The Basics of Business Planning: How Should I be Spending My Time?

I’m often asked about how I spend my time as an online business owner. From day to day, my tasks and priorities vary since I am a one woman operation responsible for all the ins and outs of my business, but for the most part, the types of activities I preform can be broken down into one of five categories for how I spend my time. These categories are Developing New Products, Taking Care of Customers and Clients, Creating New Content and Forms of Advertising, Developing Business Systems, and Improving Current Products and Offerings. All of these categories are important priorities for my business, but on a daily basis, one may be prioritized ahead of another for a variety of reasons. For the sake of this blog post, however, I am not going to talk about them in terms of priority, instead I am going to rank them by the amount of time I spend on each overall. As you may expect, I cannot quantify exact measurements of time, nor can I break up these categories into any approximation of percentage of time spent because it can vary. So, here are the five ways I spend my time as an online entrepreneur ranked from greatest to smallest amount of time spent.

Developing New Products

An an online entrepreneur, my livelihood depends on me spending a large portion of my time developing new products because in the ever changing online market, you are only as good as your next idea! I am constantly working on brainstorming, concepting and designing new products and service offerings to help diversify my income. The way I look at it, each new project I undertake is a new venture and a new stream of income in and of itself. Since most of my products are digital, I am able to spend a dedicated amount of time developing one new product after another to add to my shop, creating variety to my offerings so that I am providing products that are interesting to a greater number of people in my community. I never expect that everyone wants all of my products, but as an online business owner I want to create more products so that everyone can find something of value in what I have to offer.

Taking Care of Customers + Clients

There is no doubt in my mind that my customers and clients are my top priority, and because of this they get a great portion of my time and energy. I spend time everyday responding to emails and comments from my customers and working on client products. It is very important to me that everyone who has purchased one of my products or receives my services get their money’s worth from me and I always want to leave my customers feeling positive about their experience working with me. This is probably one of the many reasons that I get so many repeat purchases in my shop. I cannot stress highly enough the importance of taking care of your customers. It makes such a difference to your businesses reputation and the advancement of your brand! I feel very lucky that at this moment in time, my business has not grown so large that I cannot personally handle all customer service inquiries that I receive, because it really gives me such satisfaction to be able to help my customers personally. Customer service tends to be the first thing that gets outsourced as a company grows, and I personally believe that this decision shouldn’t be taken lightly. I have seen many small and very personable businesses take a hit to their reputations once they grew because of poor management of customer service, and so I am very attuned to the needs and concerns of my customers for this very reason.

Creating New Content + Forms of Advertising

Content creation is probably the biggest task I undertake on a daily basis that yields me the least amount of direct income. Every week, I put out three blog posts, two YouTube videos, and a handful of images and tweets to social media, all for the express purpose of giving back to my community. I make very little income from these methods in proportion to the income I generate from direct means like my shop and consulting, yet, these tasks take up a significant part of my week. I cannot stress, however, how important these tasks are to my business overall. Blogging and YouTube are my direct means of communication with my community and the primary means I have for advertising my products. If I didn’t show my products in videos or explain them in blog posts, no one would know about them! And if I didn’t continuously put out high quality content to my blog that adds value to my readers or create fun and informative videos for my YouTube channel on a weekly basis, none of you would trust me enough to purchase what I was selling! You have probably heard the phrase “the proof is in the pudding” and in a lot of ways, that is how I think of my content. It’s my social proof that what I am doing and saying works and is worth your time and attention!

Developing Business Systems

I have done a whole video explaining my various business systems, so I won’t go into much detail here on them, but it has taken me months of working and organizing for me to get this far with my business administration, and this is definitely an area in my business that is frequently improving. To be honest, for me the business administration is the not so fun part of running a business, but thankfully, I spent years doing this sort of organizational work for my previous Fortune 50 employer so I happen to be very efficient at it! Because of this, I am able to get away with paying relatively little attention to this area of my business for the majority of the quarter, and then I may spend a whole day organizing and working out important knitty gritty business things like taxes and filing and fulfilling my obligations as a business owner.

Improving Current Products + Offerings

The ongoing improvement of my existing products is definitely a priority for my business and although my offerings are mostly digital, I still always like to make sure that I am fixing any issues or flaws in my designs as I become aware of them. For someone who may run a business with physical products, I would assume that this subject may be of greater importance as it also ties into quality control, sourcing materials and the ongoing struggle to keep costs low and quality high! For me, however, this is the area of my business where I spend the least amount of time overall, although time spent is certainly not a representation of priority. I take quality control with my products extremely seriously, and whenever I am made aware of any issue with my designs, even something as small as a typo, I immediately act to correct the issue. This ties into good customer service for me, but also an ongoing effort to retain a premium feel to my products.

I hope this gives you some more insight into how I work as an online entrepreneur and perhaps some areas that you may want to be focusing on as well if you run an online business of any kind! I’d love to hear your thoughts and if there are specific areas of your business that you spend a great deal of time on, or perhaps not enough time on, I’d love to know what those are and how I could possibly help you by making those tasks easier or more streamlined! Don’t hesitate to leave me some comments below!

xoxo,

This article was first published on Strange & Charmed on April 27th, 2015 and being reposted as business inspiration for the New Year!