As a small business owner, I often find myself wishing there were more hours in a day.

Do you struggle with the same?

While I can’t give you more literal hours, I can help you leverage your time so it FEELS like there are more. How you ask?

Simply by investing a bit of time now, which will save time in the future. When you spend a few hours now, to create template responses to your commonly asked questions for your business, that saves you precious minutes, which add up to hours, when replying. It can be very hard to take the time now, (“I have too much to do! The kids need dinner, I have orders to fulfill, and my day job too!”) but I promise the payoff is worth it.

Take 10 minutes or so to review your various inboxes, and make a list of the types of conversations you typically have with customers. I bet if you are like most people, there will be less than a dozen types of conversation. Perhaps there will be the people saying thanks for their order, those with an issue (you may find trends here as well), people asking questions etc. You can then write a response to one of each of these, and save it either in the notes on your phone, in a word document, or even as an outlook message all ready to go. This will save you tons of time, since instead of having to craft an entire message each time, you can copy and paste, and change a few relevant details. This will also allow you to reply to messages sooner, therefore improving your customer service. (People LOVE receiving responses right away!)

Hopefully you found this tip helpful, and feel free to contact me for help with these templates to leverage your time even further!