15 Shortcuts to Business Success

Like the secret shortcut that lets you breeze past a clog on the
expressway and gets you where you’re going, business shortcuts can
provide an invaluable boost to the mileage you squeeze out of your days.
Here’s a guide to some of the most effective shortcuts every entrepreneur
should know about. These 15 tips represent the best advice of
organization and efficiency experts, small-business management
professors and entrepreneurs themselves.

1. Categorize your days. Ann Dugan, director of the Small Business
Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate
School of Business, understands how days seem to just slip away. She
also knows how small obstacles can obscure the path of a successful,
thriving business. So she advises that you set them all aside.
“Name some days ‘strategy days’ and others ‘detail days,’ and don’t
let one get mixed in with the other,” Dugan says. “You can’t put off doing
detail work forever, but you can at least say this is not the day for details
but for ‘big picture’ items, things that move the business forward.” Colorcode your calendar or daily planner accordingly.

2. Go sideways. Rather than letting incoming correspondence,
files and other to-do items pile up, devise a system for laying them out
side-by-side. “When you pile papers up horizontally, you’ve created a
paper graveyard,” says Elaine Bloom, a professional organizer and
owner of Maplewood, New Jersey-based A Place For Everything. “You
can never find anything, and the one thing you want is inevitably at the
bottom.You thumb through the pile looking for it, and the whole stack
falls over.”

Bloom recommends a change of direction. Get a wire rack, a cardboard
accordion file or a wooden box with slots—anything that makes it
possible to line up the papers. That way, you can see everything and pick
out what you need when you need it, she explains. An additional advantage:
no more forgetting about the items that are perpetually trapped in
the middle of the pile.With everything visible, nothing can be forgotten
for long.

3. Write a book. Remember that phone number you wrote down
six weeks ago? Now you need it. Any chance you’ll find it within the hour? If not, try keeping all your random notes in one place. Bloom’s
recommendation: Get a spiral notebook to use as a scrapbook. Put
those phone numbers, dimensions and preferred typefaces in there for
safekeeping. Novelists and other creative writers often use this method
for storing observations, descriptions and other spontaneous material
they want to retrieve later.

And if your work keeps you near the computer all day, don’t plaster it
with Post-it notes. Start an on-screen junk file where you can keep track
of all those loose ends. “When everything is in one place, you know
where to start looking,” Bloom says.

4. Plan for one-person meetings. If there are things you have
to do but aren’t finding time for, move them from the perpetual to-do list
into their own reserved block of time on the calendar. “Somehow, putting
those things on the calendar makes you think you have to do them at
those times,” Bloom says. And don’t ignore the importance of these
one-person meetings. Just because you’re not meeting with anyone
else, that’s no reason to ignore or postpone these scheduled tasks.

5. Take on multiple identities. It took just a few years for
e-mail, that great time-saving innovation, to create a whole new list
of irritations for entrepreneurs. “Just scrolling through all the unwanted
messages that come in [can consume so much time],” Bloom notes. She
advises setting up several screen names—for example, one for queries
from clients, another for messages from employees and a third for
e-mail to and from outside contractors or suppliers.

6. Give three points for showing up on time. Dugan says
most entrepreneurs dread interviewing job candidates. Here are her tips
for smoothing the process, from writing a classified ad to interviewing
candidates:

• Write an ad that explicitly states what qualities or skills the successful
candidate must have. List five or six key points—fewer, and you’re
casting your net too broadly; more, and you’re being too restrictive. “
Ask yourself whether people who read the ad will really see what you’re
looking for,” Dugan says. Vague terms such as “management experience
required” may not say as much as particulars like “position requires five
years or more of experience supervising a staff of at least 10 people.”
It’s likely you’ll find at least a handful of candidates who took the time
to read your ad before dropping their resumes in the mail. Among those,
don’t even bother to read names, addresses and other irrelevant informa
tion. “Just score them for how many of your top five skills they have,”
Dugan says. If too many people survive this round, trim your list of traits
to the top three and see how many candidates are still in the running.
“If the resumes you get [aren’t from] the kind of people you want, look
back at your ad and decide whether you need to rewrite it,” Dugan says.

• Before you start interviewing, make a list of 10 or so questions that
will help you evaluate candidates. Be specific, and applicants’ answers
are likely to be specific, too. Ask everyone the same questions, and score
their responses as your gut feelings dictate.

• Above all, Dugan says, remember that the interview is about finding
out about the candidate, not about publicizing your business. “What often
happens when small-business owners interview is they get nervous
about asking questions, so they spend 45 minutes talking about themselves,”
she says. They pay for it later when they discover they didn’t hear
much about the candidates and have little to go on when making a hiring
decision.

7. Get out the magic mirror. Want to improve your customer
service skills? The quickest way to train yourself and your employees
to adopt a friendly demeanor during calls is to put a mirror next to the
phone, says Richard Chase, professor of operations management at the
University of Southern California’s (USC) Marshall School of Business in
Los Angeles. “[If you’re] looking at yourself in the mirror,” he says, “you’re
not going to frown or scowl.”

