The ultimate guide to small business administration

It’s often said that small business is the backbone of America — or whatever country you find yourself in — but here’s the thing:

Many owners struggle with small business administration.

The day-to-day ordeals of running a business can be enough to put anyone off the idea entirely, with owners regularly working tons of hours a week and barely growing the company.

There’s one major reason that small business owners experience this burnout, though:

They aren’t equipped with the knowledge to grow.

This article is going to give a strong foundation of how to manage a small business’ growth, covering 3 key areas:

• HR/hiring/onboarding
• Marketing
• Sales

We’ll also give you an inside look into how to optimize each of these business areas using monday.com

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What is a small business?

We all know what a business is, but the word small is open to a lot of interpretation. After all, it’s relative.

In general terms, a small business is a sole tradership, partnership, or privately owned corporation – so, not a publicly listed company – with lower revenue or fewer employees than a regular-sized business.

Which is still a little bit down to interpretation, and it varies hugely by industry and by country.

The US Small Business Administration has a few more definitive guidelines, however:

From that, we can say that anything sub $1m or 100 employees fits the small business criteria — in most industries — and the area from 100-500 employees, or $1-6m in revenue, is up for debate.

Over those marks, and we’re no longer talking small business.

Okay, so let’s get into the details of day-to-day small business administration, starting with human resources, hiring, and new employee onboarding.

Small business HR/hiring/onboarding

Why is HR for small businesses necessary?

A common mistake that small businesses make is not implementing a strong HR department — or set of procedures — early on.

Focusing on HR from the outset, in fact, offers a number of benefits to small business owners:

• Improve company culture
• Better staff engagement
• Deal with potential issues that may arise (many small business owners don’t have a lot of experience in this area)
• Development of leadership skills and identifying people to invest in

But, most of all:

Hire better staff (and keep them on the payroll)

Hiring new employees can be a pretty painstaking process.

What makes things worse is that many new businesses end up hiring the wrong person for the role, inevitably costing the company money.

By bringing on an HR expert, your small business administration costs can actually decrease — as a result of better fit and further growth — as they’ll know how to get the best out of your talent scouting efforts.

Small business owners often fail to realize that employee turnover is a very real thing, and it can be very costly.

It’s why 87% of HR professionals consider retention their top priority.

A well-built HR team will be able to spot risks early and implement appropriate interventions to keep that employee on board.

Common small business HR mistakes

There’s some good news, though: you can learn from the mistakes of others and aim to avoid them.

Let’s look at some common HR mistakes that small businesses make.

Hiring

The top of all small business concerns, when it comes to HR, should be hiring.

Often, a small business owner makes one or more of these mistakes:

• Rushing to hire new staff and inevitably hiring the wrong people for the job in order to fill a gap
• Not taking the time to craft strong, accurate, and helpful job descriptions
• Offering too little in terms of salary or wages, rather than investing in experienced employees who can bring something valuable to the table

Onboarding and training

Getting new employees through the door isn’t the only thing that counts, though.

A major area where many a business owner falls flat is in onboarding and training, both initial and ongoing.

The issue is so pressing that 20% of new employees wouldn’t recommend the workplace to a friend or family member after experiencing their onboarding process!

Other common HR mistakes entrepreneurs and small business owners make include:

• Not documenting performance (in order to track improvement, or to be prepared for performance-related discussion)
• Not investing in further training and coaching
• Being ignorant of (or completely ignoring) employment law

Using monday.com for small business HR

Avoiding these mistakes is easy if you’ve got a good system in place.

Let’s take a look at 3 ways you can use monday.com for small business HR.

Recruitment processing

To start with, we’re going to need to capture applicant information.

We can do that easily using a monday.com form:

When an applicant enters their information, it is automatically imported to your recruitment board.

By creating a monday.com board with Person, Status, and Dropdown columns, you can track each stage of the recruitment process and know exactly where you stand at a glance.

Now, let’s eliminate the manual grunt work involved in recruitment — communicating with those unsuccessful applicants — by using an Automation recipe.

Onboarding

Managing onboarding effectively will allow your employees to become self-sufficient faster, and improve ramp rates for new sales reps.

We can use a monday.com board like the one above to track each stage of the onboarding process and make sure nothing gets missed in all of the chaos.

Workplace wiki

In business both small and large, information should not exist solely in the head of the owner (or anyone for that matter).

If you’ve got business processes, product knowledge, company policies, or any kind of intellectual property that is helpful for employees, it should be easily accessible.

Effective HR departments use monday.com to create a knowledge base or workplace wiki, just like this one:

Small business HR: tick!

What’s next?

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Small business marketing

Growing your business is all about marketing, so yes, it’s a crucial component of small business administration.

Why is marketing for small businesses necessary?

There are a number of reasons that marketing your small business is a critical part of growth.

The first — and most obvious — is that you’re still small, so you’re probably trying to get your brand out there, get known, and grow.

And, if you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re looking to grow fast!

Even if you aren’t actively looking to grow, marketing — digital marketing in particular — is super important, with 81% of shoppers performing online research before committing to a purchase.

Many businesses get their start by selling to their inner circle: friends, family, business associates, and referrals.

It’s a great place to start to get some traction, but the pool runs dry pretty quickly, and focusing on marketing early on will help you avoid getting stuck in that rut.

It’ll also help you to compete more effectively with larger, existing companies, without getting squashed before you’ve even begun.

