A lot of talk and emphasis goes into making more money by generating leads. Everyone does it, I do it, in fact, half this blog is about Adwords and SEO and lead generation etc.

Once you’ve got some work, more effort should go into streamlining your business processes so that you can handle even more.

When my business first started growing, I was spending a lot of time on the business and not doing work. In fact, I think this happens to all freelancers. The sorts of things you end up doing are drawing up proposals, making invoices, following up payments and other tasks like that. Instead, it’s much better if you can get more billable hours in. If you could do 10% more billable hours, that’s a payrise for you without raising your rates.

Some tasks that can be, and should be automated.

• Streamline your lead generation process
• Streamline your sales process
• Streamline your project management process
• Streamline your billing, accounting and receivables process

The best thing about streamlining your processes, is that it frees up more time for you to grow. If you’re efficient, you can fit in a lot more billable hours. If you manage projects and delegate a lot of your work, you can manage more projects at once by having streamlined systems.

Not only that, but having automated systems makes it easier to be in business. Tax time comes around and you can just fill in the boxes and be done with it. A new lead comes in looking for information and they can slip into your automated education program.

Documented processes are what allows businesses to expand. Documented processes make it easier to sell your business should you ever want to do that.

I was reading the Web Design Business Kit by Brendan Sinclair (if you haven’t already bought it, go and buy it, it’s a great book), and when you get down to it, the whole book is about his systems. What systems he has found work best from 10 years in Web design.

For someone starting out in business, as I did,  it’s actually quite hard to come up with systems and processes, because it’s impossible to know what works best. That’s where it becomes important to draw on resources.

It is hard to find good resources. Every business is different, and there aren’t many people out there that are giving away these sort of secrets. All of the software that’s out there focuses on project management, which is great, but what it is missing is business management. If you want a good suite of tools, you need Basecamp + Salesforce + invoicing software. You’re up for a lot of $$$ for all of those products.

And that is precisely why I’m announcing a new project that I’ve been working on. The product is called Freelance Total, and it is something I have wanted as a freelancer for a long time. Instead of focusing on the tasks that you do as a business, it is a framework that encourages the use of best practice systems to streamline your business.

It focuses on taking the legwork out of mundane business tasks, so you can focus on making money.

It’s a product that will be developed to proof of concept very quickly, and we will be using it at VDP Websites while we’re building it. As soon as it’s ready to use, I’ll be letting people get access to it.

So, if you’re a freelancer, sign up on freelancetotal.com to get notified of updates. It really is going to be great management software.

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