Only Spend Time on Money-Making tasks

If you're spending time on jobs that aren't going to directly impact your bottom line, you're not only wasting your time, you're wasting your money too.

A smart business person knows where they need to be. They need to be where the money is! Right? Absolutely, but actually, it's not always easy to know exactly where that is. What tends to happen, is that when you get stuck into running your business, you think that EVERYTHING you're doing is helping you to grow it, bring in more customers, and get more cash trickling into your bank account.

Sadly, however, you're wrong. Not everything you do in the day-to-day running of your business generates revenue, and whilst some of those tasks have to be done anyway, they definitely shouldn't be done by you.

The first thing you need to do is work out which jobs you're doing every single day, that don't actually bring you an income. You might instantly think, admin, but it's a lot more than that. There are going to be jobs you're doing that don't and won't ever make you money but letting them go shifts you out of your comfort zone. So, first things first, work out what is making you money, and what isn't.

I use Asana, but you could use this trick with whatever organisational tool you're using. It's really very simple. Insert a new column that runs alongside all your existing tasks, and add 3 labels.

1. Money Maker
2. Empty Pockets
3. CEO Only

Call your column whatever you like, I call mine Money Generator. Now what you need to do, is assign a label to each task. Be honest! Some of the jobs might make you money and they might not, but they might be jobs only you can do, so, there's nothing you can do about that, that's why we include the CEO Only label. But everything else is straightforward. Does that job have the potential to bring in money? And, no, there's no point saying to yourself, well, answering these emails could eventually lead to a sale, it doesn't work like that. It has to be things that are absolutely making you money or have a realistic potential of making you money.

After you've labelled everything, sort the column so that each label is organised one after the other, I guarantee the results will surprise you.

Now that you have identified the tasks that you're spending time on that aren't earning you money, you have to decide what to do with them. The easy answer is to outsource them, but it may not be that simple for you. The best thing to do is complete a time audit. The idea is to record how much time you're spending on each of these tasks, over a period of about a month. Only the tasks that aren't generating you an income for now. Who knows, there might be tasks that DO earn you money that you also want to outsource, but let's prioritise what matters.

Use the free Time Audit Template we have and start recording how much time you're spending on the tasks that do not impact your income. Once you have that audit and can see clearly how much time you are spending on each one, you can decide how much time you need to take someone on to outsource them.

Outsourcing to an agency like ours is a great idea, especially as we have support plans that start from just 5 hours per month and, it gives you a good baseline to grow from so that now you have more time to grow your business and increase your income, you can then increase your monthly time plan and eventually, you might decide you need to take on a full-time member of staff which will of course, be cheaper than using a VA. But a VA is a great starting point because they will be willing to work a much smaller amount of hours than an employee would.

For more help with this, I highly recommend taking a look at our GROW analysis template. It will help you clearly list all the jobs that are earning you money and all the ones that aren't and it works really well if you can't apply labels to columns as I have. Use the link below to get yours.

I really hope this post helped. Please get in touch to let me know!

GROW Analysis Template

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