Tag: TimeforGrowth
What is the job of a business owner and how should it change over time?
Time
Time, the most precious commodity in the world. Once spent, you can never get it back.
Return on time, learning too late that its too late to undo the habits that spent your time rather than invest it.
Spending, once done is done. Investing, done once and smartly, yields ongoing returns without too much additional effort.
Given this, what is your job as a business owner? And, how and when should it change over time? Knowing and understanding this now will yield massive dividends in the future.
Most business owners spend 15-20-30 years building their businesses. The same business owners spend 30-60 hours engaged in a sale to exit their businesses, and, should they succeed, seldom get the price they want. It leaves most with a realisation that what they’ve spent their time doing over the years of building their business, could have been better invested now understanding the end game. Hindsight makes us all wiser, but what is the value of that wisdom if you have no time left to implement it?
Foresight might hold the answer to winning the insight you need today to ensure that you change your mindset, practices and habits to invest time rather than spend it.
Business Evolution
The best way to evaluate this is by understanding the natural progress that any business goes through in its development.
There are 5 stages professed by academia which include start, grow, prime, maturity and decline. Whilst interesting, they may not be that useful to understand what we should be doing and when to ensure the best investment of time available to us.
A better starting point would be to understand the end game and then build towards it. From an Aurik point of view, we believe that to be the successful creation of your business into an Asset of Value.
A business built this way offers 3 criteria including income growth, capital growth and independence from you. It is what makes a business salable and for any business owner who has invested deeply and consistently in their business, is essential to ensure a return on time, risk and effort. In fact, essential to secure a pension and legacy of wealth as the final reward.
6 stages of progression to build an Asset of Value
In relation to an Asset of Value, there are 6 stages of progression that any business goes through. Traversing these stages of development can take a business owner anywhere from 7 years to never. Many land up successfully moving from the first to either the next 2 or even 3 stages before they end their tenure in the business itself. It is for this reason that 94.6% of business started, fail to sell.
In each stage above, I have indicated the average revenue numbers that should be achieved, the time invested, the objective and the behaviour of the business owner to transit from that stage to the next.
Cycles
Completing the cycle is essential to repeat the cycle since this act is what takes a business from one level to its next. In a 30-year career as a business owner, repeating this cycle at least 5 times is both possible and necessary to secure a handsome, clean payout when you finally exit. Failing to do so always leaves money on the table for a buyer and compromises both your return on time and risk.
So, 3 questions remains in play – why do you do what you do, what are you doing now, what should you be doing tomorrow? What if you don’t get it right? Well, that question is already answered by the stat: 94.6%.
How are you spending your time, daily, weekly, monthly, annually in building your business? And in that, are you doing what you should be doing to ensure that you are building an Asset of Value? If not, why not?
FIND OUT MORE
To gain a deeper understanding of how building an Asset of Value could generate more revenue, profit and time for you, Join Pavlo Phitidis for a 60-minute session on 10 February. Register here
Create more time to focus on growth
Time is our most precious resource, but it seems like we never have enough of it. The second entrepreneur Aurik ever gave guidance to, was a bakery business owned by a 54-year old man, who had initiated the company at 27. It was highly successful, but he’d not been able to focus on its strategic growth because all his time was tied up in operations. Fourteen years after we rebuilt the business with him, it now creates more than a Billion Rands’ worth of business.
As the owner of a developing business, you can, and should create time to grow the business, and work on it, instead of in it. We’ll examine seven strategies that help you create more time, and spend it wisely.
Listen to the podcast from The Money Show:
Positioning Your Business
It can feel all too tempting to try and be everything to everyone. For a growing business, there is extreme value in specialisation, where you provide a specific kind of service to a defined type of customer. By specialising and positioning your business, you’re able to focus, learn your industry, and exploit your business’ unique aptitudes.
Build the Right Systems
The systems you build become the delivery vehicle for your customer service. By building simple, effective systems that positively serve your customers, you will create time to focus on your company’s growth.
Take the Right Action
A growing business must go through its developmental stages to be successful – there is no such thing as a true overnight success. Identify which stage your business is in, and take the right action for your company. The stages of your business’ lifecycle are:
• Start – where you’re focused on selling your product/service & attracting customers
• Build – where you’ve had enough success to start building effective systems, to ensure you can keep up your level of delivery
• Grow – where you’re able to hire the right people to cater for increased customer demand
• Accelerate – where your business functions so well operationally, that you’re able to innovate and move towards becoming an industry leader
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is a great way to carve out the right kind of focused time. Here’s how to choose which tasks you can outsource:
• Which tasks are part of your core business and strategically important? Do not outsource these. This is your work.
• Which tasks are part of your core business but not strategically important? For this, you can collaborate with a service provider.
• Which tasks are not part of your core business, and not strategically important? These tasks can be outsourced.
Use Technology Smartly
Using integrated technological systems will help you create more time for your team, and thereby create more value for your company. For example, your accounting software should directly integrate with your banking facilities, otherwise you’re adding unnecessary steps to administrative processes.
Touch Things Once Only
Research has shown that, when we multitask, we experience a 38% drop in intellectual capacity. That’s why focusing on a single task at one time leads to better results. Set your priorities and work on one task at a time, without distraction.
Choose the right collaborators
In uncertain times, you may find yourself desperately seeking a collaborator, but choosing the right one is key for your company’s success. Select collaborators who are close to your business’ function, and who will help you to build it, not take time away from it.
When your time runs low, so do your inspiration levels. At Aurik, we help you build systems that curate, construct and craft your time, so that you can build your business into an asset of value. Get in touch with us and let’s start building, together.