Most businesses don't operate alone.
Even a small business usually depends on other businesses for something.
You might purchase:
Products to resell
Raw materials
Packaging
Equipment
Software
Professional services
Advertising
Transport
Office supplies
Repairs and maintenance
These suppliers can have an enormous effect on your business.
A supplier...
Inventory can be one of the most useful assets in a business — and one of the easiest to get wrong.
Have too little stock and customers may be told:
"Sorry, we're out of stock."
Have too much stock and you may discover that thousands of dollars are sitting on shelves, in a warehouse or in a storage room doing absolutely nothing.
And there's the particularly annoying situation where you somehow have too much of the things nobody wants and not enough of the things everyone wants.
When you have only a handful of customers, you can probably get away with doing things manually. You might remember customer details, keep track of jobs in your head and personally check everything before it goes out the door.
But eventually, the cracks begin to appear.
Customers wait too long for responses. Employees duplicate each other's work. Stock gets ordered twice. Invoices are forgotten. Meetings consume entire afternoons. You spend hours entering information that could have been automated.
The business is working hard.
But it isn't necessarily working efficiently.
The good news is that efficiency isn't some mysterious skill reserved for large corporations.
Successful business owners aren't necessarily working every minute of those hours. Instead, they become better at deciding what deserves their time, what doesn't, and when different activities should happen.
Good time management isn't about squeezing more and more work into your day.
It's about making sure your limited time is being spent on the things that matter most.