A choice is something that you take action on. If you want to succeed, then you need to ‘do’ something that you do. When mentoring business owners, the first thing new business owners are told to do is to keep a daily journal. This journal must include three things: preparing to make money, earning money, learning to make money.
The key is to realizing that your time has a monetary value. How much money can you make in an hour when you are ‘making money?’ That is how much an hour of your time is worth.
Preparing to Make Money
Preparing to make money consumes a large part of most manager’s time. It involves creating and maintaining a business and marketing plan. Bookkeeping and keeping reports on sales, returns, purchases, and expenses takes a big chunk of this time.
Preparing to make money is a main source of procrastination and wasted time. Many small business owners spend too much time preparing to make money. They also waste time learning to do new projects.
One good example is the small business owner who takes three months to learn how to write a marketing campaign. They start with the belief that they could not afford to pay someone $1000 - $3000 to write one for them. However, if they had of spent that two months making sales then they could have paid a professional to write their marketing campaign, and had money to spare.
It is so easy to procrastinate at this stage. Managers can waste time answering emails, participating in forums, reading blogs, researching competitor’s websites, answering phones, writing articles, etc.
Making Money
This aspect of business management is the most important. Business owners need to use this time wisely. All business owners should work on their skills, organization, and marketing plans until their ‘making money’ time reaches a preset ‘per hour’ rate. Each business owner will define what their own fee is, but it should never be lower than $20.00.
Making money involves researching products, working with customers to make sure that the product and marketing are attracting the right target market. Reaching new markets. Establishing Joint Ventures with other companies.
This section should never fall lower than your monthly expenses. If it costs $1000 to run the business a month, and you make $20 an hour, then you must work 50 hours a month at ‘making money’ just to pay your bills. You do not start to earn a profit until after this time.
This is ‘epiphany’ time for most managers. They realize that they are not working 12 hours a week making money. In fact, most small business managers who work 40 hours a week on their company rarely spend more than 6 hours actually making money.
Learning
No manager should stop learning. All managers should spend at least 4 hours a week learning, but they should never spend too much time learning. Learning includes reading forums, emails, web sites, books, watching videos, surfing the web, and reading magazines. All of these things fall into the learning category.
Wasted Time
Once the journal has been in operation for a few days the business manager will start noticing blank spaces. These blank spaces include lunch time, driving, getting coffee, taking a break, other ‘time wasters.’
Some managers are stunned to realize how many blanks are in their journal. Take some time to keep your own journal. It might explain why your business is not building wealth, and why you are working too hard for too little profit.
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