An article in McKinsey reported that
“employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value.”
The same is true for soloprenuers and small businesses.
Have you ever given much thought to how much time you spend looking for a document or a link in your business and are unable to find it?
You either give up entirely, or spend a few hours recreating the document that you know already exists, but are unable to locate.
Let’s look at an even smaller situation. Let’s say you make a connection with an ideal client and you are wanting to schedule a call with them. Do you need to go to your scheduler link to send them or hop onto google calendar and take the time to find a mutually beneficial slot?
It’s amazing how much time we waste just LOOKING for things.
This is especially frustrating when you are a business owner, a mom, a neuro-diverse individual who can go down rabbit holes WAAAAYYY too easily.
So how do you organize your life and business for success?
Well, insert your “Executive Hub”, the portal to everything you need to access and a MUST for my clients.
So while time saving and productivity are the #1 reasons to set up an executive hub, I have outlined some other vital benefits as well.
1. All pieces of your business in 1 place – Organization
My motto for my own business is to
Simplify simplify simplify.
The first way to do this is to keep everything organized and categorized. If it’s organized in the place where it should be and easily accessed it has resounding effects all over your business. I mean the synonym to “business” is “organization”, it’s not “a mess of links and files that I may or may not be able to utilize every again”.
Perhaps it’s the years that I worked in a library, but the mere fact that everything is organized makes everything else EASIER. There I said it. BUSINESS IS EASY.
Okay, I’m a bad liar, it’s not easy, but it CAN be simple.
2. Easy to hand off things to team members and trust they will know how to find the info themselves
Somewhat related to point 1, having everything organized makes handing things off to team members or contractors a much smoother process. If they happen to have a question about something, direct them to the Executive Hub.
If they are asking about how a process happens, direct them to the Executive Hub
If it’s their first day and their trainer is out sick and they dont’ know where to start….. Direct them to the executive hub (or maybe give them a quick overview first).
3. Anxiety reducing – it’s good for your health!
Anxiety may be one of the top contributing factors to health issues in today’s world. Seeing that women are much more susceptible to it than men (not to mention the # of things that today’s modern-day woman juggles, especially those that have chosen to have families) it would make sense to reduce the anxiety in all of the areas possible. Taking care of yourself should be one of your “big rocks”, you are the CEO of your company and your family. Leave your brain-power and your problem-solving abilities for when they need it.
4. Simplifies processes and SOP’s
Executive Hubs also makes it more efficient to outline processes, create SOP’s and generally help your business and team operate smoothly.
Knowing all of the information points, or data points that your processes utilize can help shorten the length of time you or a team member may utilize to find that information multiple times for multiple projects.
If a link to a particular document changes, the only place you need to change it would be the hub, if everything else, like your SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures) point at the hub for access to these things. Gone are the days of updating 10 places when you just have to update 1.
5. Allows you to serve your clients better and more efficiently
These may be the most important and beneficial aspects of your Executive hub. Being able to answer client questions, provide information, or review an FAQ for policy changes are just some of the things that an Executive Hub can do to improve the Client Care aspect of your business.
In fact, in some cases, you can actually direct your client to a client portal that has access to some of these things, not only saving time for you but your clients as well.
As a client of many services, I appreciate quick and succinct answers and access to my inquiries, and knowledge of how things work.
Okay, so you know that an Executive Hub is a good idea, how do you go about creating one? How do I structure my business from the get-go to be able to access the information I need?
⭐ Start simply.
Over the course of the day, write down all of the “information” you find yourself looking for. At the end of the day, categorize those “things” in larger sections, such as “Operations”, “Training”, “Finances” or “Marketing”.
With those in mind, you can use Airtable (my preference) or Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, to create a table for each of those sections.
The next day you can add more items to each of the categories. As you go on you will find several subcategories for them within each larger category. For instance,
Marketing will have “Social Media” or “Idea Hub” etc.
As your business becomes a bit more complicated, you will be able to refer back to the executive hub and figure out if you need to update anything or if it’s out of date and then classify it as “active” or “inactive”.
Stop looking for things multiple times. Know you can go one place and only one place to find everything you need. It may seem like a small thing, but having that dewy decimal system of organizing is life-changing, for you and your biz.
Do you want to know more about these Executive Hubs? How they may help you? How to start one, or how to hire someone to help you organize it?
Send me a message or check out my website 🙂
