Working On Your Business

31 August 2022

I talk with a lot of business owners about how much time they spend on their business, and you will be surprised that the vast majority of business owners and leaders spend virtually no time on their business, except maybe when they are doing a budget or a forecast for the bank or accountant.

It’s obviously very important to get a balance between working in and working on your business as clearly if you spend all your time thinking up great ideas but not actually executing them, then you’re not going to get the right results.

I often liken it to getting into a helicopter and getting up high and above the business, this way you can see the overview of exactly what is happening in your business.

So, when you’re working in your business you are basically doing the do, the normal working activities of your business that need to be achieved. Some of these activities no doubt you will believe can only be done by you and of course you are the best at doing them.

If these daily tasks start taking all of your available time, then a number of things will start to happen to you and your business.

1. Your business will eventually stop growing
2. You will become unhappy doing mundane jobs all the time
3. You will fall behind in the marketplace, perhaps becoming obsolete
4. Nothing new will ever happen
5. You will lack direction
6. Your personal and business gaols will not be aligned
7. You will have no tangible exit

It is therefore pretty obvious that we need to spend time on the business, so how and how long should we spend.

The most important thing initially is to start to block out some time straight away, stop putting it off and just do it.

Remember, procrastination is the main enemy of most business owners.

As a minimum, start with at least one working day per month, if you work 20 days per month then this is only 5 percent of your time, also change your environment, somewhere quite but pleasant, relate your time out to having a good experience. It’s essential you are not disturbed by staff or in fact anything that can stop you thinking creatively.

Create some stretch targets, goals and also things that you would like to achieve in life that your business may help you achieve through great performance

If we can align our business performance to things that we would like to achieve in our personal life then it makes it much easier to focus on achieving our business goals and then simultaneously creating the opportunities within our personal life.