Re-inventing the Wheel? Time Hacks for Start-ups

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30 May 2017. Apart from the obvious shortage of money, the thing that most start-ups struggle with is a lack of time. Starting up your own business takes the concept of multitasking to a whole new level. There will not be enough hours in the day for you to achieve all you need to. This is where technology and the clever use of existing resources are vital.

Don’t reinvent the wheel – use what’s out there

Starting from scratch is incredibly time consuming and you don’t have to. You can use free templates for your invoices and most other business paperwork. They will be available in tried and tested formats and you can adapt them to suit our own purposes and brand.

Your social media posts must look slick and professional and you can download readymade templates from Canva and personalize them with your own logo and artwork. The templates are sized and designed for all social media channels.

You can even design your own logo using custom designs and images. It takes a matter of minutes and all the ideas are there in front of you. All you have to do is choose.

Automation will save you hours

There are some tasks, including social media promotion, that must be done several times a day. You could spend your whole day trying to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is much more efficient to work in batches, rather than skipping from one platform to another.

For Facebook, it is best to schedule within the app itself. Set aside one hour a week to schedule posts for the next 7 days. Use a picture and links to your site where needed. For Twitter, you can use a scheduler such as Social Oomph. Once loaded, Tweets can be scheduled every few hours with no input from you. Sprout Social is a useful scheduler for Instagram and many businesses use Tailwind for Pinterest.

The hours that you have saved can be used to greater effect on designing new products and services and finding new niches.

Recruiting and managing employees

Once you get to the stage where you are recruiting employees you will realize how time-consuming recruitment and management is. You don’t need a full-time Human Resources executive if you only recruit once a year! Hire is a freelance HR expert when you need one.

You can spend hours having ‘informal chats’ with prospective candidates and setting up the most convenient time slots for you both. Get around this by using a calendar system such as  Calendly. Your potential candidates will get an easy email link that they can use to book a slot in your busy diary. An automatic applicant tracking system (ATS) is a cloud-based application that you can use to manage the whole recruitment process.

Once your workforce is in place, you can use technology to track their productivity. This will enable you to track hours worked and output without spending hours gazing at spreadsheets.

Burn-out is real issue for start-up owners but with a few time saving hacks, you can keep the workload under control.

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