Top 5 Tips for Creating an Administrative Business System

Having an administrative business system is vital to growing your business online.

An administrative system streamlines and automates routine tasks and “to-do’s” in your other systems. 

Imagine running a business where overwhelm, stress, burnout, and overwork are minimized. A business that conserves essential time, allowing you to channel it into hobbies, rest, or high-growth activities like creating new products. This is the power of a robust administrative system. It's not just about efficiency, it's about creating a space for your business to thrive.

Establishing an excellent administrative system can be challenging. That’s because the hardest thing about it is creating and setting it up.

It’s important to remember that it helps run an online business quietly in the background once set up.

If you’re considering creating or tweaking your administrative system, I’m sharing my top 5 tips to help.  

We’ll cover:

• what systems are, how they work, and why we need them.
• what administrative systems are + what tasks and tools could go into it.
• 5 tips to create an administrative system that helps run your business.

What are Business Systems for Entrepreneurs?

Business systems, in their simplest form, are any routine that makes your time more efficient. 

We use systems all the time when we work from one thing to the next. We find the patterns and complete routines over and over again, making us faster as we go.

We can make systems so efficient that we can hand them off to someone else, work less, and hire others to complete behind-the-scenes business tasks. 

What’s an Administrative System?

Administrative Tasks: 

Business administration involves the essential tasks of running a business. A majority of these tasks are repetitive. They can be routinized, delegated, or automated. 

Administrative System:

An administrative system is the set of routines, processes, or procedures that manage administrative tasks, the behind-the-scenes minutia of your business.

The system will help administrate other systems, like marketing, finance, accounting, delegation, or project management. All are geared towards ensuring efficient operations.

Top 5 Tips to Create an Administrative System

1. Prioritization

The first step to creating a business system is to prioritize it. This involves asking: 

When Will You Do the Work? 

Dedicate regular time to create your system, figure things out, and set it all up. You can use time-blocking to set aside the time you need. 

Which system could benefit the most from more automation, routine, or procedures?

Look at all the systems you already have in place. 

Your administrative system could apply to any of them. Email marketing, long-form content, or accounting are examples of systems you may want to administrate. Choose one that could be significantly improved with more automation, routine, or delegation.

What Tasks Need to be Done?

Once you’ve chosen the system to work with, start thinking about and prioritizing relevant tasks. You can do this by brainstorming a task list or blueprint.

Consider questions like:

• Where can you automate with technology?
• What can be semi-automated with templates?
• Where could you increase productivity by creating a more efficient “operational” procedure? This procedure can be for you, staff, contractors, or assistants.

Let’s look at a practical example of how this may look.

First, you set aside 30 minutes weekly to build an administrative system. This is when you’ll do any work involved in creation and set-up. You use this time to list the systems you already have. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Then, you decide that your email marketing system could be much more efficient. So, you start with that.

2. Understanding the Overlap

Understanding overlap between business systems helps you see how each system affects another. Look for ways to be intentional when building your administrative system and ensure that one system leads into the next through automation, delegation, or elsewhere. 

For instance:

• My blog system only works well because it overlaps with my organization system
• And my social media system only works well because it overlaps with my blog and organization systems. 

So from an administrative perspective, I need to see where things overlap and ensure there are no stop gaps.

3. Organization

It’s time to think about organizing relevant files in the most efficient and accessible way.

You may have decided to automate your email marketing system by creating email templates for routine messages. These could be templates for commonly asked questions, customer service replies, newsletters, or welcome emails.

Now, you need a place to store and organize the templates so they’re easily accessed. You may store and organize them in Google Drive, Trello, or Airtable.

4. Flexibility

Setting any system up involves a lot of trial and error. Monitoring, adapting, and tweaking your new system is crucial, especially for the first 90 days. 

Growing your business online requires flexibility as well. This is what allows you to adapt to changing needs. These could be lifestyle or business needs.  

Let’s look at the email marketing example again. 

After using your email templates for a while, you realize they only include text and visuals. But you’re still constantly chasing down links to insert into them. Staying flexible, you can decide to create a link library. This is a master list of all your links in the same place. I store my link library in Airtable.  

5. Delegation

Finally, look for opportunities to delegate. 

For example, how can you delegate the administration of your email marketing? 

You’ve got templates on hand. They’re organized and accessible to you. But are they organized and accessible for a team member who may handle your inbox? Is there a way to collaborate and communicate regarding the templates or inboxes? 

Another example: The templates are on hand but not well branded. One of the items on your task list was to create more brand visuals for your templates and emails. You decide to delegate the creation of graphics to a contractor. 

Start Creating Your Administrative Business System

Running a business requires a robust administrative system. It all starts with knowing how to prioritize. Besides being the most logical place to begin, prioritization helps prevent being overwhelmed and procrastinating as you set it all up.

If you want a solid administrative system but don’t have the bandwidth to do it yourself, my Signature System Build is a completely Done-For-You service. I work 1:1 with you to build a unique system individualized to your business needs. 

I hope to see you there!