4 Secrets to Building a Successful, Profitable Business – Secret #3 Manage Yourself Rather Than “Time Management”

“Either You Run the Day or the Day Runs You”

- JIM ROHN

There are very simple reasons why some entrepreneurs are more successful than others, why some and go on to build successful businesses, become multi-millionaires, while others don’t.? In this article I will share with you the third of the 4 Secrets that I learned from my mentors like Bob Proctor, Jack canfield and Brian Tracy, whom I have been so grateful to train and study under and certify with. These have become pillars, of not just my business, in my almost 20 years in business, but also the key things I now work on with my mentoring clients to achieve. It led me to building and selling a profitable business and if I can do it, anyone can!

There is another key differentiating factor that separates the successful entrepreneur from the unsuccessful, a differentiating factor that allows some entrepreneurs to achieve their goal whilst others don’t and in this chapter I am going to share that secret with you. This secret is crucial for you to master if you are going to achieve your goals, vison and dreams successfully.

The secret is this….manage yourself not the time. It is a given that the hands of the clock will tick every minute of every day and time will move forward, something that is not under your conscious or unconscious control. But one thing that is under your control is how you choose to use your time; how you choose to perform within the time you have….how you choose to “Manage Yourself”. You will never get time back so it is vital that you use every single minute as effectively as you can. To use it effectively, you yourself must be effective and the only person who can control this is you!?

In this chapter I am going to share with you a few key principals for ensuring your maximum personal effectiveness and peak performance, these principals or “Rules” are a guaranteed recipe for your success.?

The Top 5 Rules for Personal Effectiveness and Peak Performance:

Rule 1 - Know Your Numbers

Rule 2 - Eliminate Procrastination

Rule 3 – Prepare, Plan and Prioritise?

Rule 4 - Practice Self Discipline?

Rule 5 - Make Yourself Accountable, Always!

Know Your Numbers

“If you don’t know your numbers you don’t know your business, it’s that simple”

-Marcus Lemonis from The Profit

As I’ve already explained, The Pareto Principal states that 20% of your activity will account for 80% of your business growth and success. To that end it is vital that you spend your time doing the highest value, highest productivity and highest revenue generating tasks as a matter of priority on a daily basis. You need to outline the number of high value; high productivity tasks you need to undertake and preferably number them in order of priority.?

Let’s look at my Top 5 Goals outlined in the last chapter and apply the 80/20 rule. In relation to my Rule of 5, let’s say we take 10 tasks and apply the 80/20 rule, 2 of these tasks contributed most to my success. The 2 highest value tasks for me were:

1. Sales calls to prospects/customers and arranging meetings to get in front of them to win business thus generating revenue through sales growth. I knew I needed to speak to 20 people per week to get in front of 2 of them and I knew that I had a 50% conversion rate which meant 1 of them would convert to a new client. Knowing these numbers is vital for your success.
2. To send proposals relevant to the needs of my clients and prospects and follow up on these until a decision had been made. I either converted them and began work or archived them and moved on to the next prospect! This “20%” contributed to 80% of my productivity and growth.? One thing to note also is that I had set a target to make 12 follow up phone calls to every prospect or client that I had sent a proposal to, I never gave up before call 12 and often it was on call 8 or 9 that a decision was reached. I have met many people in business who didn’t use this type of number system and it is likely that the may have given up one call too soon!

Other vital numbers for you to know are:

1. Your financial goal; know how much money you want to make annually? This will give you your monthly target to achieve.
2. Your annual forecast for business and prospects
3. What is net profit margin on your product or service? This is a more accurate measurement of your businesses profitability. Remember, turnover give you vanity, profit give you sanity!
4. How many products or services do you need to sell to fulfil this goal??
5. What is your sales conversion rate??

These are all vital numbers for you know and if you haven’t yet focused on them you need to now. Once you know them you then need to track them in terms of your progress, this will tell you if you are reaching your goal or not and if you are not tracking these key areas, your chances of success will be seriously limited. The numbers don’t lie!

The other number you need to be cognisant of is the numbers on the clock. Whilst I have already stated that you cannot “manage” how the hands move around the numbers of the clock, you do need to be aware that these numbers are your starting and ending point in any given day. It doesn’t really matter whether your day is going to be an 8 hour day, 10 hour day or 12 hour day, what you get done in that number of hours will determine your level of performance and your level of performance is what determines your level of success.?

