If I only had another 20 hours a month

What is the value of your time as a business owner? If you had 20 hours more each month to devote to your business, what would you use it for?

Too often business owners get stuck in a rut. They are working a tremendous number of hours juggling everything from keeping stock on the shelves to booking clients to doing their books and fulfilling regulatory requirements. All of this because they need to pay the bills and hopefully take home a little money at the end of each month.

My mom used to call my dad the world’s most expensive plumber. Why? Because he would not want to pay someone to come out and fix a leak. He’d see this plumber as being expensive, but Dad would spend countless hours running to the store, buying parts, and trying to make it work. Most of the time he would be successful and proud of the result and some of the time he would have to resort to calling a plumber in the end. However, if he could have been billing his own clients or thinking about how to improve his own business instead, he could have made as much or more money along the way. The leak would have been fixed with confidence, more quickly and with less chance of future leakage.

With this in mind, reserve an hour or two each month or a day each quarter to see what you are doing that could be done by someone else and free you up as an owner to move your business forward. Then, engage and offload that work to a specialist and focus on the business of your business. Now your job as the owner is to make sure that they are delivering value to you.

This requires a little bit of working capital, but if you would like to be growing and moving your business forward rather than sweeping the floors at night, it is well worth it.

–Eric

Also posted on LinkedIn