Are you struggling to grow your business? Trying different marketing strategies and introducing new offers may only get you so far. They could also add more complication, more work and more expenses to your bottom line.

Often the first strategy for building business growth is marketing.

Let’s look at how this works logically. If you add a new marketing strategy into the mix and then increase the number of clients you have without having effective systems in place, then you will just be increasing the headaches for everyone in your team. 

If it was inefficient before – adding a new campaign or new offer is NOT going to make it more efficient.

If any of this sounds familiar to you, then try looking internally to grow your business instead of adding more.

5 Useful Ways to Grow your business before you even consider a new marketing campaign

• Framework #1 A project management tool
  

  Whether you manage clients, content or people, there are regular actions or tasks to be completed, and an online PM tool is so effective at achieving this. Tools such as ClickUp, Asana or Monday.com can give you and your team real time information about the status of any project, when it’s due, and who is responsible, so that you don’t have to follow it up with a team member.

  This also reduces the reliance of email and provides everyone in the team with a clear idea of priorities, urgent tasks and allows them to keep it updated without the need for additional communication.

• Framework #2 Document your business operations
  

  Documenting the processes in your business allows you to get all of the knowledge out of your head and shared with your team so that it’s not reliant on you, or one other person in your business. 

  This reduces confusion within the team because they will know what needs to be done. This is even more important when the team is remote or working in isolation. In that situation each person may be working out a different way of completing a task, which adds additional time and cost.

• Framework #3 Create guidelines for how your team work together and communicate
  

  Once you have the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of running your busines, (Framework 1. And 2.), it’s important to be clear your team know when to respond, when to update the project management tool, how to collaborate and comment so that the project or tasks don’t get missed or lost.

  You know those times when someone says – I thought this was with you? and they say – I thought it was you!

  Again, this reduces the reliance on email, having to remember to check in or follow something up. The combination of tools and the guidelines mean you have to be clear, and they enable you to manage this so quickly, you will be wondering why you didn’t incorporate this into your business sooner!

• Framework #4 Host regular team meetings
  

  Regular communication will save you time and money by addressing issues as soon as they arise, circumventing problems and trouble shooting effectively.

  Communication between you and your team is essential for issues to be identified quickly. Whether it is a morning stand up meeting, or a weekly meeting, these are important opportunities for you to answer questions, resolve issues and stay up to date without needing to be knee deep in the doing, or getting stuck answering questions.

• Framework #5 Track and report on the progress using dashboards
  

  Once you have your project management tool set up, you are better set up to track projects. You can track project progress, time vs cost, overdue tasks – there’s so much more information you can keep an eye on – again without needing to be deep in the daily operations.

  Adding this information will allow you to also track how overloaded your team may be, and provide an additional layer of transparency to your business and culture and allow you to support your team more effectively.

   

  Picture how your days would be different if these frameworks were in place in your business. There would be time for you to holiday (because I’m sure if you were in the day to day operations, you were running on empty and feeling close to burn out), and then you could focus your efforts on building capacity – from a much stronger position.

  The ability for you to actually make progress on your growth goals are so much more realistic with these strong foundations in place, and your business will be able to ride the ups and downs of team member turn over without losing valuable IP.

If you or your team can relate to any of these, then ClickUp is going to help you.

Here Are Five Ways That You Can Save Time With Clickup.

#1 AUTOMATIONS

Automations in ClickUp save you time by keeping your process flowing, without having to wait for a person to do the next action. ClickUp automations are a set of triggers and actions. Once the trigger is set off, the action takes place. You can build customised automations within ClickUp to suit your business needs.

The ability to move a client, or a task through to the next step without waiting for someone to action it personally can make your process faster.

As well as the obvious time saving gained with automations, there is also the advantage of improved customer service, improved quality, or faster resolutions (it depends on the use case of the automation).

You may have seen automations in marketing, for example – an email sequence automation, when a client is taken through a funnel with emails triggered relating to them opening an email or buying a product.

Setting up automations in a project management tool is different to that of a marketing tool. The automations in ClickUp are focussed more on the process. Taking care of those tiny details that can add up to additional time when done individually. 

ClickUp automation tip: It’s essential that you know your process and the outcome you are working towards. This will enable you to create the best time saving automations. If your process is unclear, then knowing what each next step is will make it difficult to create time saving automations. I help clients prepare their process as well as implement it into ClickUp, so book a consult if you would like some assistance creating the best process for you.

Knowing your process and being organised with the trigger action and a consequence action, will set up your automation for maximum time saving in your business.

Some of my favourite automations to help you save time with ClickUp include

• automatically assigning a person to a task, once another step in the process has been completed, this can include a whole task template and comments.
• Triggering a comment, or request within a task, when the status changes for example: status changed to ‘approved’ triggers a comment with @mention to publish
• When assignee changes, then move task to a different list and change the priority. This recipe is great for filtering information and moving the task through the workflow automatically

#2 DOCS

As well as an extensive task management platform, a great feature of ClickUp is that it has docs. Having this within ClickUp allows you to streamline internal and external communication, using less tools.

