Can you find your desk? Or is it hidden by piles of unsorted paper and clutter? Are you spending time searching for hard copies that might be better spent, say, doing actual work that earns you a profit? You’re not alone.

Successful businesses I’ve worked with have implemented procedures to reduce the clutter problem that can eat into your time by an hour a day or more.

When it comes to paper and information management, you need to divide your hard-copies into three categories:

1. Active Information. Action is required. Active information can be placed into a priority action plan, like a Tickler File or BF – Bring Forward File.

2. Reference materials have no action required but may be part of your “reference library.” Your reference materials may be moved away from your immediate work surface into a dedicated filing system for ease of access.

3. Archival resources may need to be kept, based on legislation requirements. If space is limited, archives may need to be moved out of office or even off-site.

The companies that implemented these types of procedures were mostly viable enterprises to begin with – decluttering might not be the difference between paying suppliers or closing up shop – but they definitely all saw a productivity boost that helped the bottom line.

Time is money, after all. And think of what you’re paying for the square footage of your leased office space – being able to get rid of filing cabinets increases the amount of space you have to add an employee space or essential equipment.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Business books give me great insight and perspective – like  Tribes, by Seth Godin. There’s a great section in there about a scene from his vacation that pretty much sums up how much easier it is for entrepreneurs to take advantage of time in ways that employees just don’t get – which is why they’re still employees and you’ve got far higher potential:

“A couple walks by, obviously on their way to bed, having pushed the idea of vacation a little too hard. The woman looks over to me and in a harsh whisper a little quieter than a yell, says to her friend, “Isn’t that sad? That guy comes here on vacation and he’s stuck checking his e-mail. He can’t even enjoy his two weeks off.

“I think the real question – the one they probably wouldn’t want to answer – was, “Isn’t it sad that we have a job where we spend two weeks avoiding the stuff we have to do fifty weeks a year?”

Godin wasn’t just being a snob. His point was that since he was passionate about his work and his life, he was happy to be checking emails at 4 am. He’s not alienated from his work. He actually enjoys it. So if he wasn’t sleeping, it was natural for him to take care of business – and enjoy it.

When you’re spending your time doing the work you love and leading change instead of adapting to the system, you’ve actually got more time to enjoy life – and earn what you deserve.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

For many entrepreneurs, the summer season is a bit of a down time for their business. Clients are away at the lake for vacation. Even those that stay in the city may not be working a typical workweek and might not return your call for a long while. This can be a time for building up the back-end of your business that we all tend to neglect when our schedules are filled.

Give your books a thorough audit to look for efficiencies.

• Develop a sales plan to launch for when the season is likely to pick up.
• Purchase new or replacement equipment and train yourself and your staff to use the new tools.
• Engage in team-building exercises with your staff or partners.
• Develop and test new products and services.
• Update your business plan (You should be doing this at least once a year).

Even before you start out, you may be able to predict when these downtimes are likely to occur if you’ve done your proper business planning and market research. For these quieter periods, instead of ramping up your efforts two-or-threefold to capture declining opportunities, attend to more strategic tasks in preparation for the upturn.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Lately I’ve been following Heather White and Lori Joyce on their television show about their Cupcakes business. I’ve been treating myself to a Cupcakes-brand cupcakes since years ago (Nothing beats a walk on English Bay Beach followed by a sweet frosted treat on Denman).

They have a thriving business. But one of the biggest hurdles they faced (and one that is also common to people in other professions – for instance, professional organizing) when starting out was keeping up cash flow:

“The first thing that most businesses do is stack themselves with rainy-day funds,” says Cupcakes co-founder Lori Joyce. She and Heather White didn’t do that. “As sales came through the front door, we were paying our suppliers out the back.” Now, prospective franchisees must have access to at least six months’ worth of unencumbered cash to get approved by the cupcake girls.

This is critical for businesses at all stages. New entrepreneurs will often focus on the quarter-to-quarter balance sheets while neglecting the importance of cash flow. Suppliers may demand payment in 10 days while clients may take months to fork over the cash you need to run your business.

Projected cash flow has to be part of your overall business plan or you risk a full-scale stoppage just when you want to ramp up and reap the benefits.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) is about measuring success not by the balance sheet alone but according to “people, planet, profit”. The idea is that a successful business has economic, ecological and social milestones to meet.

