It's inevitable. As a small business owner, you will wear many, many hats... Marketing manager, Bookkeeper, Content developer, Coach, Technical support staff, customer support staff.
But while this type of task juggling is to be expected, you have to be aware that not all of your hats are created equal. Marketing outweighs bookkeeping, for example, because without marketing, there will be no cash to manage.
Not only that, but 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?
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, we don't always have that option. Instead, we have to work smarter, and take care how we're spending our time.
Here are some suggestions:
1-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. But 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, or webinar development. Identify those money-making tasks in your business and be sure to prioritize them every single day.
2-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. Every task is assigned to a (labeled) 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 could. But 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.
3-Create Blocks of Time for Certain Activities
When making your daily/weekly schedules, carve out blocks of time to do certain tasks. For example, bunch your client appointments into 2-3 hours, on Mondays and Wednesdays afternoons and sales calls into 2-3 hour blocks on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That way you are in the "appointment mode" for that afternoon with nothing to distract you.
Then carve out another time period for social media activities, and another one for admin tasks such as bookkeeping, returning phone calls, and answering emails. You can set aside several hours (or a weekend) to work on content or product creation (product development).
Write out a list of business activities you do every week and decide how you can block out time periods for each area. Using blocks of time will actually save you time because it keeps you focused and more productive.
4-Have Some Passive Income Products
Having some passive income products set-up to offer your clients and members of your lists and networks, will also save you time because you create the product and set up the sales funnel once, but receive revenue from it multiple times.
You know that you are making money when you are coaching, but there are only so many hours in the day. And some of those hours will need to be delegated to marketing, admin, etc. So having a vehicle whereby you are making money without putting in more hours, is a time-saver.
And that's why this month the training package is the "Passive Income Planner." In it you will find tips and strategies for setting up your own source of passive income, and you can do it over and over again. In fact some coaches only coach part=time and the rest of their income is from passive income products.
So those are some ways to manage all the hats you must wear to be an entrepreneur. If you need more help with that, just contact me. I'm here to help!