Should you be ‘meal planning’ in your business?

Meet Kelly and Jenny

At around 4:30pm, Kelly starts thinking about what to make for supper. She’ll look through her cupboards, check her fridge, and google some recipes. She might pop out to the store to get a couple of ingredients she needs, and often comes up with new creations to rescue the about-to-go-bad veggies in the fridge.

Jenny likes to sit down once a week and plan out what she’ll cook that week. She translates this into a shopping list, to make sure she’ll have everything she’ll need, and she’s set. The chicken is always defrosted in the fridge overnight, she always knows exactly what she’s making, and never runs out of ingredients.

At the end of the day, both Kelly and Jenny have delicious suppers on their table. While Jenny’s way may be more time and cost-efficient, they both work.

However, if they were cooking for a school, Kelly’s way would get her fired within a week.

Now, back to business. Your business, in fact.

Are you a Kelly or a Jenny?

Do you come up with tactics on the go, giving different prices each time based on how wealthy the client looks, jumping into the work with no real plan of how to get it all done in the best way possible? Are you constantly emailing clients for more information that you forgot to ask them about before? Do you have frantic all-nighters to finish work before the deadline?

Or do you have a solid structure in place, knowing what you offer, how much it all costs, and how you’ll do the work? Do you get all the information you’ll need from the client beforehand, and impress them with early delivery of your work?

When it comes to your business, Kelly’s way can work for a small business with a minimal amount of clients.

But if you want to improve your business, creating less hassle for you and more value for your clients, you have to change.

And if you want your business to grow and earn you more money, you’ve got no choice.

Kelly’s way just won’t cut it.

You’ll be surprised at how much time you can free up with the right systems in place, and you can either use that time to relax and enjoy being away from work for longer, or you can use that time to do more work and earn more money. Same amount of time and effort, more cash. Sweet.

So, how do you build structure and systems within your business? How do you plan it and get it running to its maximum capacity?