How To Organize Your Online Business in 4 Steps

Ready to organize your online business but not sure where to start? You’re in the right place! It’s time to reduce your overwhelm, increase your CEO confidence, and build the business of your dreams.

I developed this four-step organization cycle (that’s right, it never ends) to help online entrepreneurs get their shit together. I’ve seen too many amazing women with sooo much to offer their audiences burn out before they even get their businesses off the ground, and I don’t want that to happen to you.

In this post, you’ll find everything you need to once and for all organize your business and achieve your goals. Let’s get started!

4 Steps To Organize Your Online Business

1. Audit Your Business

Before you can organize your online business, you need to establish your starting point. You need a beginning and an end in order to map out the journey between the two points.

Take a good long look at your business, and be completely honest with yourself.

• Are you building the business of your dreams?
• Are the things you’re spending time on helping you reach your goals?
• Have you been tracking metrics and measuring the growth of your biz?
• What are you doing that isn’t producing any income for you?
• What’s making you feel stressed or overwhelmed?
• Is there anything you can eliminate immediately?

You want to make your business as simple as possible in order to make it more easily scalable in the future. Focus on the aspects that you most enjoy and that bring in the most income for you right now. You can always add to your business as it grows, but don’t overwhelm yourself by taking on too much.

2. Make a Plan

Now that you know the current status of your business, it’s time to plan out the destination and outline the steps it will take to get there. Think about your “why” for starting your business and use that to develop what your dream business will look like in the future. 

Do you want to work 4 hours a day so that you have more time for family? Do you want to create multiple passive income streams or work face-to-face with regular clients? Or do you just want a simple sidehustle? 

Take some time to write out exactly what kind of business you want to own. Describe it in as much detail as possible, and don’t be afraid to dream big. Next, you need to fill in the gap between where you are now and where you want to be.

1. Create a timeline with broad yearly goals
2. Break those yearly goals down into more specific quarterly goals
3. Split the quarters into months and the months into weeks
4. Get more specific each time you break a goal into smaller action steps

Here’s a partial example on how to break things down

• Yearly Financial Goal: Make $50,000
  • Quarter 1 Goal: Create group coaching program
    • Month 1 Goal: Build the program
      • Week 1: Detailed outline
      • Week 2: Write content
      • Week 3: Write processes
      • Week 4: Set up systems
    • Month 2 Goal: Begin marketing
    • Month 3 Goal: Launch - Beta testing
  • Quarter 2 Goal: Offer 1-1 coaching follow up
    • Month 4 Goal: Beta testing with group clients
    • Month 5 Goal: Get 2 new clients
    • Month 6 Goal: Upgrade coaching systems and processes
  • Quarter 3 Goal: Create passive income streams
    • Month 7 Goal: Affiliate marketing
    • Month 8 Goal: eBook
    • Month 9 Goal: Printables
  • Etc…

I like to write out my yearly and quarterly goals for the coming year in December. At the start of each quarter, I break them down into monthly and weekly goals. If I need to create specific action steps for each goal, I can do that on a daily basis.

3. Outline the Processes

This is the not-so-sexy part of organizing your business, but I will make you three promises. If you take the time now to outline your processes you will:

1. Save your future self a ton of time
2. Be fully prepared to scale with a team
3. Experience consistent monthly growth

Sounds pretty good, right? Let’s get started!

Processes are sometimes called workflows or standard operating procedures (SOPs). They are simply a step-by-step outline of your recurring tasks.

If you’re sending a weekly newsletter, you need a process for that. Publishing a blog post? You need a process for that too. And if you want to onboard clients with confidence… yeah, another process.

Here’s my process for outlining processes:

1. Create an SOP template so you don’t have to start from scratch each time
2. Write out your goals, resources, outline, and workflow (G.R.O.W.)
3. Test the process to make sure you didn’t forget a step
4. Update your processes at least every 6 months
5. Hire a team, delegate, and scale your business!

4. Set Up Systems

You know what you need to do. And you know the steps you need to take to get it done. Now, it’s time to set up, streamline, and automate the systems that will make your business run like a well-oiled machine.

If you haven’t done so already, you should start by auditing your current systems. Determine which systems you need to keep, want to add, or should replace. Also, pay attention to your monthly budget so that everything you make isn’t being spent (the purpose of a business is to make money not spend it!).

Here are a few mistakes you’ll want to avoid with your systems:

• Not taking the time to learn how to use your new system efficiently
• Adding more than 1 new system per month and overwhelming yourself
• Spending too much time researching the best tool instead of taking action
• Wasting money on systems you don’t really need

You can view all my favorite systems on my resources page. Some are affiliates, some aren’t, but I’ve tried and approved of all of them. Please feel free to reach out to me if you need help deciding on the right system for your business.

Take Action

So, now that you’ve finished all 4 steps to organize your online business, what’s next? Well, start over! Organization is a never ending process (apologies to everyone who just groaned). Once you’ve set up all your systems, you need to once again audit your business and see how things are running.

There will always be something to improve, something to add, and something to eliminate in order to make your business even better. Keep going, CEO!