You can only be successful if you’ve made progress in all three areas. You treat your employees and consultants fairly, operate in an environmentally sustainable way and of course, make money doing what you do. It’s a concept that has taken the large corporate world by storm, even though I must confess many small business owners I meet today have never even heard of it.

One way of making your small business look big is by setting up milestones and metrics for achieving a healthy Triple Bottom Line. Why should small businesses be subject to diminished expectations? We expect corporations to shell out millions in donations (knowing they’ll get a tax cut) but if a small business plows all of its revenues back into the company (or the owner’s family vacation), it’s not seen as such a big issue. But corporate responsibility isn’t something that magically appears after your business earns its first $5 million or $10 million.

If you want to go big, it can’t all be about receivables and expenditures.

You’ll need to tackle this in an organized way. Sustainable Living Coach Sally Lever has some practical tips for how small businesses can get started:

People

Think about all of the people who are involved with your business. Even if you don’t directly employ anyone else at present, who else do your actions affect? Who else does your business depend on? Your answer might well include your suppliers, your clients, your associates and colleagues. A sustainable business treats all of these people in a way that’s in keeping with its business purpose and sustainability, for example, by employing staff who live locally and sourcing from local suppliers. You could reduce your clients’ needs to travel by providing your products and services local to them rather than centralized wherever possible.

Planet

Many of you will be familiar with the term “Reduce, Re-Use, Re-cycle”. Maybe you are not aware that those instructions are stated in order of priority. That is, it is more important for us to reduce our consumption than it is to re-use items and re-using items is more important than re-cycling our waste. So, uppermost in the sustainable business owner’s mind will be minimizing the negative impact on the planet of running that business by reducing consumption of energy, fuel, water and toxic substances.

Profit

Just because profit has now been relegated to one of three in the business’s bottom line does not make it any less important as a concept. For a business to be sustainable in the sense of growing and surviving long term it will need to generate a profit (unless it was set up as a not-for-profit organization.) What the triple bottom line does is to remind us to keep profit generation in perspective with the other elements. With our business accounts as with our personal finances, if we keep our costs to a minimum and minimize our consumption, the income we need to generate to cover our costs and pay ourselves is reduced.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

“Just so we’re clear, I don’t like surprises,” my new client mentioned, eyeing me a bit too critically for my liking. “If you can handle that, then we’re fine.”

The client was referring to the scope and cost of a project we were going to schedule for next week. I assured him that there would be no surprises – and there weren’t. Like you and I, our clients want things to be predictable (at least in our business relationships – not so much for personal relationships, at least not all the time).

It’s a myth that small businesses are flakier than big businesses. Large corporations have been known to screw up big (Perhaps you’ve heard of BP’s travails in the Gulf of Mexico?). Still, there may be an element of truth to this myth. When you’re dealing with a sole proprietership and the sole proprieter is a scatterbrain, there’s no easy way around that.

Assuming that you as an entrepreneur are not a scatterbrain, you build predictability into your business with processes. Certain processes are critical to have to assure your customer that you’re organized and professional. You can show you have these processes in place by:

1. Responding quickly to queries.

2. Providing reliable quotes and pricing information.

3. Being punctual for meetings (in-person or virtual) and sending reminders to them when applicable.

4. Being able to refer to emails and other records quickly.

5. Recording a custom voice message for when you are sick or on vacation.

6. Seamlessly referring the client to a member of your organization when they need assistance.

7. Delivering your services as promised

… and one of the most important signs:

8. Billing accurately and on time.

When you can do these things quickly and effortlessly, your customers understand that you’ve already got good systems in place – at least as good as the big corporations have, anyway. And that’s another reason to stick with you.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

How can a small business compete with a larger competitor that has access to more resources? By being more productive. And it’s easier than you’d think.

One example of time-wasting at work that caught my eye was a story about CRA employees spending hours a day browsing the Internet and sending offensive e-mails when they should have been doing the work that paid the bills.

It’s not just the public sector, either. I hear plenty of anecdotes from people who work at big companies who report the same thing: people surfing the Net, gambling, checking their personal email, sending out (un)funny links to their buddies. And let’s not blame the Internet – there have been time wasters at work since long before the advent of the water cooler or the photocopier room.

