It was a Tuesday and I’d been fighting a headache since Saturday. I’m not the type to just take a pill at the drop of a hat. Not trying to be tough I just think that we too easily reach for medication to sort out issues that are trivial.

Well that Tuesday I mentioned the headache to my wife and she said:

Just take a Tylenol why would you have a headache for 4 days and just ‘tough it out’ anyway?

Certainly smart advice and I took it. Within the hour my head was feeling normal and I could easily concentrate on work again.

Seems pretty silly as I write about it now but how many minor pains do you just let run in your business?

Manual Invoices

When I started running my business I used Billings as my invoicing software. It was a 1 time payment and I’m 100% for keeping business expenses low especially when starting out.

The little ‘pains’ with Billings were:

1. Manually making Paypal invoices
2. Manually marking invoices as paid
3. Manually adding late fees to overdue invoices and sending them again
4. Manually reminding people of overdue invoices

In stepped Ronin which not only allowed a user to pay online via Stripe and Paypal it also automatically marked invoices as paid, automatically added late fees, and automatically reminded people about overdue invoices.

With one monthly service I was able to solve 4 ‘little’ pains and save myself hours a month of manual work. Hours that I could then be billing to clients.

Your Pains

What are your ‘little’ business pains? Do you manually deploy sites via FTP all the time? Have you looked at Beanstalk?

Are you manually making invoices or adding late fees?

Every time you sigh to yourself about a task this week write it down on a ‘little pain’ list. Then at the end of the week choose one that you are going to fix.

If you can fix one a week for a while your business will be way more fun to run.

Expenses

The two items above are monthly recurring expenses and expenses can easily drain your business (as I spent last week telling my email list). Hold out and find free solutions if you can, don’t just jump in to the next Sass service.

But don’t let a little pain linger around just because you can’t bear to part with a few dollars.

photo credit: e-MagineArt.com via photopin cc