Part 2: Two Immutable Business Secrets to Liberate Your Time and Your Life
In my previous post, I described the importance of creating and putting proper systems in place for your business, allowing employees to become great at what they do. As your business begins running smoothly and every employee is empowered to know what to do and how to delight customers, with limited involvement from you, it’s time to move on to the second secret of liberating your time and life.
Know thy time and delegate tasks
As Michael Gerber reminds us in The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, “Your business is not your life. Your business and your life are two separate things.” Most people start businesses because they want to create a job for themselves and stop working for a boss. After the initial excitement of starting, they realize they are their own boss and soon feel exhausted and demoralized. Knowing a specialty inside out does not mean someone is prepared to run a business. In fact, it is more often a liability, since the business owner becomes unwilling to hand over the work to anyone else.
Gerber describes a typical day in the life of Sarah, a new business owner, who launched “All About Pies”.
‘It was 7 a.m. and All About Pies was to open in thirty minutes. But Sarah’s mind was someplace else. It’s seven o’clock,” she said, wiping her eyes with her apron, as though reading my mind. “Do you realize I’ve been here since three o’clock this morning? And that I was up at two to get ready? And that by the time I get the pies ready, open for business, take care of my customers, clean up, close up, do the shopping, reconcile the cash register, go to the bank, have dinner, and get the pies ready for tomorrow’s bake, it’ll be nine-thirty or ten o’clock tonight, and by the time I do all that, by the time any normal person, for God’s sake, would say that the day was done, I will then also need to sit down and begin to figure out how I’m going to pay the rent next month?
“And all this because my very best friends told me I was crazy not to open a pie shop because I was so damn good at it? And, what’s worse, I believed them! I saw a way out of the horrible job I used to have. I saw a way to get free, doing work I loved to do, and doing it all for me. … Damn, Damn, Damn!”
As Gerber puts it, “Suddenly the job she knew how to do so well becomes one job she knows how to do plus a dozen others she doesn’t know how to do at all.”
Rarely, will you ever find a successful business owner doing it all. Sooner or later, other factors like stress, health, and financial headaches begin to emerge due to sheer exhaustion from overwork in the business rather than on the business. If you want to succeed, you need to become aware of how you spend your time and learn to delegate to a team. There has never been a successful business owner that did not employ the service of others. Furthermore, a business owner can produce only so much revenue and profit on their own with limited time.
General George S. Patton, best known for leading the US Army in World War II once famously said,
“An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse shit.”
Outspoken though he was, Patton was fully aware that the success of the troops lay not only in the fighting spirit of the men coupled with brilliant tactical warfare maneuvers. Instead, it relied on a fleet of over 6,000 trucks and trailers that delivered over 412,000 tons of ammunition, food, and fuel to the Allied armies between August 25 and November 16, 1944. Patton strongly believed that “no bastard ever won a war by himself”. Similarly, a business woman like Sarah could never build a pie empire by herself.
The late Steve Jobs is quoted, saying in Business Week in 1998 prior to Apple’s meteoric rise, where it became one of the world’s most valuable companies at the time of his death,
“This is not a one-man show. What’s reinvigorating this company is two things: One, there’s a lot of really talented people in this company who listened to the world tell them they were losers for a couple of years, and some of them were on the verge of starting to believe it themselves. But they’re not losers. What they didn’t have was a good set of coaches, a good plan. A good senior management team. But they have that now.”
In order for a business owner to successfully delegate to others, they must do three things, writes Peter Drucker in The Effective Executive. “They must record their time to find where their time actually goes. Secondly, they must manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally, they must consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units.”
A business leader or manager, who tracks their time, can better learn what to eliminate and what to delegate by asking certain questions. For instance:
What would happen if this were not done?
“Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?”
While delegation of tasks has become popular, it is rarely followed and makes little sense. When it implies that someone else ought to do part of “my job” (a president’s or managers’ work). This is wrong and an abjuration of one’s own responsibility because one is paid to do one’s own work.
Worse yet, tyrannical delegation is a situation, where the owner of a business has employees, only to make him or herself feel superior. Most small to medium sized business management falls into one of those two camps. They may ignore what is happening in the business and occasionally visit to employ “pigeon management” by “raining down droppings on everyone’s heads and then flying off”. Or they may follow a command and control approach, where employees feel helpless and immobilized.
Such environments are often characterized by high turnover and employee dissatisfaction with staff. People without a shared sense of goals and vision, coupled with strong management, leadership and recognition for their effort will contribute a little as possible until they depart.
The key benefit to becoming self-aware of one’s time is that it allows a business owner to free up wasted time, delegate appropriately to others and focus on working on the business goals and vision for the long-term.
So, now that you are aware of how to liberate your time and life by following the two secrets, what will you do? Please join me in my next post where I will offer specific strategies on how to create systems and effectively delegate tasks that will grow your business exponentially.
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