Are you ready for your busy season? How to manage your time effectively during peak business times.

Meetings to plan, phone calls to make, payments to chase and plans to be made…Everything suddenly needs doing all at once and you only have two hands! Just when you thought you were coping you’ve hit a busy period in your business and now you’re wondering how you will make it through the next few months!

All businesses have peaks and troughs throughout the year, whether it’s Christmas, Easter, Summer, Winter or something more specific to your industry. The key to getting through, or even better, growing during these periods, simply requires some forward planning and savvy business choices.

So, what can you do to make sure you survive a busy period in your business? Read on for my top tips;

Use quieter periods to plan for your busy times

It’s very unusual for a business to be busy all year round, so use your downtime wisely. If you need to build up stock levels, do so in the quieter months when suppliers may be offering discounts; use your quiet periods to catch up on business tasks and admin and set up forecasting tools to help you plan and prepare for the busier periods. Always look 6 months ahead and plan for every eventuality.

Create a marketing plan for the year

When a business gets busy, it’s easy for marketing efforts to stall. Use quiet months to plan your newsletter, schedule social media posts, or draft an email campaign, so it’s all just ready to go when you need it. I like to use WIX ShoutOuts or Mailchimp to create email campaigns and Hootsuite or Tweetdeck for social media scheduling.

“You can do anything, but not everything” David Allen, Getting Things Done

Delegate

Whether you are surrounded by professional experts or have a workforce around you – use them! Use their strength to your advantage and delegate work to them. Trusting them and their abilities will free up your time to focus on what you are good at. It will also lead to greater individual satisfaction thus helping them to grow and take on more responsibility - leading to new processes and ideas being developed. Some excellent team collaboration tools I would recommend are Asana, Slack & Trello.

Outsource

If you are just starting out, or don’t want to take on extra staff, you will really feel the strain of a busy period in your business as you try to shoulder the workload yourself.

According to a recent survey, the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) found that the average small business owner spends over 33 hours a month dealing with internal admin, and over half business owners said that their company’s growth is suffering as a result of excessive amounts of business administration.

While the Government has pledged to help free up small business owners to spend more time doing business and creating economic growth, in the meantime, what if you could outsource those business tasks? What would you use the time saved to do? Increase Business Development activity, develop a new product or service, or take a much needed, relaxing break?

If you are feeling the strain during a busy period, consider using the services of a Virtual Assistant. A Virtual Assistant can help with all aspects of business administration, from CRM management, data research, secretarial services, book-keeping, social media, project planning, as well as sourcing and liaising with external service providers. Outsourcing these tasks and more will leave you free to focus on your business - and you may even be able to start planning for the year ahead.