Business Management 'Like a Boss'.

When you’re just getting started with your small business, simply deciding which goal to tackle first—and knowing what to do and when—can be a job just by itself. To help new local business owners we’ve composed this list of 5 Small Business Management Tips That’ll Save You 40 Headaches Every day.

None of us are born with business smarts or an entrepreneurial playbook pre-printed into our brains. It’s stuff that we’ve all got to figure out along the way, and that most of us make some sort of horrible mistake over time. And especially when we first get started in business—when we don’t have years of experience to help us make smart, educated guesses—business management tips and advice from others can be incredibly helpful. So today we’re going to focus on management tips— time management, money management—you name it.

But they’re all tips that’ll help you as a new small business owner manage your business better so you can avoid unwanted headaches and just push forward to the progress you want.

Separate Your Personal & Business Finances

Please, please, please, by all means, don’t accept payment in your personal account or put business expenses on your personal credit card. Most banks will require official business paperwork to open something up in your business’s name, but at the very least, you can open separate personal accounts that are designated for only business transactions.

Invest in Your Education

Heart-to-heart right now: the best money I’ve spent on my business has been on my own education to further it. If I don’t know how to do something, I know it’s silly for me to keep trying to Google solutions, go through months and months of trial and error, and maybe get it right after that. Instead, it makes a lot more sense to pay a few hundred dollars (sometimes even a few thousand, depending on the skill) to have someone who’s been there, done it, and been successful at it teach me how to do it right the first time. Because even though those courses cost money upfront, they more than pay for themselves in return on saved mistakes alone… not to mention how much they help me actually make more money because of the things they teach.

Invest in Marketing

An “Open for Business” sign on your front door and/or a website that’s finally gone live isn’t enough to get you customers. The world we live in requires small business people like us to force our way in front of people, show them something valuable, and somehow have them listen to our pitch. So to invest in marketing properly, you’ll need to do a little research to find out what works best for your business model and this market.

Leave 20% of Your Day Open

If you’ll be “at the office” for five hours, only schedule four hours of work. Because the thing is, there’s always something that comes up last minute that you have to deal with. There’s always a phone call with a needy client that goes 60 minutes over its allowed 30 minutes. And there’s always something you thought would take an hour to finish, but it takes two. You now have time to catch up on your emails, read up on what’s happening in your industry, or dedicate more time to your passion project within your business. Or, you know, you could just take that time off for the sake of your mental health.

But by leaving 20% of your day open, you know that you can confidently take care of those last-minute things that come up without scrambling around and worrying how it’s going to affect the workload of the rest of your week.

Time is Money - Identify your big-time wasters

Once you complete a time logging day, you'll quickly see where you're wasting a lot of time. Take your time log and total up the time of the day you tracked and then try to categorize all of your activities. Then, do some basic calculations to determine the percentage of time you spend on each activity. The goal here is to find the areas where you're spending way too much time. Categories to consider are: Email, Phone Calls, Meetings, Breaks, Errands, and other nonproductive tasks.

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