Your administrative practices can make or break your business.
It’s so easy to treat administration as an afterthought.
Keeping information organized, making sure everyone can work together smoothly and can find what they need, and solving predictable problems as they come up – this can make or break a business!
But entrepreneurs and executive directors have other things to focus on. Too often, it’s never the subject of focus – it’s passed off as ‘additional duties as required’ of staff with other skill sets, or by engaging a new team member you don’t have the capacity to train or supervise.
This is a bad strategy, resulting in wasted time and missed opportunities – or worse. Here are some common, costly consequences that I have witnessed in larger organizations, and I know how to prevent them before they become an issue for smaller ones:
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- Team members not being able to find things they need (physically or electronically – files, passwords, information, certificates, equipment) and spending ages hunting for them, and/or spending money replacing them
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- Databases and websites not being maintained properly, costing your team and your customers frustration and time – and possibly much more, like major system outages
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- Regularly finding yourself unprepared for meetings, deadlines or routine requests
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- Customers and new team members taking up a lot of experienced team members’ time asking common questions, and/or making expensive mistakes
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- Important files being accidentally deleted by well-intended people who didn’t know what they were
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- Collaborative projects thrown off track because of version control confusion
These were all in organizations where their admin help was from a temp agency (which is why I worked there as a temp) or on a team where ‘admin’ was spread across functions. In no case did the team leader understand the business impact of all this wasted time.
On the teams where it was somebody’s actual job to pay attention to these things, it all went so smoothly that an observer may not notice how much work had gone into developing such processes. I think this is why it’s so easy to undervalue this work: it looks so easy that it’s not even there.
But you get what you pay for. It might seem wise to save money on admin, but it could lead to very costly mistakes in the future.
Contact me today to chat more about how investing some time and money in your admin systems today can pay off in the future.