One of the most powerful tools you can use to assess how effectively you use your time is to keep a time diary, even just for one week. This is one of the biggest eye opening things I have ever done in terms of self-reflection on my performance. For one week, I kept a diary in 30 minute review chunks and assessed for every 30 minute period exactly how I had used my time. I quickly realised on review of that one week that there were many parts of my day where I was not performing my highest value and highest productivity tasks and I had total clarity on where I was using my time most and least effectively.?

Procrastination

“A Man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance”

-Hunter S Thompson

Procrastination is defined as the deferring or delaying of action and is one of the biggest reasons that entrepreneurs do not achieve success, usually because their delay or deferring of the action will result in lost opportunities and these lost opportunities will prevent the entrepreneur from moving forward toward their goal.? If you are doing this you risk getting left behind by someone who is doing it.?

If you plan on starting your tasks or goals next week or next month, then it will always be in the future and so too will your success. If you plan on doing your highest value and revenue generating task “later on” then it may never get done or not get done as effectively by leaving it late in the day rather than doing it first thing when you are at your most energetic. Your success starts and is dependent on you taking concentrated action now. Successful entrepreneurs have an action orientated approach and they have a sense of urgency, an “impatience” to get things done so that they can move on to the next task.?

Look at; what is it that you need to do today, this week, and this month to move you forward towards your goal? What is it that you need to do first, you need to just do it, and then when it is done, what is it you need to do second, you need to do that too and so on.?

One of the World’s leading Experts and Authors in this subject is Brian Tracy and his book “Eat That Frog – Get More of the Important Things Done today” is one of the best books you will ever read to move you forward in avoiding procrastination or at the very least show you that if you are going to procrastinate, which we all do at some stage, make sure it’s on the little stuff not the big stuff. Make sure it is on meaningless low value, low productivity tasks rather than on the high value, high productivity tasks. This book has a practical approach and action steps summary at the end of each chapter. But remember, knowledge is only power if you use it. It is only power if you take it and put it in to action and the only person who can do that is you.

Prepare, Plan and Prioritise

“Before Anything Else, Preparation is the key to Success”

-Alexandra Graham Bell

Preparation is vital to the implementation of any plan. Preparation is ensuring that you have everything in place from the outset, the arrangements that you make for putting your plan together. Preparing the order of your tasks, preparing the layout of your day and week, preparing to have everything you need in place for achieving your Top 5 priorities, preparing for every meeting you attend to ensure that you sell to the needs of your client or prospect.? These are the key elements of preparation for the successful entrepreneur.?

Planning your tasks (goals) is essential to maximise your effectiveness in carrying out high value tasks in a timely manner. Planning is as simple as writing a list and while your business plan will be your masterplan, the vision for your business going forward, planning through writing down a daily list, weekly list and monthly list is what will effectively get you towards your overall? goal, the master plan.?

Commit to planning your goals in writing. This was very easy for me because as a nurse, there is a universal acceptance that legally if something has not been documented, there is no evidence it was done, quite simply if it wasn’t written down, it doesn’t exist. It is the same for you when you are planning your goals, writing it down is evidence that it exists and more importantly when you are assessing your performance it makes that evaluation very easy. You either did what you wrote down or you didn’t!?

Although we living in a digital era, where many of you may have your notes about your goals on computers, tablets and smart phones, there is an abundance of evidence to suggest that physically writing your ideas, goals and targets down on paper is much more beneficial for embedding them in your memory and enhancing your creativity. The Pre Frontal Cortex area of your brain in one of the primary areas of the brain that takes the information you write down and binds and stores it in to your memory, so it might pay to rethink your digital device!

Whatever way you plan to document it, one thing is a given. You will be more productive if you get in to the simple habit of planning tomorrow, today, planning next week this week, planning next month this month and most of all PRIORITISE!

Prioritising is as simple of giving tasks a numerical order of importance.? I used a Rule of 5 with task 1 being the most important, vital, urgent task to be carried out first and 5 being the task that although still being important was to be carried out last. There will always be hundreds of tasks to be done and you won’t get them all done in one day or even one week, month or year but some of these are not the the highest value or productivity tasks to help you achieve your goal and therefore you don’t need to focus on them in the now. Prioritising is basically about deciding what needs to be done first, what is most important. It is about deciding what needs to be done by you, what can be delegated to other members of your team if you have employees, what can be outsourced to an outsource provider and what doesn’t need to be done by you as a priority or what can be “dumped” because it doesn’t need to be done at all.?

In my first year in business I tried to keep all the balls in the air, the temptation is to try and “save money” by doing things yourself.? This is not a good use of your time and you will likely get swamped with low value tasks that are not a priority and will not move your business forward. I grew my team in year 5 but from year 2 onwards I outsourced tasks such as basic administration to a virtual office provider, monthly management accounts, credit control, IT, social media. These were all tasks that were eating into my time and preventing me prioritising my highest value and revenue generating tasks in the time I was losing to doing those lower value tasks.?

Practice Self Discipline

“A Disciplined Mind leads to happiness, An Undisciplined Mind leads to Suffering”

-Dali Lama

Discipline, self-control, motivation, will power, it doesn’t really matter what you call it; Self Discipline is one thing you must master if you want success at anything in life, not just your business. Self-Discipline is the foundation that separates the successful from the unsuccessful as it relates to your ability to make yourself do the things you need to do consistently to get from where you are now to where you want to be.?

Disciplined people are usually very structured in the approach they take and the energy they use to get the things they must get done in order for them to achieve their goal. Discipline in my opinion is even more important than talent, more important than circumstance and this can be seen from the examples of people who have gained success even when there were more talented people in their field who didn’t or people whose perceived circumstances should have brought them more opportunities for success but they still didn’t achieve it.??

Self-Discipline is about pushing yourself to “do”, at all costs, no matter what. It is about putting control on your own behaviour to do what it takes to achieve your goals, it’s about taking a systematic approach and holding yourself accountable to control your own behaviour to ensure you get there.?

In our earliest day’s discipline was about conforming to rules, regulations, and systems, if you think of being in school for example. Your discipline in business isn’t really that different. Self-discipline in business is about how you show up! How you show up in performing your goals, what behaviours or self-imposed “rules” you engage to get you results for your business, this includes things such as accountability, persistence, focus, action and consistency.?

Make Yourself Accountable, Always!

You can spend hours planning, you can write down plans in every detail. You can have a vision for achieving the biggest goal, you can write down your weekly and monthly goals all day long but there comes the point where you must review them and ask yourself am I achieving my goals or not, this, the cornerstone of your success is called “Accountability”.??

Accountability is basically where you take responsibility for your action(s) or inaction if that is the case. As an entrepreneur or business owner it is you that must take 100% responsibility for every single action or inaction that leads to the success or failure of your business. It’s also important in taking responsibility for how your level of success is progressing, or not progressing, that you adopt a no excuses policy. We can all make excuses like economic uncertainly, multiple competitors, inefficient staff but at the end of the day the buck stops with you!

There are useful things you can do to help you maintain your accountability structure.?

• You can be your own accountability assessor using a rewards/penalty system for when goals have been achieved (reward) or not achieved (penalty).
• You can use an Accountability Partner (Someone who assesses the goals you have set for a given period with you and assesses whether you have achieved them).?
• You can become part of a Mastermind Group where you set goals within and in front of the group and they become your accountability partners. A Mastermind Group is a group of people who meet with a common purpose, e.g. business owners who want to grow their business. The best groups I have been in have had between 6-8 people in them, met monthly and they had a good gender mix. The meetings should be timed and chaired to ensure they are effective. It is also best that if you are joining a group; you join one with people who are at a level above where you are currently at but where you would like to get to. The main reason for this is that you will likely be pushed out of your comfort zone, thus enhancing your performance and you can learn from them, both of which will inevitably bring you more success.?

Conclusion & Action Points

Applying the 80/20 Rule, What are your 5 most important tasks?

1. ---------------------------------

2. ---------------------------------

?3. ----------------------------------

?4. ----------------------------------

5. ----------------------------------

?What are your target numbers this year for the following?

?Annual Financial Goal: -------------------------------------------

?Profit Margin on your top 5 products or services:

Product/Service 1. ---------------------------------

Product/Service 2. ---------------------------------

Product/Service 3. ----------------------------------

?Product/Service 4. ----------------------------------

Product/Service 5. ----------------------------------

Your Conversion Ratios: -----------------------------------------

?What is your highest value, highest productivity task:------------------------------------------------------------