It’s inevitable! Listen, as a small business owner, you will wear many, many hats such as…
Marketing Manager – managing your promotions, positioning of professional brand, and working like mad to hold market share
Bookkeeper – sending out invoices, paying vendors, and paying yourself
Content & Copy developer – website content and copy for your marketing collateral
Mentor & Coach – mentoring team members and subcontractors and Coaching clients
Technical Support Staff – not a day goes by that I haven’t had a fun tech challenge – printers, cpu’s, laptops, and even faxes, etc.
And the long list just carries on…
But while this type of task juggling is to be expected, you also have to be aware that not all of your hats are created equal.
For instance, marketing outweighs bookkeeping.
You might ask, Why?
Well, the short answer is that without marketing, there will be no cash to manage. See, it is really that straightforward!
In our world, we call it “money generating activities” or MGA’s for shorthand.
Additionally, you have to consider how much time you’re spending in each area as well.
If you spend all day tweaking the design on your website and put off sending an email to your list, what have you gained? I can help you with this one, nothing! A big fat zero.
Sure, you might have a prettier website, but you lost an opportunity to drive traffic to your offer.
In an ideal world, you’d simply put on your CEO hat and delegate the rest, but here in the real world of small business, we don’t always have that option.
Instead, we have to work smarter and take care of how we’re spending our time. This is where my phrase time = dime came into being! It was used as a way to hold myself accountable to my small business and those who relied upon me to get things done.
Prioritize Your Daily Tasks
We all have different skills and sweet spots when it comes to the tasks we want and need to do.
You might love customer support and hate bookkeeping, while someone else enjoys the numbers game and doesn’t like dealing with the help desk.
Regardless of your personal preferences, one thing is certain: Money-making tasks should be at the very top of your to-do list.
That might mean product creation, email marketing, client outreach, webinar development, or something entirely different.
It is exceptionally important that you identify those money-making tasks in your business as soon as possible and be sure to prioritize them every single day via block scheduling.
Know the Difference Between Important and Urgent
In his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends prioritizing tasks based on a time-management grid. [A simple internet search and you will easily find on Wikipedia for example] Every task is assigned to a quadrant of the grid, based on whether it is urgent, important, both, or neither.
Once you know where a task falls on the grid, you’ll immediately know what you should be working on. For example, marketing and planning are important but not urgent. A ringing phone is urgent, but not important.
The sales page for your new program, which is launching tomorrow, is both urgent AND important.
So before you prioritize your daily to-do list, think about where each of your tasks falls in the quadrant,
and schedule them accordingly.
Will you always be working on the best task for right now? Probably not.
Nor will you always use your time as wisely as you can.
But here is the good news: by making a conscious effort to organize and prioritize your days, you’ll find it’s a lot less stressful and overwhelming to manage your small business. This will take some focus and effort – but the payoff is BIG. So, this is in fact, an MGA 😉
