F53-074: How Much Time & Energy Do You Spend In Your Zone Of Genius

Today's show is about something I work on with my clients all the time and something I'm always working on. And you can substitute "working on" for "struggling" sometimes and sometimes it's something I'm really good at. It's a form of personal balance - how to know how much time to spend on your craft, product, or service versus the other "stuff" you do in your business, which can be accounting, admin work, marketing, sales, hiring/firing, business development, reporting, etc. How much of your time are you doing that versus the actual product creation or product development (if you're a “products” person) or services and services delivery (if you're in service business)? You'd like to think this was an easy answer but we all know we have a limited amount of time to deal with during the day. But I've found it personally as well as with the people I'm working with that being able to put a container around this helps keep you from working 16-hour days and looking back not knowing what the heck have you got done in the day. Here are some principles I've used to govern how to know what to spend time on. Bootstrapping If you don't have money and you're bootstrapping it, suck it up. The exercise here is to only do the important things. Do you really need to work on a social media campaign if that's a stretch for you and that's not important to your business right now? Is that the best use of your time? If you're bootstrapping and can't hire people to do it then you're going to have to do these things. Setting priorities Have a great priority identified and set up that you can go through and review to make sure that if you're doing all these things, at least you're doing them in order of priority. Sales and business development should always be at the top of this list. Sales will make up for a lot of wrongs in your other business certainly in the short term so cash flow can account for some of these stuff. Business development is something you can do yourself especially when your business is small. Hiring Let's say you do have some money but you still find yourself stuck in the minutia of your business. You should hire out to very specific tactical functions inside of your organization like: Accounting There is no reason you should be doing this. Go hire someone. Pay a couple hundred bucks a month. Ask your friends or other people in business who they use and get a referral to get this off your plate. First of all, your books need to be clean. Your accounting needs to be done well. That has all sorts of downstream ramifications from both being able to sell your company and identifying issues in your business. Get it done right by having an expert do it. It's an easy thing to segregate from your business and have someone else do it. Hiring/Firing If you don't have an HR person inside the organization, this is something you need to do. If you have someone in your organization that you think needs to be let go of, let go of them TODAY. I say this pretty sternly because everyone knows there are people inside of the organization that you need to let go but they just drag on. I saw an interesting stat at this one conference I was at that really resonated with me, which is that: "A bad employee costs 15x more than their salary." This seems like a bit of an exaggeration but you can very easily see how it does between bad potential customer service and the loss of additional customers or bad morale or environment for your other employees. And it sets the bar.   Stop making excuses! When you're running a larger company and have a bit of money but you still find yourself stuck in the minutia and there's not enough time to hand off things or you don't know what to hand off and how to get it to someone else or that you don't want to hire someone. These are just excuses and in fact, this is the biggest pull of people I work with and the environment I'm in. The reality is, you're lying to yourself. You know exactly what to do. You know exactly how to do it. You just need to do it. And by "do it," I mean getting it off your plate. Either find someone else to do it or delegate it to someone who's already in your organization, hire somebody, or don't do it at all. This is the giant paradox and what I want to tie this back to is that I work with a ton of people that are working so hard and in the grind and they're complaining about their job and what they're doing. They're working 16 hours a day and doing part of the assembly of their product because they don't have the stones to hire someone for $8 an hour to do the manual labor for them so they can be off doing their own business.   Your Call-to-Action: If you're really unsure how much time to spend on your craft, product, and service versus other stuff in your business, I encourage you to sit back and reflect on these questions: Am I happy with everything I'm doing to my business right now? Am I providing service to my business the best that I can be? Are you happy? Or are you just working your ass off to get by and that's just all you've done? Sit back. Take a deep breath. Think about all the things you're doing. And think about whether these really fit into the things you're really good at that you should be doing for your organization. For solopreneurs out there and you work by yourself and you augment everything with contractors, same thing. If you're the one doing all your Facebook posts and if you have the opportunity to outsource it for $100 a month, think about it.   Books, People, & Resources: I'm researching former professional athletes and how they transition from being an athlete or a new lead athlete into the "real world." I'm interested in hearing about their struggles, their challenges, roadblocks, successes, and everything in between. Sports has always been a big part of my life. I love them. I have a special interest in athletes and specifically the ones that have competed at the highest levels. Do you know anyone like that? If so, I'd love to hear from them or maybe it's even you. Shoot me an email at [email protected].