How to Fix Bottlenecked Workflows in Small Business Administration
Lisa Millar
Are you a solopreneur or a small team running a business? In many small businesses, administrative tasks often become an afterthought—done only in crisis mode, causing stress and inefficiencies. Tasks like bookkeeping, customer service protocols, file management, and client onboarding frequently lack a clear plan.
Why Administrative Bottlenecks Hurt Small Businesses
The reason? Business owners prioritize client work and revenue generation, leaving admin tasks overlooked. Without intentional strategic administration, time and energy are wasted, critical tasks fall through the cracks, and business operations suffer.
This can lead to:
Financial penalties and missed invoicing
Frustrated, confused clients
Hours wasted searching for files
Repeating processes instead of streamlining them
It’s easy to focus on sales, marketing, and innovation because they drive revenue. Neglecting administrative procedures though, impacts cash flow, client retention, and overall stability.
By building streamlined administrative workflows, businesses can achieve strategic cash flow management, improve client retention, and create a strong foundation for growth.
What I’ve Learned From Working With Small Business Owners
Admin is not everyone’s love story. It can be a real pain if your talents lay elsewhere and you simply don’t want to deal with it. While often overlooked, efficient administrative practices are the backbone of a thriving business, energizing and stabilizing all other operations.
Operations is one area in which I’ve worked to support small business owners. We create a plan together for their business to implement highly effective practices and organization in cashflow management, file storage, communication, client onboarding and retention, to name a few.
Over 20 years ago I began my career as an administrative assistant in architecture and health and wellness businesses, gaining deep insight into small business operations. I noticed the most successful companies embraced structured processes, adapted to change, and built strong client relationships.
On the other hand, businesses that resisted change and automating processes (avoiding technology, neglecting organization, and failing to meet evolving customer needs) eventually saw declining revenue and high employee turnover.
Due to neglect, administrative and operational workflows get jammed up.
Lost time = lost money
Remember: Administrative procedures connect every aspect of an organization.
A company is only as strong as its weakest link.
Administrative bottlenecks stall projects, stress out staff and frustrate customers. This triggers chaos to varying degrees and a downward spiral unless something changes.
If you are ready to learn more, keep reading.
How to Identify Workflow Bottlenecks in Your Business
Tasks that take longer than necessary to complete use up valuable time and resources. With a little creativity and assessment, you can design efficiency into your workflows.
It is important to not skimp on this process, or you will start using bandaid solutions that become costly and frustrating. It is crucial to get to the source of the problem and unravel it to find long-term solutions that work.
Your aim is to improve efficiency and make life easier for you and your employees, therefore I recommend not rushing this process. Putting a bandaid on a festering wound does not stop the infection, it just temporarily blocks you from seeing it. This is the same with solving administrative problems. Spend the time now and solve it at its source. Over time, you will become very skilled at quickly identifying bottlenecks and getting the workflow moving again.
Step One: Look for Common Causes of Time-Consuming Administrative Tasks
The obvious ones
Repetitive tasks are not automated and hours are spent duplicating tasks
Creating every task from scratch
No clear line of authority for decision-making or there are delays in project approvals
Ineffective communication - overflowing emails, too many systems (or lack thereof)
Overworked staff - tasks fall by the wayside because staff have to prioritize what they can do. Staff actually become less effective when overburdened.
Frequent new hires who don’t receive the onboarding training they need, resulting in unnecessary errors and mistakes
The sneaky ones
No written or video recorded standard operating procedures. Employees have to figure out how to do semi-routine tasks each time. This is especially true for infrequent tasks. There is no consistency.
Lack of quality control - managing the quality of products and services is left to chance or assumptions. For example, customers receive late and not agreed-upon deliverables, there are missed emails, lost files, and technology not maintained and updated, which leads to time-consuming problems.
Step 2: Look at Your Analytics
Data analytics will give you key information to audit your workflow. For example, track the number of times your customers ask the same question, how they contact you (eg. chatbox, email, phone call, social media), and do team members know where to find project briefs, client contact information and project files?
