As a business owner, you’re probably reading this title thinking that cutting your working week down by 10 hours per week is never going to happen for you. After all, working extremely long hours, forgoing sleep and sweating the small stuff is certainly the case for many new business owners.
However, with the right business structure and the right staff you can cut your own input way back and spend more time keeping fit, travelling or developing big picture ideas for your business.
Here are my top tips for cutting your working week down.
Hire the Right People Who Share Your Vision, Mission and Values
Arguably the most important part of any successful business is the staff who support your vision and help you execute your mission and core values.
So how do you create a high performance team that will take your business the extra mile?
It all begins with the culture of your business. Once you create a good culture, you have the ability to have high performance output. In order to create this culture, here are 5 steps.
Step 1: Foundation
You create the foundation of your business by specifying what your vision, mission and values are. Most businesses have 5-7 core vales that are engrained in the culture of the company. For example, with Gym Hub, my main core value is customer service. All of my staff know this and as a result that is what we are known for.
Step 2: Recruitment
In order for your recruitment process to be effective, you need to share your vision, mission and values within your job ad to help attract the right people.
Then when you get to interview phase, make sure you test the applicant with questions that are relevant to your vision, mission and values to make sure they are a good fit for your team.
Step 3: Induction
The induction phase is a very important part of the journey when it comes to getting your new staff members on track. It is a time where you:
- Explain why you do things the way you do them
- Why you are so passionate about the journey
- What your values mean to both the staff and the company and
- What success looks like
Make sure you are in depth with your staff inductions as getting that right from the start will save you a lot of time overall.
Step 4: Performance Management
Performance management is where you set your KPIs for staff members as well as some accountability for them. After all, it is your job as a boss (or manager) to tell people (lovingly) if they are on track or not.
Having systems in place for performance management is great for your staff as it tells them exactly what they need to do if they want to progress in your business, get a pay rise etc.
Step 5: Leadership
The best leaders create more leaders. The more people you have in your team who know what needs to be done, can be trusted to get the job done and/ or can ensure that others also do their work the better.
Furthermore, as a leader it’s important to go to your team each week and recognize those who are demonstrating your core values.
Essentially, this method allows you to spend less time on management because your staff are motivated and work hard because they are the right people.
For more information, here’s a video that I recently shot.
Simplify Your Business Model
Look at your sales funnel, your service offering and every other step in your business and look for ways to streamline things. Remember that the most successful business models are the simple ones so ask yourself:
- What would it look like if it were easy?
- What ways could technology help?
- What steps in the process don’t need to be there?
Create Systems and Processes for Staff to Follow
Most day-to-day roles don’t require the boss to do them – therefore, it is worthwhile to create simple processes, teach quality people how to do it, provide ongoing training on those systems and provide regular quality control checks to get the easier tasks done.
Outsource and Focus on Your Genius
I use the $10k master document to show business owners how many of there ‘day to day’ roles are worth as little as $10 or $100 and hour – when they need to focus all their energy on tasks valued at $1000 or $10k an hour.
See the Gym Hub $10k per hour time audit sheet attached. It is one that is used by the world’s best business owners.
STEP 1 – Write down every single job you do each week into the template, by determining if its worth $10, $100, $1000 or $10,000 per hour.
STEP 2 – Identity all the jobs that are only worth the hourly rate you wish to be earn and then delegate to rest. This way, you can focus more energy and more time on the high value tasks that contribute the most to the growth to your business. I bet you are surprised how many $10 an hour jobs you are currently doing!
Example
As I was a gym owner, I realised that the areas that add the most value were – recruitment, staff development, seminars and marketing so I cut my hours back from 80 hours per week to just 12 and then delegated the other roles to key staff
eg – personal training, group training, sales, customer service, admin,
I know that my strengths lie in public speaking and mentoring gym owners so I discipline myself to only working on those tasks. I outsource tasks such as admin, document creation, SEO, graphic design, website changes to a marketing assistant in the Philippines,
I create the content and the ideas – and they help me implement them quickly and at a high standard.
I also outsource locally for cleaning, book keeping, accounting, Computer servicing, events.
Planning and the Daily Rituals
Every day, start by revisiting your 90 day plan and choose no more than 3 tasks to complete that day. Then knock these tasks over before you look at anything else.
A few more rituals to consider
- Check your emails and make your calls only 2 times per day for efficiency
- Pack your lunch – for most people, more than 1 hour is lost every day walking somewhere for lunch and coffees
- Make yourself unavailable sometimes – when you close your door and give 100% focus to 1 task until complete, we can produce twice the output
First published on www.businessinsider.com.au
