Time Management

Time is precious enough as it is, but even more precious when you have to share your full time job and home life with a new business venture. Understanding how time uses us or how we use time is an important step in determining how much time we can devote to what we want to develop in the future with our new business enterprise.

Things to think about are initially what we spend time on now. What are our prime times of day and what do we need to shift in order to make room for our new schedule. A Diary used for recording our current time trends is a boring task yes, but absolutely necessary if we want to carve out a new life, a new beginning to support our soon to be increasing work load.

Balance of our precious business time is key and difficult to maintain. Especially, when we go from or continue with a normal 9 to 5 routine, over to a life which requires our consistency to continue with our current job and startup a new business in unknown territory.

The days and nights will get a bit longer and our loved ones will probably see a lot less of us until we can get up and running with enough income to hire staff to handle the workload.

The changeover from employed to self employed is a delicate one requiring careful precision in order to reduce the risks. You would be wise to sit down with friends and family, especially those who don’t work for themselves to explain the nature of the work involved and how much spare time you will have for usual extracurricular activities.

This will be a good time to also look at where you spend your current time, and how you will be able to maintain your work and personal commitments. Your business project plans will allow you to successfully juggle all three worlds, time is a primary resource in the building of any successful business. Let’s get to it – now!

Project Plans

Projects have become the smart solution for managing problems, satisfying customer requests and producing results within given time frames and budgets. Starting a business using Project planning is the perfect solution for any solo or small team of entrepreneurs.

Every business starts with a list of mini tasks and goals, they need to achieve in order to start and maintain a consistent income. Setting goals for yourself or your team members is a key ingredient in achieving what you need, not only to get off the ground but also in order to create the systems you need to monitor performance and manage the workload within the different departments of your growing enterprise (e.g. administration, finance, marketing, sales, purchasing,  and stock control, etc).

Goal setting and project planning enables you to delegate tasks to the appropriate person, handing over responsibility and a fair share of the workload is a giant step in the movement towards growth. You may find yourself starting off on a solo adventure with a vision for multiplying in the not too distant future. If so, the initial planning and management of your time will be key in making sure you start off how you mean to go on, as good habits die hard.

Without a mentor like the ones offered by Love business, it will be easy to fallback into old habits and miss your own deadlines without any repercussions.

Going it solo means you will need to be your own manager and not just in the sense of managing your workload but more so, separating yourself into at the very least, two people. Half of you will play the role of the worker and the other half will play the role of the manager, checking and making sure you don’t procrastinate or put off tasks required to meet your goals and projects. We often have the tasks we love doing (which we are good at or skilled in) and the tasks we loathe or hate with a passion. The tasks we put off will tend to be the ones that either cripple our business gradually or leak vast sums of money in small amounts, out of the business on a daily basis. Remember, 90% of Startups fail as researched by Neil Patel therefore we need to be make sure we have our project plans in place with a schedule of who will do what with how much and when?!

Want to know more about the real deal on getting things done and how to turn your fantasy into reality? Get yourself on the Love business Workshop Now!!

Team Management

Questions some people ask themselves when deciding on who should be involved if anyone in the setup and startup of their business:

• So, why does anyone need a team?
• Isn’t it much cheaper and thus more cost effective to start a business alone?
• If I hire someone I will have to pay for them and I don’t have much money as it is?
• If I don’t involve anyone else in my business is it more likely to succeed?
• Can my business be taken away from me if I allow others in at the beginning?
• I’m a perfectionist, nobody can do what I do as well as I can do it, so why hire someone and be let down?
• I’ve never managed anyone before, how will I manage to start a business and manage people at the same time?
• I know one of my weaknesses is trusting people, can I really trust someone I don’t know to do right by my business?

The list goes on and on, there are many reasons why a business will not hire someone to work in their business. This is one of the reasons why many startups fail at the beginning of there journey. Some businesses need teams to develop and provide the kind of customer service required in order to compete and keep customers coming back for more. It can be very easy to become overwhelmed and thus appear unprofessional or unable to cope with the demands being set by returning customers.

We all have our fears and insecurities and like becoming a parent or embarking on a new relationship, those fears and insecurities will come to the surface. When they do, we need to be ready to face our demons because if the business doesn’t expose or test our weaknesses, our customers will! The demand for what we do will be there, the question is can we meet it consistently and alone without the support additional staff members?!

A great acid test would be to create an imaginary scenario where we are 5 years down the line and the business is thriving. If we are the only person how would we cope?! If that seems to far ahead and we have made an agreement with ourselves that we would have hired several staff members, we can alter the time line to six months but keep the customer count the same. How would we cope in that situation?!

These are common risk scenarios we explore when devising an optimum team for our business. Similar to the Cashflow forecast which attempts to produce a timeline of our income and expenditure over a period of a year or 3-5 years. Customer and Sales management poses similar questions as to how we will cope, not only if we have an overwhelming amount of customers but also if we don’t have many at all. Hiring staff when you don’t have the work can be equally as crippling. However, you can hire staff on a temporary seasonal basis as well as on a zero hours contract.

There are different ways to manage work within an organisation. Having a source of constant supply of Agency or Temporary staff to help will benefit you with a buffer of manpower if and when you need it.

The management of your team is also an important aspect of keeping the face of your business looking pristine. If your staff (temporary included) are customer facing, then some degree of training will need to take place in order for you to keep your customer coming back or at least recommending you to other potential customers.

With the advent of new technology becoming smaller and smaller, you can now manage your business and employee needs right from the palm of your hand while busy being on the move. There is a new matrix style organisation, which has arisen, giving us the ability to communicate using various user friendly smart mobile phone apps and computer software which talk to each other seamlessly; meetings can be held on the fly from anywhere you can get a mobile signal and thus an internet connection. The future is mobile.

If you’d like to find out more about how to make your business and team more mobile then contact us now!