Thinking about how you use your time and money takes up a lot of bandwidth for small business owners and community leaders. Everyone has a bit of the pioneer spirit in them, but as entrepreneurs we tend to have a larger than average dose of it. That makes it easy to fall into the trap of trying to do everything yourself.
I work with many small business owners who tell me that if they do everything -- the accounting, the shipping, the plumbing -- then it doesn’t cost them anything. That may feel like the comfortable and correct approach, but that’s not always the case.
Do you have a process in place to figure out if a task is worth your time or money? Have you ever considered the question before?
When you’re a solo-entrepreneur that question is critically important. Consider what you would have to pay someone of your skills and experience to do the task you have in mind.
Let’s put a real world value on your time. As the visionary leader of your business or organization, for the sake of this example, let’s say your time is worth $100 per hour. If you had to budget and pay yourself to do all of the tasks in your business, you would need to pick and choose carefully in order to allocate this valuable resource. If you can’t afford the $100 per hour for the tasks you’re performing, you need to look for employees or outside contractors so that you can focus your time on being the owner and leader of your business.
In many of our blog posts, we touch on the concept of thinking vs. reacting. This is yet another example of that. Building a profitable, sustainable business takes time. You need to spend it on the most valuable, brand building, long term ideas not on reacting to every single task or issue that may pop up throughout the day.
As the owner or founder, you need to live up to the job description and do the real work of building your business or organization. When you work on tasks that save $25 here and there, you cost yourself hundreds of dollars in value.
What task can you let go of to free up some of your time for higher value tasks? Let us know in the comments below!