The Simple Way This Super-Efficient Florist Saved Itself Even More Time

Farmgirl Flowers is designed for minimal fuss. It offers just one floral arrangement per day -- as opposed to, say, selling single roses or carnations -- which keeps flower waste at less than 1 percent, rather than the industry norm of 40 percent. And founder Christina Stembel handles, well, almost everything. "The C-suite -- that's all me," she says. "I'm the CEO, the COO and the CIO here, managing an $11 million operation, so time is precious." That's why, as she's been working to grow her 6-year-old San Francisco-based company, she wanted to escape time-consuming paperwork. Her 77 employees' benefits forms had to be filled out by hand, and vendor agreements were sent back and forth with messengers. Isn't there a better way?

The Fix

In 2014, Stembel began using DocuSign, a cloud-based platform that makes online forms easier to use than paper. You can fill out and sign a contract without ever printing it out, and then send it to whoever needs it -- making transactions so fast that 84 percent are completed within a day, and 62 percent wrap in less than an hour. The system saves and organizes your files, and works with software platforms from the likes of Salesforce, NetSuite, Google, Apple and Microsoft. The vast majority of its users are small to medium-size businesses, says DocuSign founder Tom Gonser, because "there's no investment in software and very little setup involved."