Want To Earn Your Dream Income But Work Less In Your Business?

It would be fair to say that the biggest two issues a business owner has is cashflow and lack of time. The interesting thing is these go hand in hand and can manifest each other to either being amazing or spiral well out of control.

You need time to earn more money and you need more money to get back more time.

 

So, what should a business owner focus on to help solve these problems?

 

The first thing we need to look at is what in your business creates time; and what in your business helps bring the cash. So let’s look at the fundamental business functions and what they will bring into your business.

 

Cash is easily summarised by the following functions in your business:

 

Marketing – Bring people to your door, letting them know about your product and being able be seen by people unaware of your product or service offering. Being able to know your marketing budget and focus your marketing efforts in the right areas with highest rate of return is the ultimate form of marketing.

 

Sales – Once you get that enquiry from your marketing, sales processes kick in. Have you got an excellent sales process from the initial contact through to the sale and then after sales service? You will find most business owners fly by the seat of their pants. You want more time, streamline your sales process to have a lasting effect on the prospect and also easily manageable for yourself. Have things like templates for emails and phone calls right through to proposals that are easy to complete.

 

Operations / Customer Service – How to deliver your product and service with quality and the best for the customer/client/patient. Create huge referrals for doing this process and leaving a lasting impression. Rarely is this done in business because the business owner and their employees are too busy and again, fly by the seat of their pants.

 

Finance / Admin – How to manage your cash and find out where you are going from a business perspective. Having great reporting function, budgets, maximum earning capacities, KPI’s is essential to help make business decisions in your business. This is your scorecard to how you are performing as a business and a business owner.

 

Time can only be provided back in your business with the following functions:

 

Systems – Each one of the marketing, sales and operations tasks should be systemised some way to save time across the board in your business. Either computer systems or process flow, systems is fundamental to follow to create consistency and also ease of delivery.

 

Team – To run the systems that run the business functions of a successful business. The challenge is team cost money and a lot of business owners will not take the risk to put on team.

 

By looking at each of these areas in depth and creating appropriate systems is the first step to getting your time back. If you are doing everything yourself then you will need to get control of your time management which is easy to do, if you have the right discipline to do so….

 

So how do you, as a business owner become more productive? It really is simple if you are willing to make some changes:

 

Your environment – Do you work in an environment where you can be interrupted every 5 seconds, does your phone and emails just constantly go off. You need to change your environment to be more productive. Remove yourself from distractions, turn your phone and email off. You are not that special that you need to be available 24/7. So change your environment and you will change your time.

 

80/20 rule – Be available for your customers, suppliers and team 80% of your working week and the remaining 20% is to work on the cash flow functions of the business. That means not being contactable during these times and you just focus. Reality, most people get more things done early morning or late evenings due to their interruptions. Imagine you could deal with those interruptions during the working day a lot more effectively. You will get more done. So go lock yourself away 20% of the time in your working week and watch your productivity sky rocket.

 

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate – Its funny how much control we want and you probably say, it is easier to get it done myself. So it is time to stop being a control freak. The challenge is this will not work for your productivity or your business. A perfect example is me spending $20 on air tasker recently. Best $20 spent. I had to rush and book a conference room for urgent training and was out on the road not able to do the research. I put a job up on Air tasker and had over 10 people willing to find the room and do all the enquiries for me. Within 30 minutes the task was done and best $20 ever spent. Learn what and how to delegate and you will become a productivity king.

 

Lastly, you want your time back, learn to say the most powerful word you have in time management – NO, yep NO, Lets practice, NOOOOOOO, say it again, NOOOOOOO. As business owners we will drop everything to make a sale, to be there to help our customers out and reality most people understand that you might be busy or can’t get something done straight away. Now you are thinking but I could lose a customer. You won’t, if people want things done urgently then what type of customer will they be? Why did they leave it to the last minute to get to you in the first place. You are in control and the biggest person we need to say No to is ourselves and stop being there for everyone.

 

In summary, business is simple, getting your time back is simple, making money is simple, we as business owners over complicate everything and make it more difficult then it really is. This is just a quick snapshot of what we do at Black Belt Business to help business owners get control of their time and money. Reality is, all your business can provide is time and money, which in turn creates a great lifestyle for you. The more money and time you have the better the lifestyle.

 

Want to spend some time with a Business Instructor. A free 1.5 hour session where will give you the hard reality’s of where you are at in your business and also strategies to help implement straight away. Contact us on 1300 884 589.

 

Nathan McDonald

Head Business Instructor

Black Belt Business