In this article we look at an often neglected but crucial aspect of entrepreneurship. Admin. What is admin? – often perceived as a tedious job to be done at the end of the day, half-heartedly so, whether admin is done right or not, can be the difference between your business succeeding or crumbling under the weight of its own mismanagement.  Have a look at what it means to do admin the right way and why it could help stabilize your business for success.

Administration gives an organization its structure. In this regard it forms the skeleton of an organization, allowing for crucial information to flow from one department to another, with each piece of that information being a key competent in keeping the company running. Keeping the order of it is crucial when it comes to preparing it for inevitable growth should all go well. Without a functional administration department, a business would lose efficiency, which could ultimately lead to its eventual demise.

The following points highlight the importance of admin and provide some insight into what needs to be done and why:

1. Manage and organize office effectively and professionally
   • This could be as simple as organizing your desk or computer desktop. Every second spent sifting and searching through a messy workspace is precious time lost that could be spent optimizing your business for productivity
   • This includes tasks like filing and labelling certain documents, forms, invoices and receipts in such a way that each designated sheet is where you put it when you need it. Money can always be made back, but lost time is a different story.

2. Develop an appropriate office management strategy
   •  A key quality of entrepreneurship is being able to see a little into the future, and institute strategies and systems that save you future effort in the present moment. A great example of this is “automation”. Again, it’s about creating a space in which the majority of your time is spent on growing the business while managing it.

3. Develop an appropriate assets management strategy
   • It is crucial to know what belongs to you and how you can make the most out of it all from a monetary point of view. We all know what assets are but not everybody knows how to extract the most value from their assets

4. Develop administrative procedures
   • Putting things off as an entrepreneur is not really a smart move at all, especially your administrative work. It doesn’t take too much for a few slips to turn into a mountain of paperwork for you as an entrepreneur. We’ve waxed lyrical on this quite a bit, but losing time as a result of disorder in your administration is a surefire way to put more strain on yourself. The last thing you need is more work that robs you of your productivity.

5. Able to plan and control administrative budget
   • Tracking the money in and out of your business is essential for planning on how to use it. In this regard, administration is a facilitator of setting organizational goals, policies and procedures. From hiring, firing, purchasing new technologies and settling expenses, budget control is one of the most essential aspects of the administration process.

One final tip for you here! If you’re looking for some general technical skills required to excel at administration as an entrepreneur, look into improving your:

• Reading, writing and speaking
• Computer Literacy
• Accounting and budgeting
• Decision-making
• Time management
• Organization, planning and record keeping

For the most part, the basics will do for developing some sort of competency, but if you like to get your hands dirty and want to save a little bit then dive into learning some more.  Ultimately, you want to identify which tasks are tedious and repetitive and look at automating those so that you are spending less time on them. Feel free to ask cohorts in your industry or even Google. In this increasingly digitised society that we live in, there are a number of different software for a number of different tasks. Try Zapier or Zendesk just to start.

Software:

Xero – Accounting, invoicing. Convenient to use, connects with your bank account to get your transactions in real time. Invoicing is quick as you will have already created templates for your invoices.

Trello  –  Good for managing almost anything from your projects to small tasks and keeping track of where you are in terms of progress

Google Drive – Store all of your items in the cloud. You can use google drive. This is to ensure that you do not lose everything and that you can access everything in anyone of your devices, this way you only need to save things once. You can also share folders with your team so they can access the updated version of anything you save there. Using Google docs/ sheets also helps as anytime you update a document or spreadsheet, your team will have the updated version.

The worst thing you can do is let your admin pile up. To prevent this from happening, schedule time time out of your day where you know for that that designated period, you wont be disturbed as you do the necessary ill of keeping your business optimal. The backlog of admin will eventually seem too daunting and make it harder to start. 

To finish off, while admin may seem tedious, its importance cannot be understated when it comes to the functionality of your workflow. Once you take care of your administration, you’ll enjoy the atmosphere of your environment as an entrepreneur, and flourish from the efficiency and productivity afforded to you by a little bit of order.