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Time is the one resource that everyone has an equal amount of, yet it is often not treated as a finite resource. By mastering the art of managing your time, you will be able to scale your business, provide better service, and be able to have a life outside of your work. Here are four key concepts to protect your time from Beacon Managing Director, Dan Baccarini’s new book, Scalable: The Key to Tremendous Business and a Tremendous Life!
Understanding Scalability
If you are running a business, at some point you will reach a period of growth where you have to decide whether to stay at your current limits or scale up. If you decide that you want to scale your business, you’re going to need help.
Keep track of how you are spending every minute of your time for at least a week, but up to a month. This will show you exactly where your time is going. As your company and staff grow, you will find that you need to be hands-off on many aspects of your business that take up too much of your time. If the only two things you are interested in are getting new clients and keeping the clients you have, you need to look at how much time you are actually spending on those two areas. This is where systems come in.
Creating Systems
Being a super technician does not equal being a super business person—it takes a systematic approach to duplicate results. To scale well, you will need to create easy-to-understand systems for each aspect of your business. Systems ensure that everything is being run the way you want it to be, and eliminate any ambiguity that can cause mistakes and miscommunications when giving a directive. To figure out what systems you need, you should find out where your company needs to grow in order to scale, whether lead generation, closing sales, or providing a service.
Once you have identified your needs, you should make a step-by-step directive, so that whoever you hire is able to provide professional, consistent service, and you are able to focus on the parts of your business that merit your time and attention.
Retaining Clients
In addition to systems for generating leads, you should have procedures in place to guarantee great customer service. Prompt callbacks are often something that only you can do; otherwise, you risk losing the customer’s trust. This means that although you can outsource many other aspects of your business, you should be notified immediately if you need to make an important phone call or decision. Other details can be left to your staff, so that your time is only used for the things that are only able to be accomplished exclusively by you, and no one else.
Don’t Forget About Your Life Outside of Work
Once people start making a significant income, they often find themselves working in excess of fifty hours a week, often not taking a day off. If your business is truly scalable, you should be able to plan your days off, and not worry about coming back to a disaster.
At Beacon, we are here to be that trusted partner for your success with investment solutions and turnkey marketing, operational and account management support—giving you more time and energy for everything else. Contact your wholesaler to discuss the many resources available to you and how we can be of help in reaching your business goals.
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