The Small Business Money Machine III

by Jody C. Rookstool

Three Pillars of Success – Part 3 

Part 2 of The Three Pillars of Success builds on learning to focus your effort and energy on the things that matter most.  Pillar three focuses on learning to properly control your time each day and investing it in areas that will create repeatable, scalable and profitable growth. 

Pillar 3 – Time

Every person who decides to start a business has the same number of hours in the day.  The difference between success and failure is closely tied to how you choose to invest that time.  Yes, time is an investment. You exchange it for a return of some sort.  Part 3 focuses on how you can spend your time on things that will have the most significant impact and turn your dream of a successful business into a reality. 

The average business owner works 59 hours per week in their business.  If you want to change your future results, start tracking how much of your time is spent working IN the business versus ON the business.  If you only allocate 4 – 5 late night hours per week on marketing for instance, after you get back from a long day of repairing a roof, cleaning a carpet, making the food, as an example, then you can expect you will keep getting about what you have now.

Your time must worth more to you than simply making a living and eking out a small profit each month.  If you are tired of being stressed out on every single payroll and wondering if there is going to be any money left over than making a choice to invest your time in things like marketing your business, finding new customers, the messages those customers respond to best, refining your production processes to reduce waste and increase efficiency, analyzing your financials to see where your revenue is really going, and the list goes on and on. 

Learning to invest your time each day requires discipline.  It’s so tempting to always want to rush off and put out every fire and do all the work because you feel like you are more capable than the person you hired.  A smarter investment would be to spend time properly training that person to focus on every detail the way you would until they master the process and you trust them well. Then, you can focus on other activities that will grow the business.

So many business owners get caught in the trap of trying to do every task in their business because they feel they can’t afford to hire someone else to do the job.  The fact is you can’t afford NOT to hire the right people and invest time in training them if you want to grow.  Great people build businesses, not great products and services.  It requires a team that has the same training, vision, and direction to replace parts of what you do. 

Make sure you focus part of your time on finding the RIGHT people; not just a warm body because you are too exhausted to really put in the effort to find the best person.  There are so many business owners that work hard, but very few have the ability to understand where to invest their time best to create a future financial return. 

The list of things you should be spending time on each day may vary depending on your business.  What doesn’t change is that every business must have someone who is investing time in the things that matter most. Such will have the most significant impact on your bottom line. 

Once you have spent a day, you can’t get that time back.  Once that day is gone, you can’t change it.  What investment to focus on growing your business will you make? Are you willing to get up earlier to make sure you get the most important things that drive growth are done first? Are you willing to invest in yourself by going to seminars and reading books to help you find the answers of how to succeed? 

The fact you made it this far in this article says you are someone willing to make a better investment of time each day.  Start tracking how much time you spend each day doing various activities involved with running your business. If more time is spent putting out fires and producing products or services than it is on things that will impact growth for the long-term than now is the time to change.

Here is a short list of things you might choose to invest your time in:

1. Detailed and comprehensive searches for the right people to join your company.
2. Training your people to do an as good or better job than you would at various aspects of company related to what you produce or sell.
3. Analyzing how customers find you and why they come looking.
4. Calling your best customers and asking them what caused them to choose you and how you can better improve their experience with your company.
5. In-depth analysis for your companies’ financials and working with a good accountant to make sure you understand where your money goes and why.
6. Finding the right technology at the lowest possible cost to streamline how you run your business or interact with customers. 

And the list goes on and on.  The real key is that your investment of time must be on big-picture, high-impact items or you will never reach your goal of creating a company that is repeatable, scalable and profitable.