Too Busy! Where Does Your Time Go?

Have you ever completed a grueling week in your business, felt exhausted at the end of the week but had no financial gain to show for all your efforts?

Do you often find yourself doing tasks in your business that you could have, and should have delegated properly to a team member, or outsourced to another party?

Do you work more hours in your business than anyone else?

If the answer is “yes” to any of these questions then you need to stop and assess yourself and your business.

You could be costing your business a fortune.

I recently asked a client to do a time study because he seemed to always be very busy but had very little to show for his efforts. His debtors were running at a quarter of his turnover, he was falling behind in his payments to suppliers. He was not getting to all customer enquiries and as a result was losing business to inferior competitors.

While he worked in a price sensitive business, being on time and being in a position to do the work would give you an additional 5% margin.

When we analysed his time – the results were staggering:

• He worked 90 hours over 10 consecutive days.
• He spend 40 hours managing deliveries, loading and unloading, organising the warehouse, etc.
• He spent 10 hours on deliveries, driving the van and also on collection from suppliers.
• He spent about 4 hours on sales and dealing with customers
• He spent 10 hours sorting out issues that his team handed to him, from pricing to customer complaints.
• He spent 2 hours on the financial aspects of his business
• He spent 1 hour collecting money
• The rest of the time was spent on trivial tasks/
• He did not meet his team at all

This man’s business was in trouble. It was in trouble because he had not delegated and he had not introduced any accountability to the team. He did not like confrontation and he felt that it would always be quicker if he did it himself.

I worked with this client on hiring one team member to do all the warehouse, stock and deliveries. We introduced proper roles for all the team and carried out some training and reporting. We focused more effort on credit control collecting about 70k additional in 6 weeks. We also went to work on selling, converting more enquiries in less time.

If your business is not performing well because your inability to manage yourself, call me today on 087 222 0720.