Starting a small consultancy firm, whether it be a marketing firm, PR agency, accounting firm, law firm or IT Consultancy, can lead to incredible freedom, both in your personal and professional life. It can lead to having the freedom to determine your own schedule and work the hours you select. It could be the key to finally having that work-life balance you’ve dreamed about. The idea seems so easily achievable until you realize the problems that come with starting your own firm are vast. Your team might not be consistently tracking time, you may not have a way of tracking your service tickets, or you may not have a way of easily repeating your projects; whatever it is, your process may not be solidified enough for you to focus on the work you love doing. Without a process, the business can lose customers, which can ultimately destroy a small business. The best way to guarantee your business is set up for easy scalability is with a client work management platform. Here are a few reasons why adopting the right software can really help make a difference in the way you efficiently run your business.
If you’re working with more than three different applications to run your projects and they do not communicate with each other, you might want to consider a different solution. Having more than three different applications makes it difficult to streamline your processes, especially if they do not integrate with each other. If your information is spread out amongst several applications, it’s hard to get a clear overview of what’s going on with your projects. Switching to one integrated solution will not only make it much easier for your team do to their job, it will also save you time and money. As a small-to-medium company buying several different applications can be extremely expensive. When employees are able to complete projects, create quotes and invoices, fill in timesheets, create customer contacts via the sales, chase up sales leads, stay on top of unpaid invoices, share documents, and more using just one application, it is easy to see where money can be saved. With one solution that does everything you need it to do, all your business processing needs can be automated and stored in one place, eliminating the need for print-outs and lengthy status meetings. This would save you vital resources, as well as cash that can then be put into scaling your business.
Another issue that small businesses encounter is scheduling your resources. As a business owner of a professional service business, you will have recurring projects that are constantly ongoing, just like you will have clients that drop and ad-hoc work that lands on your desk. What will make your business successful is the ability to handle the changes that come your way, no matter what they are. A client work management solution allows you to schedule your resources based on your demands. Teams that effectively leverage resource scheduling tools can get a clear picture of who is busy and who is not and efficiently level out workloads. It is a well-known fact within service organizations that very small changes to employee utilization yield dramatic results on the company’s bottom line. Using client work management software to understand when resources with key skillsets are available will allow for real-time optimization of resource productivity. Resource scheduling also gives organizations the tools needed to ensure proper workloads across all of their employees. Minimizing burnout, balancing workloads and identifying professional development opportunities are all critical issues for organizations that want to retain their top talent. Without excellent visibility into resource allocation and historical utilization, key resources may quickly become dissatisfied with their work environments.
In the end, ensuring that your business is able to easily grow, while maintaining the work-life balance you dream about all comes down to having the right business process. With a client work management solution, a company can improve their task management and time tracking, and forecast their constraints, all in real-time. When you have a small team, automating that process saves you both time and money. Stop wasting your time on several different applications that do not allow you to easily schedule all of your resources and your work. Get a solution that will do it all for you, easily.
