3 strategies to help manage your party planning business admin

If you tell people that you plan home parties for direct sales, they probably imagine a pretty easy life. From the outside, it sounds like you spend your working life is just a few hours in the evening, delighting over products and chatting with customers like they are old friends.

Of course, you know the reality is very different. There are those upsides; those pleasant times spent with customers, showing off your wares and delighting in their excitement. However, there’s also the reality of dealing with all the work that goes into planning parties, sourcing products, marketing, and dealing with customer queries– the essential business admin that dominates the majority of your time.

Getting to grips with your business admin is essential for keeping your business ticking over as you might hope. Here are a few strategies that can help you control the paperwork and ensure that you are always focused and ready to go, whatever challenge is placed in front of you.

1. Improve Your Skills

The term “business admin” sounds relatively simple; we all deal with our own household admin, so it’s easy to assume that the skills you build running your home are transferable to your business. In part, this is true; but business admin is far more complex and important than remembering to pay your heating bill on time.

If you’re serious about your business, you might want to consider undertaking an online accredited MBA program that can give you all the business-related skills you might be lacking. This is a great option if you don’t want to have to learn from your mistakes, allowing you to hit the ground running and not make those mistakes in the first instance.

2. A Little A Day Goes A Long Way

When you’re busy, it can be tempting to just push all of your admin work to one side and focus on other aspects of the business; aspects that are undeniably more enjoyable than wading through paperwork. If you do this, however, you may find that those admin tasks begin to stack up, and areas will inevitably be overlooked.

Admin is best approached with a “little and often” strategy. Set aside a single, dedicated hour from every day and run through the most urgent admin demanding your attention. It’s unlikely five hours per week will be enough to manage the entire admin side of your business, but along with the third strategy (to be discussed!), this technique should allow you to keep up with the most pressing matters.

3. Dedicate One Day Per Fortnight To Admin

Your hour per day will help ensure you cover all of the most important matters in good time, but it’s unlikely to be enough dedicated time to cover all your admin needs. That’s why you need to introduce a day where admin is the single focus; one day per fortnight is great, though once a month may be sufficient if your business is still growing.

Use this month to go through all the admin that isn’t particularly time-sensitive, and thus hasn’t been covered on your daily schedule. It might not be the most thrilling working day, but it might just be the most useful.