you formulate that into a working, automated, system that can be understood and used by your whole team?
My approach is to use tools (not physical ones but software).

Let’s chat about the different types at our disposal:
There are a number of distinct platforms that offer similar services, all with the aim to help untangle your twisted thoughts and ideas and from that generate plans of action.
The budding ideas you have to systematise your business.

Trello

Trello is a kanban style (kanban is a Japanese word that means ‘visual signal’) web software for organising team and personal projects through the use of cards on a board. Every work item is displayed on a separate card within a board for the purpose of managing workflow and priority in a highly visual manner.

So if you’re someone that learns/functions through visual means then Trello would be for you. Its functions are straightforward and easy to use. You split large projects into boards and divide the projects into smaller tasks or cards.

To give you an idea of what I mean, you could label boards as the different systems in your business; the Back Office, Operations, Marketing, Sales, The Team and within those boards have the related projects you are working on as cards. Then within the cards, you can get into the nitty-gritty of each individual project, tag team members, link files, set due dates, create checklists and have a visual board of the development and progress of the project.

A lot clearer than your mess of scribbled notes and email chains.

Click Up

ClickUp is much the same as Trello in terms of function however the layout is different, so which app you decide to use depends on how you like to work.

ClickUp is more versatile in terms of different views depending on your individual preference. However, everything is first divided into a Space – a folder that you may have with the different areas of your business – then within these spaces, you have multiple view options depending on the type of work you do and your individual preferences. But they are:

• • Boards
  • Lists
  • Calendar view
  • Gant chart
  • Activity
  • MindmapAnd quite a few more.

So ClickUp has strived to make its platform applicable to a wide array of job types. These views are all divided into progress; to-do, in progress, running, complete etc… Within these labels, you can access individual jobs/tasks getting into the details of a job, there’s a description, to-dop list, subtasks, attachments, chat and option to tag members as well as track time of a task.

Asana

Again Asana is not unlike the above two mentioned platforms. But it has its
differences. The dashboard layout of Asana has been done really well in that you can see the task name – usually under a larger category for example, In Progress or Milestone – due date, assignee and status laid out in easy to digest manner.

Like both Trello and ClickUp, it has the option to separate tasks into boards with cards that you can edit and alter easily. A neat feature of Asana is its individual dashboard for each major project so you can track the progress in a visually clear way with graphs and charts. Like ClickUp, Asana has multiple views depending on preference as well as the ability to label group rolls and templates for different types of jobs.

Social Media Scheduling

Planoly and Coschedule.

These are both tools you can use to schedule and post content to your social media channels which is a good way to automate your marketing. Something you should think about. If you post to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn weekly these applications will remove the time spent individually posting. There’s a calendar and feed layout so you can see how your feed will appear as well as what’s being posted when and if these line up with holidays etc…

File Managing Systems

Now you’re probably all already using a file managing system like GoogleDrive or Dropbox or OneDrive but I do feel the need to reiterate the importance of having everything in a work relating Drive in the cloud with regulated access that is separate from your personal files. This means that you don’t own the drive but your company does and anything anyone writes up in that drive will be owned by the company.

So how are you feeling after reading about the numerous tools you should be using and most likely aren’t?

To grow your business and make consistent, considerate profits you need to automate it. You need to implement systems.
Systems take time and effort to write, learn, teach and implement. This is why
organisation tools like the ones above give you a helping hand in the scaling of your business.

So get your hustle on and get automated

I don’t care which you pick but pick one. I’m not wedded to a software brand and neither should you.

Pick something that works for you and your team and started getting your business organised!
And if you would like to chat about how we can help you, book a 10-minute call with our strategy specialists.