Founding partner of CEO Advisory Guru, LLC. Best-selling author of The Private Equity Playbook and The Exit-Strategy Playbook.
Being an entrepreneur and small business owner has a lot of upsides. You can do what you love, be your own boss (to a certain extent, anyway), and—if you play your cards right—generate a lot of wealth.
However, there are also challenges. One of the biggest I have found is that, unlike CEOs at larger companies, those of us who are entrepreneurs and small business owners often wear all the hats. Prospective client wants to schedule a meeting? Most of us don’t have an executive admin, so we have to do that. Need to send out invoices? Yep—that falls to us. Have social media posts to write and publish? That’s us, too. And here’s the thing: While these tasks and others like them absolutely need to get done, they can take time away from the high-value work that generates revenue and grows the business.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In my own journey from CEO of three large service companies to founder of a growing consulting business, I’ve learned that the key to spending more time on high-value work comes down to doing two things: categorizing how your time is spent, and utilizing technology to help improve your efficiency.
1. Evaluate how you spend your time.
The first step to making space for more high-value work is identifying how you’re currently spending your time. What specific activities do you engage in each day? Of those activities, what percentage are high-value (strategic planning, landing new clients, and so on), and which are low-value (invoicing, categorizing expenses, scheduling, answering emails, etc.)?
To figure this out, I recommend that you intentionally catalog your daily activities for a full week. That way, you don’t inadvertently forget about low-value activities and/or underestimate how much time you actually spend doing them. Consider creating a simple time log to track your activities, or download a time tracker template from Microsoft Excel (or a similar program).
However you choose to do it, remember that your goal is to get a detailed, honest view into how you’re spending your time. At the end of the week, organize each activity you engaged in as either high- or low-value.
2. Take advantage of technology.
Once you’ve done that, the next step is to find ways to use technology to reduce the time you spend on low-value tasks so you can free up bandwidth for high-value work. While you may be able to outsource low-value work, technology is exploding in such a way that there is a high chance you can automate many low-value tasks for a fraction of the cost of outsourcing them.
Let’s say that your time-cataloging exercise reveals the following scenario: A prospective client emails you several dates they’re available for a discovery call. After reading the email (which takes a few minutes), you check your calendar to see if you’re available during any of those windows (that takes a few minutes, too). You are, so you email them back to confirm (several more minutes gone). Unfortunately, their schedule changed between when they sent you the email and when you responded, so they respond with a new proposed date/time, and the process—and time-suck—begins again. Even if they are still available, you have to set the meeting up in Zoom, create the invite and send it to them. Run this scenario with multiple clients and you may be looking at hours wasted.
So, streamline the process! I have found Calendly to be a great way to automate scheduling. You can share a link where people can book a meeting based on your specific parameters and set up multiple calendars to accommodate different clients and different scenarios. Tools like these can also automatically send clients a link to your virtual meeting room, take payment (if required), add the meeting to each attendee’s calendar and send reminder notices. The end result: All of that low-value work is handled for you, leaving you free to address the strategic side of your business.
Explore the possibilities.
Calendly is far from the only technology you can utilize to free up time for high-value work. QuickBooks, for example, can automate your invoicing so invoices self-generate every month and are automatically sent to clients. It can also automate your recurring business expenses so you don’t have to spend time manually entering them.
There are also technology solutions available to help you manage projects and workflows (Trello), proofread your writing (Grammarly) and generate social media posts and business emails (ChatGPT). Slack can be used to communicate with your team, LastPass to manage passwords and Zoom’s AI bots to take notes in meetings. And it doesn’t end there: Solutions like HootSuite can schedule and publish your social media posts, and you can use Zapier to connect all your automation technologies into simple workflows.
I do want to say here that I have no affiliation with any of these technologies, other than being a satisfied user who has found many of them invaluable in the running of my business. Ultimately, by taking advantage of technologies like these, I have freed up time for high-value work that drives my business’s revenue and growth. If you implement some or all of them, I believe you will experience the same benefit.
Drive productivity increases.
The bottom line is that our time is constantly under pressure. To grow and scale, we need to focus on driving productivity and generating revenue. However, when our time and mental energy are eaten up with low-value tasks—tasks that have to get done, yes, but which don’t add to our bottom line—it’s hard to focus on more important goals.
So, flip the script. Figure out what low-value tasks are sucking your time away, then learn to automate them so you can give yourself the bandwidth you need to focus on high-value tasks.
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