In the last two articles I have spoken about Valuing Your Time.
Now that you appreciate the real value of your time AND
you have identified the LVA’s (Low Value Activities) that have been chewing your time AND
you have arranged to delegate or dump these activities AND
you have accepted the need for personal accountability
you are now in a good position to prioritise how to invest your commercial time in order to maximise your return on investment.
Initially, you may like to look for opportunities where you can maximise your leverage within your business.
Typically these areas include (but are not limited to):
• Staff Training
• Sales & Marketing
• Business processes and systems
• Online business automation/streamlining
IF you still have not done the exercises that I suggested in the last two articles on Valuing Your Time (Part 1 and 2), don’t try and short cut the process. GO BACK and DO the exercises as they set the framework for the right mindset to move forward from here.
And in case you haven’t realised, your mindset is one of the critical contributing factors to your success or failure. OK, yes, we could argue about how much of a contributing factor, but that would miss the point that IT IS a contributing factor and you ignore it at your peril.
As an example, let’s consider a business owner or senior manager who is a control freak. You know the type, the one that says “If you want to get it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself”. Or they may cramp the style of their team members wanting to know all the minutia that is happening in the business, rather than focusing on monitoring key desired outputs and their respective inputs.
Sure, we all know that if you give someone else a task to do, they will probably do it differently to the way you would do it. RELAX!
At first that different way may not be the most efficient or best way to do it. Your team members need to learn and you need to mentor them. You may in fact learn things from them that you had not considered because you were too close to the action and too frantic putting out fires. And, yes, it is possible that your team members can show you better ways to do things IF you make it safe for them to do so.
Trusting others to do things and letting go progressively of the control is one of the most difficult areas for many business owners to come to grips with, especially when the business is your baby and you have put your heart, soul, assets etc into growing it.
Yet here is the key. Unless you learn to let go control of much of the more mundane, operational issues and tasks in your business, your business success will always be capped because you are consciously or unconsciously inhibiting its success.
IF you do this you will find another 1.5 to 2 hours per day each and every day which you can spend working on the business instead of in it.
You have heard that you need to work on your business and NOT in it. This is how, practically, you do it:
• You will be less stressed and more focused and, I dare say, a happier, more contented person which your staff and your family will notice.
• Your business bank account will also be healthier, since contented, happy staff are more productive and focused staff.
So, let’s delve a little deeper and look at:
Training Your Staff
1. Do you train your staff regularly, with direct purposeful intent?
2. If not why NOT?
Perhaps you are thinking of the down time and investment required; and sure it does require time and an investment.
On the other hand, if you do not train them and they continue to operate at 50 per cent or less of their capacity or productivity that will be detrimental to your business.
Soooo, if you don’t train your staff and they stay…can you afford that? No you can’t.
Remember, you need to maximise your leverage, so communicate with your staff. They are not mind readers.
You may like to consider having short sharp weekly meetings with your staff that focus on results you want to achieve in the coming week and what was achieved in the previous week. These meetings should be “tight”, not a talkfest, and they should be interactive, with your staff able to contribute.
For some, this will require a change in culture and will not happen overnight. But it is worth it to persevere. Yes, there will likely be one or more cynics in your team.
Hopefully this will NOT be YOU!
If it is, decide to lead from the front and be an example to your team since they will
Do what you DO, not what you say.
Next week I’ll cover more detail on some specifics you may like to train your team on. | 
