I’d like to ask you a question, “As a business owner, have you ever felt like your to do list is never ending? That you simply don’t have enough hours in the day to get things done to grow your business?” I know that I have.
The other day one of my kids was asking me if I had a time machine. The reason she was asking me is because it’s Christmastime and she couldn’t wait for Christmas morning to happen so that she could open up her presents. And I said, “Yeah, of course I do.” And, of course, she knew I was joking. But I said, “But if I did have it, if I did have a time machine, what I would do is I wouldn’t actually make time get faster. I would make time go slower because I have so much to do right now.”
There never (ever) seems to be enough hours in the day.
Does your business sometimes make you feel stressed and overwhelmed because you’re trying to figure out how in the world you are going to get everything done that you need to get done? It’s a never-ending cycle. Sometimes you are really stressed because you’re trying to get new clients for your business or new sales for your business. And then, all of a sudden, you have new clients or you have new sales, and now you have to fill all of the orders.
And so you’re stressed, either because you need more sales or you’re stressed because you’re trying to fulfill all of those new products or services that you’re trying to deliver. Maybe in your business you feel sometimes that you’re stuck on how to figure something out, that you know that you want to launch a new product or service online, but you’re not exactly sure how to do it.
Or maybe you’re trying to build your website for the very first time and you’re eager to launch it. Or maybe you want to set up an automated webinar or send out automated emails? You want to automate tasks. I had one client and we went round and round. She was getting all of this conflicting advice about how to set up her merchant account correctly so that she could connect it with Infusionsoft (Keap), which was her marketing automation platform. She had gotten a merchant account, but it was a “card present” account and not a “card not present”, which is the type of merchant account you need to get when you’re doing business online.
She had called up her merchant account, because she called up her bank and tried to explain, and nobody believed her when she said, “What I really need is a ‘card not present’ account”. I finally convinced her to just go into the bank, sit down, talk to the manager and make them fix this.
Maybe you are getting stuck with something in your business, and you’re not even sure how to figure it out. And people are giving you conflicting advice and you don’t know what the next steps are. Maybe you are telling yourself: “I just need to figure out this one thing and then I can get my business to move forward.”
Well, I want to ask you a question: How much is your time worth?
The reason I’m asking this question is because way back when we first launched our consulting agency, one of the things that I learned early on was that if I could pay someone $5 an hour to do something and I chose to do that one thing, then I was literally making or saving $5 an hour. When I learned that principle, it kind of blew my mind. At the time I was still doing everything myself.
Here I was trying to figure out how to update this page of my website using HTML, learning Dreamweaver… and I wasn’t really good at it. I was good at other things, but that was not my area of expertise. And it is taking me literally hours to figure out how to do this. And I could literally go at that time and maybe even today to Fiverr.com or other freelancing websites and find someone very easily and pay someone just $5, and they would have it done for me in probably 15 minutes. They wouldn’t even take them an hour to do those kinds of things.
And then it hit me. I realized, “Wow, I’m trying to save $5 by doing this thing myself!”If I hired
someone and gave them that job and assigned it to someone else, I could pay them $5 to do it — and they’re going to get it done faster than I ever could. They’re going to do a better job than me, and then I’m going to be able to free up my time to focus on where I should be focusing on. As a business owner, you have two jobs and only two jobs.
And those two jobs are to increase sales and to implement systems. If you don’t have systems in your business, you’re not going to be able to scale. You’re going to create this big thing where you are the bottleneck of your business and without sales, your company is going to die and you cannot delegate getting sales for your own company.
So, for example, when you’re first getting started, you may have zero revenue. That’s how we were when we first started our e-commerce business. And when we first started building that website, I did everything I could and then and pulled in my husband to help me with whatever I could not figure out. We didn’t have older kids at the time. They were all babies. So, there’s the two of us doing everything ourselves. We did not have any money at all to delegate to and even
$5 an hour was way too much to hire someone else at that time.
About eighteen months after we started the business, our sales skyrocketed to $30,000 a month! I finally realized that it did not make sense for me to do all the work myself anymore.
At the time I was still making all the edits to my website myself, creating all the graphics myself, writing all of the product descriptions myself…. on top of processing orders, taking customer service calls, and more! And it made sense when we were getting started. But once the revenues were at 30K per month, it did not make sense anymore. My time was better spent doing profit generating activities.
For example, let’s just take editing a video. I don’t know how to edit a video. I’ve never even tried to learn how to edit a video. But, let’s say I decided that I wanted to be the one to edit the videos for my business. Well, I’m going to have to first off, take a course or watch some videos about how to do editing. I’m going to probably have to buy some type of software tool to figure out how to edit the videos. I’m going to have questions. I may have to hire a consultant to teach me just so I can learn how to do it myself.
It’s going to take me hours and hours and hours to learn that new skill! Unless video editing is my core business, I literally have no business trying to learn how to do it! The time that I would take to learn that skill is not time invested. It is time that is wasted because it is not time that I can use to leverage that skill to increase the profitability of my company. My time needs me to be focused on two things which are increasing revenue and implementing systems in my business, so that the business can scale.
It’s time to buy your time back.
If you are a consultant and you charge $200 an hour and you choose to do something that you could easily pay someone $50 an hour to do, then at that moment in time, you are making $50 an hour. If we drill that down a step further, you are actually losing $150/hour because of the lost opportunities you are letting slip by.
This does not mean you have to go out there and hire a full time employee! You can hire a virtual assistant or a marketing consultant for only five hours per week and you’ll be amazed at how much they’re able to get done! You’ll be amazed at how different your own life will be by just giving yourself five extra hours!