15 Productivity Tips to Help Small Business Entrepreneurs Succeed


Small-Business Entrepreneurs

Small-business owners tend to realize almost immediately how different their businesses are to run from large corporations. For success, a small business needs to adopt its own strategies that work with limited available resources.

From figuring out how to find and develop new talent to discussing how to expand the business’s reach, small-business entrepreneurs have to think creatively about solutions they can implement to improve operations and increase productivity.

Productivity Tips for Small Business Owners

That’s why we asked 15 entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following:

“Small businesses aren’t run like mega corporations, and so require different strategies for success. What’s your best productivity tip for helping small-business leaders succeed?”

Here’s what YEC community members had to say:

1. Prioritize the Most Important Tasks

“Each day, make sure each team member is focusing their attention on the task that will move the needle the most for your business. That task should be the first thing that gets completed each workday. Keep chipping away at the most important tasks. Small businesses don’t have the resources available to get caught up doing noncritical tasks.” ~ Diana Goodwin, MarketBox

2. Leverage Your Flexibility

“Small businesses have a huge advantage in that they are nimble and can change quickly to adapt to market demand and trends with little to no consequences. Use this to your advantage. For example, as a small business, you don’t have to pick your niche from day one. You can allow niches to develop and then determine what strategy would be best to capitalize on the individual opportunities.” ~ Ryan Meghdies, Tastic Marketing Inc.

3. Ask Others How You Can Help

“The first inclination for small-business owners is to ask others to help their business succeed. Instead, ask others how you can help them. You will be surprised by how much you help your small business grow by asking others how you can help them first.” ~ Doug Bend, Bend Law Group, PC

4. Account for Everyone’s Time

“Account for everyone’s time. Create a timesheet on a website — we used Podio and are currently testing out Harvest — and ask for people to quantify the activities that they engage in during the day. Then you can identify which clients are going over their retainer, and which are well within the allotted amount. You can also find out how much time in-house tasks are taking.” ~ Duran Inci, Optimum7

5. Hire an Assistant

“I give my assistant free reign to schedule meetings and events for me so that it’s one less thing for me to think about. You’d be shocked with how much time I have saved by getting that one task off my plate. Small-business leaders don’t always hire an assistant, but it can be invaluable for increasing productivity.” ~ Jennifer A Barnes, Optima Office, Inc

6. Take the Personal Touch Seriously

“Take the personal touch seriously. Giant corporations can’t deal with customers as individuals, but smaller businesses can. In fact, it’s often why customers choose smaller businesses in the first place. They want to feel like they matter and that the company cares about who they are and what they want.” ~ Justin Blanchard, ServerMania Inc.

7. Hire Humble, Adaptable Personnel

“Hire humble, adaptable personnel that enjoy having unique workdays with various random jobs that come up. Managers from major corporations will try and delegate, tossing the ball down the ladder when there’s no one there to catch it. If an employee has too much of an ego to roll up their sleeves and fix the printer, your company will suffer!” ~ Jonathan Sparks, Sparks Law

8. Leverage Productivity Technology

“Leverage productivity technology so that you can work as efficiently as possible. Your time counts and whatever you can do to maximize your time will pour back into the business. So using tools like monday.com or Trello is going to help you level up your success significantly.” ~ Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.

9. Automate as Many Tasks as Possible

“Automating as many tasks as possible helps you get more productive, even if you have a small staff. One especially effective practice is outsourcing, which is a way to get additional help without the costs or responsibilities of hiring employees. Outsourcing jobs that take up lots of time, whether it’s web design, content creation, IT, SEO or anything else, lets you focus on your core activities.” ~ Kalin Kassabov, ProTexting

10. Hold Daily Standups With Your Team

“Hold a daily standup with your team. This can be done asynchronously with a time deadline, but it is critical that everyone on your team is held accountable for getting what they need to get done in a timely fashion. A standup simply asks two things of each team member: what they did yesterday and what they are planning to do today. Small teams can’t afford for people to coast and projects to stall.” ~ Nicholas Haase, MaintainX

11. Ensure You Have the Tools Needed to Succeed

“The best productivity tip for helping small-business leaders succeed is to ensure they have the tools they need to succeed. These tools include a laptop, smartphone, VPN, email, secure Wi-Fi connection, and anything else they need to be able to work in the office or remotely. Essential tools are critical to a leader’s success.” ~ Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC

12. Eliminate as Many Time Wasters as You Can

“Eliminate as many time wasters as you can. Anything you do should be in service of your business and customers, but as small-business owners, we do everything. Take a hard look at your actions every day and eliminate the ones that don’t help grow your business or that take you a long time to do. See if you can automate anything or get help with them from someone else.” ~ Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite

13. Create a Streamlined Set of Processes

“Create a streamlined set of processes for your staff — something easy to follow and mold without overcommunication. Assigning regular activities to your staff members will set clear expectations on a weekly and monthly basis, freeing up some strategy and creativity time for you as a business leader. Growing startups often struggle with management, and refining this process will help you scale further.” ~ Mario Peshev, DevriX

14. Have a Clear Line of Communication

“Small businesses need to have a clear line of communication. One small mistake with a limited team could be disastrous. I suggest setting up a Slack or Skype channel as soon as possible so everyone can stay on the same page throughout the day. This trick will help you avoid simple mistakes and improve productivity company-wide.” ~ John Turner, SeedProd LLC

15. Work on One Non-Urgent Task Each Day

“Work on one non-urgent task each day. Something that’s not vital today could turn critical if you keep ignoring it. By tackling one every day, you’ll ensure it gets done and still helps your SMB. For instance, you could be looking for new vendors, tweaking your website’s layout or revising the content of a marketing email.” ~ Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster

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The Young Entrepreneur Council The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.

6 Reactions
  1. Great article, its easy to forget some of these and it’s good to be reminded. I’m sure as with most businesses at the moment, time is something that we could all do with a little more of.

  2. Small businesses need to invest heavily in being productive. They don’t have the resources to out do their bigger competitors, but what they can do is double down on their efforts and find ways to optimize time and their given resources.

  3. Thanks for these amazing tips I would like to share some of my views for small businesses too. Small businesses should have a strong accounting management tools like quickbooks,freshbooks etc. Or if they find it hard to use these software they can opt for accounting services from KPMG spark or eBetterBooks

  4. Needed post. When you are a business owner you have to stay productive whole days. Thanks for sharing these tips, It is really helpful for me.

  5. Thanks for the amazing stuff. I really like the way you have described the productivity tips for the business. I believe the information will be helpful for all the small -medium-sized businesses.

  6. Priotitizing the most important tasks is a very smart thing to do, often overlooked. you bring up so many good points in this article thanks for writing it!