Time Management: How to work ten hours less a week
Advice on franchising by Pieter Scholtz, Master Licensee for ActionCOACH SA. ActionCOACH is one of the fastest growing and most successful business coaching franchises in the world today.
John D Rockefeller, a man who commanded incredible amounts of money, once said: “Those who have leisure time to spend pursuing their passions and dreams experience the real wealth in life.”
Knowing how to spend time is a more valuable skill than knowing how to make, manage, invest and spend money. Entrepreneurs who want to be truly successful, must master the skill of using their precious and irreplaceable time wisely. It is interesting that those amongst us who know how to manage, budget and save time, rather than letting it manage them, also find it easier to make money.
Learning how to lop ten hours off a typical work week without sacrificing any income requires practice, but it’s easier and faster to accomplish than most people think, if you follow these three steps.
Step 1: Fire extraneous customers
As the saying goes, time is money, and the first rule of any time management system is to utilise the time we are allotted wisely. Be wary of the time thief.
So the first, rather controversial step is to eliminate those customers who tie up sales representatives’ time with negligent transactions, who occupy your valuable time with constant complaints and waste your accountant’s time chasing them for payment. Either dispense with them or transform them into customers who proactively feed the bottom line. While this approach may sound radical, it makes practical sense to only focus on customers who respond with profitable transactions.
Firing customers may involve deleting dead-end leads from the client database, sending customers or clients to a business that more appropriately caters to their price demands, or simply adjusting the magnets that attract those unwanted customers in the first place.
Step 2: Double your transaction conversion rate
Money is a fabulous timesaver and those who are efficient at making money can leverage it further to carve out more time for themselves. The key to increasing profits is to convert unprofitable interactions into profitable ones. This is a foolproof formula for saving more hours each day without compromising productivity or earnings.
Investing in a mutual fund or pension plan may take decades to deliver the kind of nest egg that will allow you to semi-retire and take say ten hours a week off to play golf or spend with family. Yet it doesn’t have to take years to make the money needed to free up an extra ten hours a week. The road may be long, but those with a faster stride arrive at the desired destination much quicker. Increasing business profits which can be achieved in a matter of days or weeks, is a quick solution to affording yourself the privilege of working ten less hours each week. While most people crawl toward retirement, innovative entrepreneurs sprint there in record time.
To prepare for your profit-boosting initiative, gather accounting data and metrics that provide a clear understanding of where your profits come from, how many contacts are made with customers each month and how many customers make actual purchases. An easy way to harvest such information is by using software connected to point-of-sale terminals or cash registers.
Next, launch a marketing and advertising campaign that will generate new customer leads, promote your most profitable products or services and encourage existing customers to buy more.
Rather than chasing market share, focus on “wallet share” or more profitable customer-based transactions. No matter what a business sells, it is ultimately the customers and how many times they spend money that generate the profits. Invest in attracting and retaining good customers and the rest will take care of itself.
Once an expanding customer base is established, use incentives such as superior customer service, in-house financing and preferential customer perks to inspire clients to double their monthly transactions.
Here is an example of how to achieve the goal of working ten hours less a week without sacrificing productivity or profits. For the purpose of this example, we will assume that the business is open 40 hours per week or approximately 160 hours per month.
To gain ten hours off each week without losing money, it is necessary to reap 40 hour’s worth of extra profits each month. Ten hours off a week means you’ll be working 25 percent less hours in a month. To make up the potential loss of sales and profit, you have to increase your conversion rate by the same quotient.
There are numerous ways to make up the required 25 percent that will free up ten hours of your week. This can be achieved by attracting more customers, increasing your profit margins or lowering overhead costs by 25 percent. You can also eliminate the customers who are wasting 25 percent of employee time, cut out discount coupons and unnecessary giveaways and institute in-house financing to capture extra sales and interest rate revenues.
Step 3: Run your businesses on auto-pilot
Now the business owner has enviable options. One possibility is to close down the business for ten hours each week, take time off and settle for making the same amount of money per month that was generated before boosting profits by 25 percent.
Another alternative is to leverage that newfound success for progressive changes and forward momentum. You can maintain the same hours of operation, capture the extra 25 percent in profits and then wisely reinvest those profits in greater timesaving initiatives.
By working smarter – not harder – through organized systems, cutting edge technology, innovative advertising and dynamic employee training, you can prepare to entrust the business to the hands of capable others, which is the next step toward personal freedom. If somebody else is minding the store without any loss of productivity, it is possible for you to literally play golf all day without loss of income.
