As a business owner, you face new problems every day. When you come into the office Monday morning, there are calls, emails, customers, patients, and a myriad of other things to deal with. By the time it feels like you’re done catching up, you look at the clock, and the day is almost over.
Where did all that time go? How could it have been better spent? Increasing the efficiency of your business is the #1 guaranteed way to increase your business profits, and that’s what I want to talk about this week.
Specifically, I want to talk to you about one of the best ways to spend your time and money as a business owner: Special Project Teams. These are small teams of specialists (yourself included) of around five or six people—you really don’t need more than that, even at a huge company—dedicated to boosting the efficiency of your business, save you precious time, and increase your business profits.
The best part of it all? Special project teams practically pay for themselves.
Increase Your Business Profits by Making That First Commitment
Before we get into Special Project Teams, I have a homework assignment for you. If you’re willing to seriously commit to this, I can guarantee you’ll be increasing your business profits in the near future.
From this point on, I want you to set aside four hours a week for at least 50 weeks (don’t worry, you can take two off) and use that time to commit to improving your business. In all, this will total up to 200 hours a year. After five years, you’ll have spent 1,000 hours working to improve your business instead of just running it. In a business setting, this can give you a serious edge over your competitors and help you corner your niche.
It’s during this time you set aside that you can also begin meeting with your special project team.
Increase Your Business Profits by Putting your Special Project Team Together
If you run a larger business, you may already have a specialized team ready to go. However, since not everyone has a business like that, you may be reading this and thinking to yourself, “I don’t have a team like that. Where am I going to find one?” The answer, of course, is different for everyone, but there are a few ways you can put together your A-team.
At larger companies, you may be able to find a handful of people with big ideas and can-do attitudes to help you improve your business. People often look at companies like Apple and wonder how they’re able to so frequently and consistently innovate and put out new products.
The answer isn’t necessarily that they have a certain “spark of genius” that other companies don’t; they’re able to pull it off because they recognize talent when they see it, and they make full use of that talent to boost their efficiency and capitalize on bold new ideas. If you, like them, are willing to commit like they are, you can do the same thing.
If you run a smaller company and don’t necessarily have a lot of employees, or don’t have easy access to experts, you may be surprised to hear that putting together a small team is still incredibly easy, and it’s all thanks to the internet. Think about those four hours a week you’re going to set aside.
If you spend even a fraction of 200 hours a year searching for the right specialist in your field, you’re virtually guaranteed to find one. There’s no shortage of experts, consultants, and business coaches out there that are willing to help you increase your business profits.
While we’re on the subject, if there’s one other thing that I want you to take away from this, it’s that you should strongly consider hiring a business coach. Business owners often fall into the trap of thinking they know everything and that they can do it all.
No matter how much of an expert you may be, nothing could be farther from the truth—getting an expert’s outside perspective and guidance is not only essential to increasing your business profits but running your business competently as well. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made as a business owner was waiting fifteen years to hire a business coach for myself. Once I did, it made all the difference in the world.
Increasing Business Profits: Your Team in Action
Once you put together your team and commit those four hours a week to improving the efficiency of your business, you’re already on track to increasing your business profits in a big way.
When I worked at Coca-Cola, I put together a team exactly like the one I described, and every week, the six of us would meet to discuss ways to improve the efficiency of the company by solving different problems we had.
We started with the “low-hanging fruit,” or the problems that were easiest to fix. Once we got a handle on those, we moved onto issues that had the biggest impact on the business (this is the same method I’m recommending to you and your team). At one point, we zeroed in on a big problem the company was having, and we were able to solve it. Once we did, we ended up saving them over $10 million dollars a year—every year.
Not only did we increase business profits, but we also did it in the most efficient way possible: the money they were saving more than made up for the amount they were paying us. Essentially, as a special project team, we paid for ourselves, and this is what you want for your business, too.
It may seem intimidating at first, but if you’re willing to set aside the time for that kind of commitment, you’re guaranteed to create an efficient, highly profitable machine that pays for itself. If you weren’t convinced to create a special project team before, I hope you are now.