Simply by being disciplined, using a calendar and task list to keep on schedule, you can boost your productivity relative to your competitors – particularly those demoralized by recent tough times. I overheard one executive putting his finger on the problem:

“So when the merger happened, they took on all of the employees from the other company, but at their own pay rate, which was a 20 per cent pay cut.

“So of course, the ‘new hires’ put in 20 per cent less effort than previously. Well, you only get about 20 per cent efficiency out of most people at the best of times, so this basically put them all back at zero,” he concluded with a smirk.

Stay focused. Keep track of your hours. Use your time effectively and you can outperform the big guys.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

“If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire… The A-Team.” Most of my male friends can quote the end part of the introduction of that 1980s show (and newly-released movie) from memory.

It’s a very memorable unique selling proposition for their company. The A-Team in so much demand they literally have to hide themselves from their customers (Well, they’re also being hunted by the US government, but whatever…). Everyone wants them, because they’ve got a unique combination of skills that will take care of your problems even if “no one else can help”. 

Here in Vancouver, we’ve probably got the highest number of entrepreneurs running small businesses per capita in any Canadian city, particularly for sole proprietorships. Like many others, I run a small business that has to be able to compete with big businesses. One way of doing that is by building your A-Team. 

That doesn’t mean going out and hiring the best people out there. But it does mean establishing connections with local businesses who complement the type of services that you provide. That way, when a client needs services with a bigger scope than you can offer on your own, you can still remain part of the project by being part of a team (Actually, the She-Team is a good example of this).

On that note, as a resource for my clients, I keep a list of companies that I can refer handy on my own website to help them assemble the team they need to get the job done. The idea here is that if you have a problem, if no one else can help, maybe you can hire… us. See how that works?

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

Do you show business leadership in challenging times through a robot-like focus on your own work (and an expectation that your members team will do the same)? Or can you get better results from your team with honesty and a bit of emotional intelligence? I’m for the latter.

My recommended reading for this week includes a column by Rick Spence in the Financial Post called “You Can Still Win in a Slow Economy”. One of his suggestions:

“Keep it real: employees will rarely go the extra mile for leaders who are all logic and no emotion. Share what the new economic realities mean for you personally. Let your guard down; be human.”

I totally agree. While many of us are seeing a turnaround in 2010, memories of 2009’s economic troubles are not far from my thoughts. It was a tough time for many of us, and our teams of employees, subcontractors and partners were not immune to fear and confusion about the future. They needed leadership more than ever at that time.

I’ve always been an emotionally intuitive person and the crisis brought that out even more. I was very up-front and honest with the people I worked with. I reassured them as best I could. I told them the plan we had for getting through the tough times. 

I felt I had to be honest and let them know that there were no guarantees, and even the experts weren’t sure where the overall business climate was going long-term. But I was honest about the risks we were facing – and I was facing personally, as the owner of my business. I answered questions about the steps we were taking to maintain and potentially even grow the business in difficult times. 

My colleagues and partners understood the situation, felt I understood their perspective and knew that I was doing everything I could to keep things on an even keel. They felt appreciated and “in the loop” – and seemed to be able to focus better on their work.

Particularly in tough times, leaders need to be able to reassure their people. But show you’re human and share their concerns. Help them understand that you’re just as motivated as they are to solve the challenges you face together.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

If you want to lead the way in your business, you’re going to have to cut back. Way back.

One of the first lessons an entrepreneur takes to heart is usually that they can’t do it all themselves. They need a team of people to make their dream happen. No one is an engineer, financial expert, marketing professional and receptionist all-in-one. You need to downsize your own contribution to focus on what you do well.

The procedure is roughly akin to what happens when my downsizing house-moving clients need to choose what to take with them to their new abode. They can’t take everything. But how do they choose? Based on utility? Size and space required? Cost that they bought it for (even if it has limited resale value)? Sentimental value? 

The choice for entrepreneurs is a lot easier, actually. Which of your responsibilities are providing real value for your business? Which might be done quicker, more efficiently and at less cost (considering that time is money) than if you did it yourself? These sorts of variables tend to be easier to measure quantitatively. 

Make a list to figure out where you can cut back or out-task and do it. There are only so many hours in the day and to be a leader in your field, you’ll need to focus on what you do best.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca