Making time to work ON your bookkeeping business is the only way to get off the treadmill

The message over the past couple of weeks has been about the importance of working ON your business. If your books are full and you’re up to your neck in BAS’, my persistence might feel like torment! “There just isn’t any more time in the day to work ON my business!” you scream at the computer. I understand. Really. I felt the same way when Peter Cook suggested that I document the bookkeeping systems which were stored safely in my head, and train another bookkeeper to follow them. Jaded because of the situation I had created and felt stuck in, I asked him (slightly sarcastically) “What time of the day am I supposed to do that, midnight to dawn?”

I speak to bookkeepers every week who are on this relentless treadmill of BAS-ON/BAS-OFF and are dreading the fast-approaching EOY. There’s not even enough time for family, let alone time to work ON your business. In the EMyth Revisited, Michael E Gerber says that “while you are busy doing it, doing it, doing it there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.”

I realise that it can be complicated, you have valid reasons why it seems impossible to make the time and, yes, it’s not going to be easy. So let’s look at your choices. You can stay on that treadmill, hoping that something magical might happen to change your situation. Or you can make the time to work ON your business and create a business you love and you’ve always dreamed of. It is possible. It just takes courage.