“You can always make more money but you can never make more time.”
I first heard this from Alan Weiss recently and it is dead on.
If you are suffering from “being busy” or “not enough hours in the day”, that is a sure sign your business is sick. It’s in pain. You and your business are not operating optimally and you are wasting money.
Maybe you’ve read time management books or tested out productivity apps. You try to figure out out ways to be more efficient and manage it all. Yet, you’re still “time poor”.
As Peter Drucker said, “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.”
Instead of trying to be more “efficient” with your time, let’s find ways to eliminate, automate or delegate tasks. That is where the money is.
Easier said than done, right?
I do understand how hard it is to focus on optimizing your business when you’re up to your ‘arse in alligators! We all struggle with that.
But you know those fires and crises will continue until you get serious about turning your business into the Well-Oiled Machine, right?
One of my mantras, from Mark Sanborn, is, “If you keep doing what you have always done, you shouldn’t be all that surprised if you keep getting what you have always gotten.”
If someone offered you an investment with a 400% risk free return, would you do it?
If the pain of working too many hours isn’t enough motivation to do something different … perhaps knowing how much money you’re wasting is.
Let’s do a simple exercise so you can understand what is really at stake:
First, write down what your time is worth per hour. If you don’t know then you can figure it out right now:
Divide the amount of money you make in your business (net profit + your salary) by the amount of time you spend on your business each year. If you spend 40 hours a week and take 2 weeks of vacation each year then that comes to 2,000 hours a year.
(net profit + your salary) / (hours worked) = (what your time is worth right now)
Now that you know how much your time is worth you can make smarter decisions about automation and delegation.
Let’s say your time is worth $100/hr and you found a way to automate a process that would free up 5 hours a week (250 hours a year). And let’s say that this “automation project” would cost $5,000. In this scenario you would have just made a net savings of $20,000 in the first 12 months!
That is a 400% simple return, in only one year. Not only that, it is a risk-free 400% return. Even better.
And, of course, that investment will continue to pay year after year. It doesn’t just stop after a year.
Now take this a step further and think about where you could reinvest those 250 hours each year. What if you invested those hours on strategy, marketing or product development? How much more profit could that generate? That isn’t even in the return number. Nor is the joy of doing work that is having an impact.
Bottom line … Automation provides a massive ROI as long as you’re reinvesting your time in the right areas. Once you understand this, you understand how to grow your business with less time and effort.
You pull the money you are spending on projects or people with less return and start doubling down on these. These are foundational investments that amplify the return on all investments made afterwards.
I absolutely know this is true. This is the same strategy I used to build a company that became #826 on the Inc. 5,000 List of Fastest Growing Companies. It is also the same one I am using to build The API Guys.
Are You Ready to Turn Your Business Into a Well-Oiled Machine?
So, if you’re tired of wasting time and money, week in and week out, putting out fires … if you want to learn how you can optimize your small business, we should talk.
Remember … your job as an entrepreneur is to create maximum leverage in your business, recover every iota of wasted time, aggressively reduce risk and drive the hell out of the ROI on Infusionsoft.
And that is exactly what can happen when you work with us to create your own version of The Well-Oiled Machine.
So let’s make it happen.
The next step is a 30-minute consultation call with me, Kim Snider, to discuss the details of your business. Maybe you already have a specific project in mind. Super.
Or maybe the project is bigger but still kind of squishy. You just know your business could make more money, take less time and effort and churn out raving fans.
Either way.
Fill out the form below and tell me what you’re thinking. I will email a link to schedule a 30-minute initial consultation. On the call, we will get acquainted and figure out where to go next.