A question for you. As a start up business owner ‘How many hats are you wearing?’ In this article I will discuss the number of roles that small business owners of new businesses need to fulfil and how you can focus on two key things in order to work smarter to get more done.
It is almost inevitable that due to lack of funds and as small business owner in a start up, you will wear many, many different hats.
Marketing manager.
Bookkeeper.
Content developer.
Coach.
Product Developer.
Technical support staff.
Leader/CEO
Just to name a few, 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’s two simple ways you can start to do that.
Prioritise 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 people. 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, social media strategy, development, potential client conversations, webinar development, or something entirely different. Identify those money-making tasks in your business and be sure to prioritise them every single day.
Know the Difference Between Important and Urgent
In his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends prioritising tasks based on a time-management grid. 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 programme, which is launching tomorrow, is both urgent AND important.
So before you prioritise 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 organise and prioritise your days, you’ll find it’s a lot less stressful and overwhelming to manage your small business.
Need some support?
If you need help with prioritising your tasks and working more effectively so that you can achieve great things then have a look at my Business Confidence Club, it might be the perfect cost effective way (just over a pound a day) for you to get the support you need.
Suzanne