Step 3: Ask More Questions
When I do business consulting I go into much more depth with clients and lead the discovery process. After gathering data, we look for patterns, ask questions, brainstorm and look for solutions to the identified problems. It takes a combination of sleuthing out the clues, referencing analytics, and asking a lot of questions to source the root cause of workflow disturbances.
Here are a few key questions to ask
Look to see if project due dates have been met and if the client was happy with the quality of what was delivered.
Check for other delays - did employees have to wait for approvals and answers to their questions? Does this happen repeatedly?
What do employees grumble about?
Are there steps in a workflow where customers and employees complain about delays?
When did you last review your workflows? Have key players participate in assessing workflows for bottlenecks or unnecessary steps. Write out the process if you haven’t already. You could create a visual on a whiteboard or use post-it notes on a board.
Strategies to Streamline Administrative Procedures
Once you have figured out the source(s) of the workflow bottlenecks, you can start building strategies to solve the problems and prevent future stressors and costs.
Here are 3 key strategies
Simplify the Process
Here are a few areas to consider:
Look at where you can reduce the number of steps in a task.
Are there redundant and unnecessary steps in the workflow?
Do team members need to be empowered with more autonomy to make decisions (quicker decision-making)?
How well have you trained your employees when they are onboarded and throughout each year (reduced costs in project time, human resource time, losing customers due to quality issues and delays and penalties due to errors, mistakes and confusion)?
Reassess the roles and responsibilities of your employees. Are their skill sets being utilized fully or could you hand off routine administrative tasks to a virtual assistant?
Bring in an outside advisor or consultant to give you valuable, specialized feedback and advice on workflow improvements.
Continuously monitor workflows for areas to improve. Updating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) will help you with this, combined with experience in using your systems.
Build SOPs
Standard Operating Procedures keep you organized and on track. Having systems and processes makes it easy to track analytics and have a data-driven view of how your business is operating.
Look at how the work is being done, fine-tune the workflow and build SOPs for the process.
Create document management systems using SOPs standardizing how to save and find files
Building the SOPs alongside redesigning the workflow will track what you are doing and you can fix and adjust the SOPs along the way.
Automate and Use AI
I will touch on a few suggestions here.
Repetitive tasks take time. Are you manually maintaining your invoicing, typing up cold emails from scratch every time or typing in weekly meetings in a schedule? Look at how you can automate and create systems for getting this work done.
For invoicing, you could use Wave or Quickbooks software, which will prepopulate and keep track of outstanding invoices and delayed payments.
For scheduling use Google Calendar or Outlook, Calendly or TidyCal. There are numerous other strategies but those are a few to consider.
Use ChatGPT or CoPilot to help write email templates, and edit basic documents if you struggle with writing or need to save time. It is really important with AI to use your language, voice and tone and read any AI-generated text closely. AI practices need to be integrated into your SOP manual.
AI is a tool - check for accuracy, clarity, and professionalism no matter how you use or implement it. Don’t just run an AI prompt, copy, paste and forget about it. Your customers will figure out the lack of sincerity behind the correspondence (and get confused). Customers like corresponding with people, not robots! You also need to know what is going on in your business. AI needs supervision.
Conclusion
Administrative bottlenecks cost companies time and money. Looking at common causes for lost time can give you clues and ideas of where to look in your systems and processes to identify the root cause of the operational and administrative workflow problems. You want to go deep and identify the source to alleviate the issues from the ground up. This involves doing an investigation, researching and coming up with solutions. By using key strategies of simplifying, building SOPs and incorporating automation and AI, you are well on your way to unhindered workflows. Plus you will be well-positioned in the future to identify problems sooner and get them resolved, saving you countless hours and lost revenues.
Still feeling stuck and don’t want to attempt sorting out jammed-up workflows alone?
I help small businesses create systems and processes in
Cash flow management
File organization and storage
Communication and client onboarding
Retention strategies and more!
Click HERE to book a FREE 30-minute consultation and let’s get started.