Owners Must Manage Time Differently

Lately, a lot of my time has gone toward a new training venture. In this process, I’m documenting skills that I’ve used throughout my career to help new business owners get in front of the very hard learning curve. I’m a “hands-on” manager and prone to jump in, which is often the very wrong answer. 

I recently completed the first draft of these training sessions, targeted to people who are starting up a franchise location. When it was ready for feedback, I showed it to a colleague who read through it and then got back to me with the million-dollar question. “This all sounds great, but how do I do this stuff?”
The information in the workbook was good, but I realized that my advice was a lot of high-level strategy. It was missing executable tactics. The more my colleague and I worked on it, the more I refined the core ideas to tie in day-to-day implementation. The concept being someone needs to have the Big Ideas, but having them is not enough. You have to make sure they get done, and it shouldn’t be you doing most of it.

As we worked, a new through-line began to take shape: helping a new entrepreneur quantify the value of their time. I’ve written before about the value of time for an executive, but to my mind, your time becomes even more valuable in an entrepreneurial or start-up role like a franchise. And missteps are more critical.

In a larger organization those at the top have an obligation to create the big plans, and usually their time is allotted that way. You also have a lot more people and a lot more moving parts. Much of the “business” happens regardless of your input. In a small business, you are your organization’s most expensive resource and without you providing the right inputs it may stall on you.

Identifying the best uses for your time, I find it helpful to create AND DEFINE the two buckets that your productive time falls into: working in your business & working on your business.

Working in your business is the hands-on work that you do to facilitate daily business operations. It may be paying bills, engaging with customers, or stocking a shelf. 

Working on your business is when you create a process, a sales plan, a new product set, sort out how to inject a lead gen platform, etc.. Your work grows your business in the long term, although it may not generate income that same day.

You may have heard the adage that an owner needs to work on their business, not in their business. Working in the business is very valuable for setting examples, teaching and a customer-feedback loop. You just need to keep it in small doses. There should be a clear limit to how much of this “doing” time you’re giving your business every week. If you are the only person in the business, you have a job by another name. For you to own an enterprise, you need to have others working.

Working on the business is what I used to get done in the office when I was an executive. I’d spend nine to ten hours there a day working on the Big Thoughts: organizational trends and plans. I would have told you all of it was focused and valuable. I was wrong.

With the pandemic and the rise in work from home, I realized that a lot of that time in the office was spent engaging with office culture and the cycles of the building rather than actually making plans and setting them into action.

If I spent ten hours a day in the office, maybe four to six hours of that was spent on deliverable work. And now, even when I have a lot in the “working on the business” bucket, I find that I’m best served by a one-to-two-hour sprint. Not only are these sessions productive, but you’d be surprised how quickly your brain gets tired when you’re focused exclusively on big ideas in front of you,  as well as how much you can crank out when focused. 

In my experience, one to two sprints once or twice a day will get you much more value for your time than grinding out a ten-hour day.  When entrepreneurs and new business owners don’t realize this, they start to wonder why they’re consistently working 18-hour days and doing nothing but spinning their wheels. There is a failure to separate high-value concept work and the linear tasks you have to do to support the organization. Often, it is easy to get sucked into working in your business and then be too worn out to give working on your business the time it deserves.

The solution to this issue is to set aside dedicated time to working on your business so that working in your business doesn’t take over. Believe me, I know how easy it is for one quick question from an employee or customer to turn into hours on the floor. 

But I also know that if I spend an hour working on marketing plans for the next month and send out instructions to the relevant parties to get plans in place in advance, we have more sales than if I go into the business, get an idea for a video on the fly, shoot it, and cross my fingers that it gets traction. 

I don’t deny that it can be difficult to do. But if you’re spending all day working in your business and not getting anywhere, maybe try stepping back and giving yourself permission to spend more time with higher-level thinking. You have to Define and Defend the “on your business” time and make sure you block it in FIRST during your most productive times. When you find the right balance, you’ll be able to work in your business and enjoy it without sacrificing the forward growth that only you can generate.