TIME – FRIEND OR ENEMY?
Time is your least expensive and most expensive resource. Time is free, right? Therefore, I have an unlimited budget to spend on my business. However, consider the opportunity costs. Could you be applying your valuable 1/24th of your day developing customers rather than creating a spreadsheet to track office supplies? Simply stated, if you need to be personally involved with each task, your success ceiling has already been established! Have you considered a business system?
ORGANIZATIONAL RESOURCES
Since you are reading this blog, you likely emerged from a traditional company and all its available resources. Take a moment to assess the business systems in place and how your organization leverages these tools. Accounting systems store and and provide reporting capability for a solopreneur to manage all budgets and expenditures relatively easily. Obviously, IT systems have revolutionized our lives. Options abound to obtain a solid foundation that manages communications, file storage, and productivity. These scalable instruments grow with your business and free up valuable time to focus on the key elements of your business.
REPEATABLE ACTIONS AND PREDICTABLE OUTCOMES
Business systems allow repeatable actions and predictable outcomes. Completing even the most routine task requires some semblance of a process. Brushing your teeth requires picking up the toothbrush and toothpaste, removing the cap, and squeezing the toothpaste onto the brush. All of these steps and we have not even started brushing! Create and document procedures that can be followed. Forgot the method of posting new content for your website? Excited about spending the next two (2) hours calling technical support and fighting with the login process just to upload customer tips? Write it down! Creating these systems through formal (or informal) processes allow handoff of responsibilities to your growing team.
LET YOUR MONEY WORK FOR YOU
We are familiar with the phrase “Let your money work for you”. Have a 401(k), mutual funds, stocks, bonds, or other investments? Consider the growth of your portfolio since the beginning of your career. We work hard to generate the bi-weekly contributions from paychecks, but aside from occasional rebalancing of investments, most of us spend little time managing our money afterwards. However, we certainly benefit from gains. Think of business systems the same way, focus on establishing a solid foundation from which your team, both electronic and human, can generate the long-term success.
