Do you find yourself feeling overwhelmed with the number of emails that you have to answer every day? The answer is all about managing traffic flow and using the 80/20 rule.
You either put a band-aid on the problem and treat the symptoms like hiring people to manage your inbox or you fix the problem by managing the traffic flow from front to end.
More often than not, 80% of the traffic you receive is low-level traffic and can be answered by one of your staff. Moreover, if 80% of the low-level traffic was directed to the right person to begin with then it saves you having to answer it at all.
You then only have to handle the 20% high-level traffic. Since you, the owner, and/or Senior Client Manager is the highest cost resource to your business, it’s not a good thing for you to be answering low-level traffic.
Where most firms go wrong is that the partner is the first contact point for clients and everything comes to them before they delegate to their team. You should set up a deep and narrow ideal team structure where all initial traffic goes first through your Senior Client Manager. He/She will then direct the traffic to the relevant team members.
This will remove 80% of low-level traffic from you and you only have the high-level traffic (20%) to deal with. Doing this will lead to two things:
- You drive the cost down to a lower-cost resource to handle a lower-level question, and
- You can charge your charge rate for answering high-level traffic.
Setting up an ideal team structure and managing the traffic flow will tremendously reduce your workload and will allow you to focus more on growing your business.