8. It’s not a joke; it’s poka-yoke. Chase is a proponent of the
Japanese method of designing work sets and kits to reduce the potential
for error. For example, if assembly of a certain component requires four
screws, compiling sets of four screws in advance saves time and reduces
the likelihood of one component getting only three screws.
Can you find a poka-yoke solution to rid your business of mistakes?
Maybe it’s creating sales kits so salespeople don’t have to collect the
items they need each time they want to send information to potential
customers. Or in a packing/shipping company, Chase notes, it might
mean putting a box, tape and packing material together in a kit.
“Anything you can do to keep employees from having to root around
in one bin and then another is going to save time,” he says.
For situations where kits don’t apply—such as asking someone to
clean up a stockroom—Chase suggests offering a photograph that shows
the person the solution as it was reached before. “This is an old trick for
getting your kids to clean up their rooms the right way,” Chase says.

9. Get the message. When Shel Lustig and his two partners
moved their Des Plaines, Illinois, radio-production company, MediaTracks
Communications, into a new suite of offices several years ago, one of the
most important decisions they faced was what kind of phone system to
purchase. “We had to have something where, if a message came in to
me but it ought to have gone to one of my partners, I could forward it
directly to that person,” Lustig says.
It’s a simple feature called message forwarding, a service that’s
available from your local phone company. Lustig says his firm relies on it.
“The information conveyed is 100 percent accurate, so you save all the
time you used to lose on confusion and mistakes,” he says.

10. Start a commune. You have a file on XYZ vendor, and so do
three other people on your staff. Eliminate duplication and the risk of
errors, and make all the information available to everybody at once by
starting a communal filing system. There should be a main file on each
vendor, major order or other ongoing issue, so anyone who needs to
check on it can do so whenever necessary. Each file should be kept in
the appropriate person’s office—the person who refers to the file most
often; other employees should have access to it as needed.

11. Keep it brief. Any time there’s something people ought to
know, pull everybody together for a three- to five-minute meeting. That
way, you’ll know everybody’s on the same page right from the start.
There’s no “Gee, I thought Bill would tell you.” You’ll save a lot of time
by not having to write and pass out memos.

12. Use tools that float. If you have employees who go out
on the road, set up an office pool of cell phones and laptop computers.
Portable office equipment that’s available for any traveler saves time
for both the road warrior and the home office. This way, your employees
can make the calls they need to while on the run or log in from a hotel
room—whatever they need to do. And those of you back at the office who
need to reach them or get something to them can get it done without a
lot of crossed wires.

13. Stay home. A client in Cleveland calls with some new worries,
and you instantly dispatch a trusted employee to get out to Ohio and put
out that fire. But could you have done it sitting in your office? “There’s a
knee-jerk reaction to put people on a plane and send them here or there
without asking yourself if the trip was necessary,” Dugan says. “There’s so
much technology available now, you can probably do just as much for the
client with a teleconference, and you keep from wearing out your staff by
not putting them on planes all the time.”

Personal meetings may be important, but many businesses seem to
be cutting back on them, using sophisticated communications equipment
instead. A survey of businesses by the National Business Travel Association
found that 54 percent of respondents reduced the number of trips
their employees make, while 52 percent now rely on videoconferencing,
and 35 percent use teleconferencing.

14. Be prepared to fly. Everybody knows the worst part of
business travel is spending time in airports, the great black holes where
productivity is concerned. USC’s Chase urges anyone who travels for
business to become “a self-contained unit, as decoupled from the airline
and the airport as possible.” This goes beyond traveling with only carryon
luggage, he says, to bringing along a snack or a bottle of water and
knowing your gate number before you enter the airport.

The National Business Travel Association takes it one step further by
recommending you keep a log of flight numbers, airline customer-service
phone numbers and car-rental confirmation numbers. This helps if reservations get lost or computers go down.

15. Finally, take a vacation seriously. There’s nothing worse
for peace of mind than scheduling family time, a special trip or simply a
day of nothing and having phone calls from, to or about work periodically
intrude. Vacation time isn’t for lazy people; it’s one of the best shortcuts
to success. Just as athletes know their muscles need a break between
workouts, you also need time to rest and rebuild. “We all need time to
recharge our batteries,” says the University of Pittsburgh’s Dugan. “When
you go back to work refreshed [from a vacation], your creative juices are
flowing again, and you’re more effective.”
Dugan warns that free time has to be treated as sacrosanct. “Pick up
the phone to answer one call, and it’s no longer free time. There’s a second
call you have to make because of that one, and on and on it goes,”
he says. “Think of time off as the best time you spend on your business.
Downtime makes it possible to develop [new ideas] and start thinking
strategically and creatively about your business again.”