When small business becomes a big pain – Part 2
2. Task Management.. Well kinda..
I love post it notes, in fact I should own stock in them! Most of the time these handy little yellow notes are good enough for the obscure items I need to remember with in a day or two. Where they fail me is when I need to arrange a group of items I need to take care of that hinge on other things being done first. More often then not I will have four or five categories of “Action Items” and in each category I end up with normal need to do items and items that I need to do once I have done what I needed to do… I will pause here for you for a minute… OK you with me again? Good. Basically I need a good VERY SIMPLE project management program or a very detailed task management software. To date all the project management software I have found all work really well, for larger projects, some of my projects may be done in a few days, few weeks or farther out. I finally found what may be my task management solution for now. www.hitask.com. This allows me to create a simple project (group may be a better name) and then create tasks that I can share with people and put them in the group I want. The only thing it doesn’t do is allow me to have sub-tasks. I really hope they add that. Anyhow more about hitask in a future review.
3. CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Your joking right?!
QuickBooks definitely is NOT a CRM software. But you already knew that. So on my hunt for CRM software I ran across things like ACT!, SalesForce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, and many others. If you know anything about these companies you realize that I need a way to track future and current clients, all conversations with them, get sales data reports, invoice clients… the list goes on. There are free versions of some of these solutions but they are typically limited to use with one company and one user. I need to be able to hold company data from multiple companies (basically the ability to switch company databases) and have multiuser support, and since I am wishing it would be sweet if it could all be accessed from the internet so that business could occur anywhere. By the way, if you are in the market for any of these things in that above list expect to spend anywhere from $300 per user access license or a set monthly fee per user all the way up to $30,000 – $40,000. No that’s not a joke! I still have not found the solution for me, that’s where item four comes in. Again.
4. Being a web application developer. Screw that I can just build it!
Ya, that about sums up the solution for most of my problems to date. This is a great moment to bring up this fact. If you are like me and have the ability to program some of this stuff and are feeling the need to. Let me just remind you of one thing. Once you make the switch to your custom application YOU are now responsible for all that data, and all the future data your system will be holding. I am very aware of this and was before my projects began. However my need for something tailored to my situations finally drove me to accept that responsibility. To this day I would not have done anything different.
5. Being the funnel. BOTTLENECK!!!
It happens a lot trust me. At some point during that week or that day I begin to feel like progress on key items has fallen to the side of just doing business for that day. I start to put out fires and then before I know it my day is gone, at least all the fires are out though. This is where I have to stop and reorganize myself. The trick to being a funnel and avoiding the bottlenecks (as much as possible) is to stay as organized as possible and accurately prioritize your “Action Items”. This is where my task management needs are vital. I first quickly look at my list of projects and find the priority one. I make sure all the tasks that need to be done now are taken care of then determine if I need to add new tasks or if its time to move on to something else in that project that needs to be done. If not, I set that project aside and find the next project in line and so on. Remember, if your the funnel there is only so much output you can do before the stuff on top starts to overflow. The key point is to stay as organized as possible and manage your time wisely and efficiently. If you still find you are not able to keep up, it may be time to hire someone to help you. If so then COOL! It’s time to double your production and hopefully business as well.
6. Insomnia. the necessary evil?
Possibly… At least that is how I deal with some of it. Lets be honest though, that’s not healthy. I will admit there are just those times that you can’t rest. Maybe for days at a time, but you do need to take the time to recharge at some point during the week. It could be sleeping all day, going for a drive away from everyone, vegging out in front of the TV all day or just relaxing at home with a beer and the BBQ going. I do all these things, and most of the time I do them alone. Partly because I am single and partly because I just really enjoy the silence.
Well that wraps up my bitching about my big pain. Sorry so long winded, just a lot on my mind at the moment.
Josh-