Perhaps most importantly for new businesses, investing in the right kinds of marketing can help you to learn more about what your customers needs are, allowing you to continuously adjust and improve your product or service offering.

Common small business marketing mistakes

If you don’t have experience in the field, marketing your small business can be tough.

You’re probably best off either hiring a marketing agency or bringing a marketing expert on board if you’re serious about getting things done right.

However, that’s not always feasible for early-stage companies, so you should at the very least prepare yourself to avoid these common small business marketing mistakes:

• Not doing any marketing at all: c’mon, you’ve got to start somewhere!
• Not have a strategy and a plan: often, business owners just dig in, without spending the time to craft a serious strategy. The time you invest in planning is just as — if not more — important as the actions you take thereafter.
• Not being clear on your point of difference: part of developing your marketing strategy is understanding why your potential customers should care. What is it that you offer that nobody else does? How do you help? What problem do you solve?
• Not paying attention to competition: speaking of what you do differently, who else is doing what you do? What marketing efforts are they investing in? How is that working for them?
• Not narrowing down your service and your target audience: small business owners often make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone. To be successful, you should do the opposite. Niche down, and define exactly who needs that product or service.
• Not seeking expertise if you don’t have it: again, maybe you don’t have the cash flow yet to invest money in expertise, but you can invest time. There are plenty of free resources on the web to help with this, and some fantastic social media communities to raise your questions with.
• Not taking risks: just because you’re seeking out the right expertise and knowledge, doesn’t mean you can’t take a few risks. Trust your gut, and give it a go. You know what they say: high risk, high reward.

Using monday.com for small business marketing

The greatest part about small business is that you’re not locked into any arbitrary legacy processes, and you’re free to do things your way.

That means you need a Work OS that lets you build systems to do your way: monday.com

You can use monday.com to build out a content calendar, like this:

Or create your marketing plan, like this:

Prefer to view your marketing calendar as a Gantt chart?

No problem.

Working with freelancers or external contractors to get marketing work done?

Chances are you’re not going to want to share everything with them. That’s why monday.com allows you to create user-based permissions, bringing outside parties into your workflow without sacrificing data privacy and security.

A strong marketing strategy is not complete with a robust set of reporting tools to measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

With monday.com, you can build your own custom dashboards to see everything you need on one screen.

Small business sales

Why is sales for small businesses necessary?

One common trap that small business owners fall into is handling all of the customer-facing and sales activities themselves.

In fact, only 31% of these proprietors are even focusing on sales.

This is bad for business, not least because you’re limiting your own revenue growth, but if you’re managing it all yourself, you’ve got less time left over to work on the business.

That’s why building a robust sales team — and process — is so crucial for small business, as it allows owners to stop working in the business, and focus on making it bigger and better.

Common small business sales mistakes

Just as with HR and marketing, there is no shortage of sales mistakes small business owners make.

Targeting

There are 2 key areas where small businesses fall over when it comes to sales. The first is targeting the wrong types of customers.

Instead of nailing down their niche, identifying their ideal customer, and spending their time focusing on those opportunities, many business owners aim to target anyone and everyone.

This inevitably dilutes the pool of real prospects and means a significant chunk of time is wasting.

The second sales mistake is not talking to decision-makers.

Sales professionals are — or should be — experts are identifying who in the prospect’s business is going to make the final call on a purchase, and talking with them.

This isn’t always the case with small business operators.

Systems

A major part of a successful sales division is having a robust set of systems to build from. This refers to your technological sales stack, as well as internal processes.

Which brings us to the primary mistake when it comes to sales systems: not having a sales process.

A sales process allows you to determine what is working — and what isn’t — and to assess performance amongst team members.

In addition to not having a well-defined sales process, small business owners often neglect to use technologies that would enable them to:

• Automate parts of the sales process
• Track where leads are coming from
• Accurately report on sales progress and performance

Sales skills

Not every business owner is a sales expert. In fact, most aren’t.

This inevitably means many small business owners who aren’t investing in a high-performing sales team are making a series of sales faux pas, such as not asking for the sale, or ignoring prospects who say ‘no’, rather than trying to find a fit.

Using monday.com for small business sales

No tech stack can make up for a lack of sales expertise in a small business, but it can do a lot to improve the effectiveness of your sales team, even if it’s just you as the business owner for now.

Let’s take a look at how monday.com can help amplify your small business sales.

The first thing to implement when building a sales system is a way to track your sales pipeline.

Keeping track of customer and lead data is essential, which is why you should be investing in a sales CRM early.

Speeding up sales workflows is also essential, which is why monday.com makes creating automation recipes simple:

Your sales team is also going to need to have regular access to sales collateral, as well as company documentation regarding your sales process, best practices, and product or service information.

Keep everything in one place by creating a knowledge base board.

Lastly, as you’re stepping out of the day to day action of small business sales, you’re going to want to be able to understand sales performance and progress at a glance.

monday.com makes sales reporting easy, with a strong set of reporting tools and customizable dashboards that allow you to see what you want, when you want it.

Exceed all your small business administration needs

Building a small business up from the ground is an exciting — and sometimes scary — experience.

For some, it’s wrought with headaches and long nights in the office. For others, it’s the most fun they’ve ever had, all while putting cash in the bank.

For many, it’s a combination of both, but by following the advice in this guide, you’ll find yourself in the latter camp more often than the former.

So, where to start?

Check out our employee onboarding template for monday.com, and start hiring some expertise into your team!

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