The real reason you’re always busy

Maybe you're making pretty good money, but you're always in a cycle of, 'Get the work, do the work' and at this time of the year it just feels like everything gets put on fast forward.

Let’s talk about a couple of frameworks you can use to think about time differently so that you can generate higher profits for your business in a way that's easier.

When we think about time we tend to think of it in linear terms, but a more helpful metaphor is a target.

Each day  we have the chance to throw some darts at the board. On the outer rungs, we have things that are ‘not urgent and not important’. Things like scrolling YouTube and Tik Tok, it's not urgent and it's not important.

On the next rung, we have things that are ‘urgent and not important’ that might be someone bumping into us at the office and saying, “Hey mate, have you got a minute?“. Or maybe its the ping of an email popping up in your inbox that you don't really need to respond to at that particular moment.

As business owners we want to be sending the majority of our time in the inner two rungs. Things that are ‘urgent and important’, responding to the demand of the work. We need to do the work to get paid.

BUT, the real secret is spending enough time in ‘the zone’ doing things that are ‘not urgent, but are important’. 

These are the things that don't need to be done today. They can be done tomorrow or put off, but because they're not urgent, we tend to put them off. 

Working on your business, tuning the engine of the business and making it more efficient is one of those things. For example, refining your sales process, adjusting your pricing, and improving team culture all of these things don't need to be done today.

Now what happens within your brain at this time of the year is, these outer two rungs go entirely. But what also happens is there becomes more and more demmand from clients and anything that isn't urgent shrinks, or just goes entirely.

Maybe this is something that happens for you when things get really busy? or maybe this is something that happens to you all the time and you just never ever find the time to start working on projects that might improve the way your business is running.

I understand that pressure, and I want to show you a tool that might help re-frame this for you and show you why this stuff really is important and just how important it is in terms of the profit that it can generate for you as an owner.

If we think of the three hats that Michael Gerber talks about in The E-myth, if you haven't read it, you need to. Most of us start businesses with some sort of technical skill. These technical skills are generally pretty easy to find in other people and they are $25-$40 an hour give or take. If we can find someone else to do that technical work, we should do that because it's not worth a hell of a lot to the business.

On the other hand, we've got this next level up which is managing resources, people making sure they are doing and performing at the level they need to be. That might be worth slightly more, let's say $45 - $50 per hour.

Then finally we've got the owner hat. When we put the owner hat on, and we work in that area of the business we're doing things that may not pay us off immediately, but they're returning thousands of dollars an hour.

For example, yesterday I sat with one of my clients who is an engineer. We talked about some pricing changes in terms of his charge-out rates. It's going to take them about an hour to implement, but the increase in profit worked out to about $5000 per year, per person. These tasks here are worth considerably more to the business.  

If we think about other areas of the business like refining your sales process, so you're not losing leads and you're increasing your conversion rate. If you're working out ways to increase your average dollar sale or improving your team culture or investing in training a team member, all of these things you may spend an hour doing, but they pay you in ten's of hours or ten's of thousands of dollars over the long term.

When you think about this as a concept, I'm guessing you're with me, your like yeah, that makes sense, why I should be doing this stuff here? I should be working as an owner in those high-level high-value tasks.

Just to iterate that slightly differently, if you think about your job as an owner, your return on time, over time should be going up but over time and the amount of money you make per hour should to be going up.

If this makes sense, I would ask the question:

When you think about an average week for you, What's that week actually filled up with?

If it's just filled up with technician time, you're only ever doing stuff that's worth $25 - $35 an hour.

Maybe you're doing a little better and you're getting some of these management blocks, but if you have no time in your week that is allocated to working on projects that are making you thousands of dollars an hour, you're not just limiting your business in the short-term, but also in the long-term.

I want you to be really honest with yourself about what it is that you're filling your weeks up with and if it's week after week after week of just technical time. A lot of owners will jump back on the tools at the end of the year and say “Yeah, I made some money, and that was great, but I could have made way more money if that time was filled with high-value tasks, thousand-dollar plus an hour tasks”.

I appreciate this is a challenging thing for you to get your head around and to actually practically make a change there's a whole bunch of stuff that sits underneath this, but I want to challenge you with that and also extend an offer.

If this is something that you want help with and you've just been struggling for a long time to actually allocate that time and you've been unsure about what projects to prioritise, then send me an email. I’m happy to help and give you some advice!