Most business owners recognise that they have to keep multiple plates spinning at any one time to effectively manage their business. One of the hardest challenges is to balance how much time you should spend spinning each plate ie on the 3 critical areas of your business, to ensure things do run smoothly.
Those 3 areas are:
- Delivering work to your clients
- Generating new business (working on your business)
- Managing your business (aka admin!)
When I first started out I was told to split my time evenly between all 3 areas. I’m not sure I necessarily feel that’s correct as you can easily free up some of that 33% of your week when you should be doing your admin by effectively outsourcing elements of it, and the same could be true of some of the chunk of time for generating new business. However I definitely do agree with the concept that you can’t spend 100% of your time delivering client work.
Too many businesses, especially service based ones, fall into the trap of working out their pricing structure based on the notion of working X hours a week where invariably X is higher than 33%, and usually a lot closer to 100%. This results in them working flat out, not generating the revenues they need to/want to, and not effectively managing & growing their business.
Based on this you need to have a think about how realistic it is for you to work the number of hours required to hit your revenue targets given the need to do your admin and to grow your business. As a rough guess-timate, if you work full-time, I would say about 1 day a week is taken up with admin type activities incl returning phone calls, doing emails etc as, and 1 day should be devoted to business growth related activities which would leave you 60% of your time to be generating your revenue. These are only rough guidelines and will vary for each business.
So the challenge this week is to figure out how much time you are spending on delivering work to your clients (revenue generating) compared to doing business admin and business growth activities. Once you know how much time you are spending on delivering your work you can then 1) work out how to make it more effective 2) how to increase it by streamlining your business admin & business growth activities 3) review your pricing structure.
The net result should be the ability to generate more revenue and have more efficient business processes for your admin and business growth. Sounds good to me !