So Black Friday made a lot of headlines because some crazy people did some very stupid things. Heck over here in Australia we even heard about the woman who wanted to pepper-spray her way to a bargain along with a couple of guys who decided that the smartest way to shop was to wait in the car park and rob shoppers as they came out.

Man that is just so stupid ... it really does make you wonder whether people think things through before they decide that they've just had a wonderful idea and they better execute it right away.

We also heard way over here that Black Friday contained some good news too and it turned out to be a record-breaker as far as spending was concerned. That really is great news because it just may be an indicator that the US economy has turned the corner. If people are confident enough to buy stuff they can really live without then maybe they'll go on spending in the months ahead.

If that is the case then some of you just might be about to get rather busy so are you ready for it? Can you handle more work or do you think that you're already working just about as hard as you possibly can?

Before the most recent downturn in the economy my partner and I thought that we had reached the point where it was just not possible to work any harder. Even the people who worked for us were working close to total capacity.

Then came the downturn, some of our work dropped off and we had to let people go. Of course not all the work that they had done disappeared in the downturn ... there was still work coming in that they could do but just not enough to keep them on the payroll so once they had gone Steve and I had to start covering much of that work ourselves.

At first it was quite difficult but then we began to look at ways of doing what I often talk about here ... working smarter rather than harder. We looked at ways of speeding up the work that we were doing ... we looked at ways of automating some of the stuff we did too ... and we looked at our personal projects to see which ones were important enough to keep going and which ones could be slowed down or even ditched all together.

And somehow we survived.

Things began to pick up for us a couple of months ago and work increased to the point where in the past we would have put more people on. Steve even suggested that to me a couple of times but I was beginning to think that maybe going back to the old ways of doing things was not going to be in the best interests of my business.

Instead I've been looking at even more ways of automating a lot of the things that go into what we do for our clients. I've spent more on scripts and programs ... not because I don't want to employ people but because I want eventually to employ those people on tasks that make more money than just the basic grunt work they were doing used to make.

There was certainly some friction with that approach as far as Steve was concerned. For example I really started using a program called Artisteer to build the style sheets for websites and the child themes for WordPress installations that we were doing for clients and Steve really didn't like it. He thought that it built crap code and using it was a retrograde step.

Imagine his surprise when I got him to run one of those sites through the W3C Markup Validator and it returned zero errors and warnings . Needless to say he has now become something of a fan ... not a big fan yet ... but give him time.

For the next couple of months we'll keep on with our current staffing levels and I'll keep looking for new ways to speed up what we do but about February we'll may be back to taking people on and this time they'll be doing more than just basic grunt work.

So are there ways for you to speed up what you do so that you can do even more and meet the demand of people who might suddenly want to buy again? Is there software out there that can take a lot of the hard work out of the things that you do every day?

Are there script s and software that you looked at in the past that could do those things but you weren't happy with the finished product that they produced? Maybe it's time to revisit those scripts and software because they may have been improved since the last time you looked at them.

And whether the economy is about to start moving in the right direction or not it's important that you spend more time on the key parts of your business that can make you real money and less time on doing repetitive stuff that only brings in small change.

02/20/2012 - Tales from the Street

01/23/2012 - Getting Inside Their Heads

01/17/2012 - Planning to Survive

01/09/2012 - Headlines and Creeping Jobs

01/02/2012 - What Are You Planning for 2012?

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