In most other project management tools, the only place to manage text is in the description of a task. ClickUp, however, has a stand-alone document centre, allowing you to manage more information in your Business Hub.

Some of my favourite features to help save you time with Docs in ClickUp, include:

• adding comments in real time to docs, for remote collaboration
• sharing and managing permissions – internally using docs as newsletters or team memos, team meetings, as well as creating docs to share via URL, or even export as a pdf.
• adding tasks (great for team meetings – when tasks are identified)
• inserting tables, videos, gifs

Utilising ClickUp Docs can mean less meetings, more streamlined communication, and saving time with templates and SOP’s all managed in one place

Personally, I use Docs for

• SOP’s with videos embedded, along with task references
• managing content ideas
• collating hashtags
• team meetings
• newsletter and content creation
• arranging research

A real benefit is using Docs to host SOP’s for a team. Again, they are easily referred to, quickly updated – like your own wiki or knowledge bank, however, much more efficient.

By hosting your SOPs within the same place as your business hub and operations, they’re not just piled away in a file somewhere that no-one refers to. Your team can check them more often and they can be kept relevant. Your tasks can incorporate links to procedures and important information, that are easily accessible within the one application, ClickUp.

#3 CUSTOMISABLE WORKFLOWS

This recommendation for saving time through workflows with ClickUp may seem obvious, but let me explain further. It’s all about the status.

Being able to move a task through a workflow using the status provides a whole new level of easy task management and allows you to customise the process for your business. In regular task management software, the status of your task might go from ‘to do’, ‘in progress’ or ‘done’, which are not overly useful in considering the flow of work in your business. With ClickUp workflows, you can track it through the flow.

Let’s take a sales and lead workflow to highlight this. Instead of being able to see if each step of the sales flow is done, or in progress (again, a status that provides information that isn’t much help!), ClickUp allows you to customise the sales flow into Enquiry, Follow-up, Offer Made, Offer Followed up, Offer accepted, Offer Declined.

This creates a next level for the sales management matrix, allowing for quick and easy management, easily reportable data and your team are able to quickly see where to focus – all at a glance. In essence, adding this next layer of information is what makes ClickUp more than just a task management tool or a giant to-do list.

For a demonstration on how I use these in my own business, download 5 Ways to Save Time with ClickUp and you will receive bonus tips and a video demo and explanation for each one. Grab it here

#4 REPORTING AND DASHBOARDS

Dashboards are the Control Centre of your Business Hub!

They provide a real time snapshot of what’s happening in any of your spaces, so that you can quickly react or adapt.

They also resolve many of those internal communication issues, by

• sharing information effectively
• providing transparency
• identifying blocks
• allowing streamlined conversations, based on accurate and current data

The ClickUp dashboards are report widgets that can display charts, calculations and progress on any data that you need to track.

Along with managing tasks, ClickUp allows you to track progress within your team.

Here are a few of my favourite Dashboard widgets.

• Time tracked (per person)
• Income this month
• Goal progress
• Workflow bottlenecks
• Who is behind (ie: number of overdue tasks)
• Who is completing the most tasks
• Who is not clearing their notifications (and therefore, possibly missing out on important updates)

You can then organise your dashboards to report on team progress, financials, client progress, overdue tasks, team meeting and team chat.

As a manager, setting up all categories of this information in one place will save you so much time, as well as boost your whole team’s productivity.

#5 CUSTOM FIELDS

One of my favourite features to play with in ClickUp is the custom fields. By adding additional information into your Business Hub, custom fields give you more ways to view, sort and analyse what’s happening in your business.

Custom fields also provide a simple way for your team to update information, or access information, and are so quick to see and assess on the go.

Some of my favourite custom fields are:

• progress bar, to see % of subtasks or checklists completed
• drop down menu (a secondary status)
• ratings, so that you can provide a rating out of 5
• email address – that you can click and send an email
• comments, to quickly see the last comment made
• calculations, like a spreadsheet
• any field you would use within a form (because forms are also in ClickUp!)

There you have it, just five ways ClickUp can not only save you time but create less headaches and better business. There are so many advantages, including cost savings and team efficiencies, when the process is working well – as supported by ClickUp.

With your Business Hub, being able to see all the information at-a-glance, you have the opportunity to see what’s working and change what’s not working, in a timely manner. You have the data on where to look and how to go about making changes, when they are required.

Click here to download 5 Ways to save time with ClickUp, and you will have access to videos demonstrating how I use these in my own business.  

And if you’d like some more ideas on ways Click Up can save you time and money, see the list below.

Additional ways to save time with ClickUp:

• Email – click on an email address and send an email
• Chrome extension
• Button for quick time tracking
• Creating reminders on the go
• Notepad
• New doc
• New task
• Calendar
• Task tray

Your next steps:
Want to see exactly how I use these features in my business?

You can download these tips and the supporting videos I made for you explaining each feature and how I use it.
Click below to get your ClickUp set up optimised!