John D Rockefeller, a man who commanded incredible amounts of money, once said: “Those who have leisure time to spend pursuing their passions and dreams experience the real wealth in life.”
Knowing how to spend time is a more valuable skill than knowing how to make, manage, invest and spend money. Entrepreneurs who want to be truly successful, must master the skill of using their precious and irreplaceable time wisely. It is interesting that those amongst us who know how to manage, budget and save time, rather than letting it manage them, also find it easier to make money.
Learning how to lop ten hours off a typical work week without sacrificing any income requires practice, but it’s easier and faster to accomplish than most people think, if you follow these three steps.
Step 1: Fire extraneous customers
As the saying goes, time is money, and the first rule of any time management system is to utilise the time we are allotted wisely. Be wary of the time thief.
So the first, rather controversial step is to eliminate those customers who tie up sales representatives’ time with negligent transactions, who occupy your valuable time with constant complaints and waste your accountant’s time chasing them for payment. Either dispense with them or transform them into customers who proactively feed the bottom line. While this approach may sound radical, it makes practical sense to only focus on customers who respond with profitable transactions.
Firing customers may involve deleting dead-end leads from the client database, sending customers or clients to a business that more appropriately caters to their price demands, or simply adjusting the magnets that attract those unwanted customers in the first place.
Step 2: Double your transaction conversion rate
Money is a fabulous timesaver and those who are efficient at making money can leverage it further to carve out more time for themselves. The key to increasing profits is to convert unprofitable interactions into profitable ones. This is a foolproof formula for saving more hours each day without compromising productivity or earnings.
Investing in a mutual fund or pension plan may take decades to deliver the kind of nest egg that will allow you to semi-retire and take say ten hours a week off to play golf or spend with family. Yet it doesn’t have to take years to make the money needed to free up an extra ten hours a week. The road may be long, but those with a faster stride arrive at the desired destination much quicker. Increasing business profits which can be achieved in a matter of days or weeks, is a quick solution to affording yourself the privilege of working ten less hours each week. While most people crawl toward retirement, innovative entrepreneurs sprint there in record time.
To prepare for your profit-boosting initiative, gather accounting data and metrics that provide a clear understanding of where your profits come from, how many contacts are made with customers each month and how many customers make actual purchases. An easy way to harvest such information is by using software connected to point-of-sale terminals or cash registers.
Next, launch a marketing and advertising campaign that will generate new customer leads, promote your most profitable products or services and encourage existing customers to buy more.
Rather than chasing market share, focus on “wallet share” or more profitable customer-based transactions. No matter what a business sells, it is ultimately the customers and how many times they spend money that generate the profits. Invest in attracting and retaining good customers and the rest will take care of itself.
Once an expanding customer base is established, use incentives such as superior customer service, in-house financing and preferential customer perks to inspire clients to double their monthly transactions.
Here is an example of how to achieve the goal of working ten hours less a week without sacrificing productivity or profits. For the purpose of this example, we will assume that the business is open 40 hours per week or approximately 160 hours per month.
To gain ten hours off each week without losing money, it is necessary to reap 40 hour’s worth of extra profits each month. Ten hours off a week means you’ll be working 25 percent less hours in a month. To make up the potential loss of sales and profit, you have to increase your conversion rate by the same quotient.
There are numerous ways to make up the required 25 percent that will free up ten hours of your week. This can be achieved by attracting more customers, increasing your profit margins or lowering overhead costs by 25 percent. You can also eliminate the customers who are wasting 25 percent of employee time, cut out discount coupons and unnecessary giveaways and institute in-house financing to capture extra sales and interest rate revenues.
Step 3: Run your businesses on auto-pilot
Now the business owner has enviable options. One possibility is to close down the business for ten hours each week, take time off and settle for making the same amount of money per month that was generated before boosting profits by 25 percent.
Another alternative is to leverage that newfound success for progressive changes and forward momentum. You can maintain the same hours of operation, capture the extra 25 percent in profits and then wisely reinvest those profits in greater timesaving initiatives.
By working smarter – not harder – through organized systems, cutting edge technology, innovative advertising and dynamic employee training, you can prepare to entrust the business to the hands of capable others, which is the next step toward personal freedom. If somebody else is minding the store without any loss of productivity, it is possible for you to literally play golf all day without loss of income.
Comments
Post a Comment