I've said it before and I'll say it again, the business owner’s time is the most valuable resource in the business! You can buy everything else except more hours in the day.
So what are the best ways the business owner can use to “find” the time to focus on what is most important to their success and survival – Increased sales and profits?
The following are the steps I recommend to every business owner I am coaching when they say they have no time for the changes they have identified as vital to their success:
- I always start by having the owner track their time in detail. To do this, the owner simply writes down everything they do on a pad or a calendar for a week or two. Be sure to mark down how long every job takes.
- Then the owner must decide how much an hour of their time is worth. A simple way is to decide how much they wish to make (or what they would pay to replace themselves) and divide this by 2,500. This is 50 weeks at 50 hours per week (sorry – I don’t know a business owner who doesn’t work at least that much in a year). So, if you want to take home $100,000/year, you need to make a profit of $40/hour.
- Then analyze your time and highlight anything that you are regularly spending your time on that occurs on a regular basis and has no direct impact on your customer or your bottom line. Also highlight items that you are doing that you wouldn’t pay someone the hourly rate you calculated in step two above. ($40/hour in our example.)
- Eliminate as many of the things identified in #3 as possible.
At this point the business owner usually laughs at me and tells me, “Sounds great, but I can’t because (fill in the blank with all of the 100's of excuses you can come up with________).” My response is always the same – If you want to be truly successful, you must! Otherwise, you will continue to have the same problems you are currently having.
In future articles we will explore the following three main ways successful business owners eliminate the work they do that has no direct impact on your customer and that is keeping them from succeeding:
- Outsourcing
- Delegating
- Creating systems
Until then, thank you for your continued support and let’s make 2017 our most profitable year ever!