Time really does equal money. You are a solopreneur or small business owner and you need to ask yourself what the best use of your time really is because it is YOUR time that equals money. The health of your bottom line is directly affected by the way that you choose to allot your working hours.
First let’s discuss what your job really is as an solopreneur. Your job is to grow your business. Your job is to make those contacts that will make you money. Your job is to conceive ideas and bring them to fruition. Your job is to close that deal! You do agree with that description of your job duties as an internet entrepreneur, don’t you?
Okay! Now let’s discuss what your job as an solopreneur is NOT. Being an solopreneur does not qualify you as an accountant, an advertising guru or a writer. You aren’t qualified to be an event planner or a travel agent. When you decided to become an internet entrepreneur that did not automatically make you a ‘jack-of-all-trades’.
You can waste a lot of your valuable time on tasks that you just plain aren’t very good at. You are the idea man/woman. It IS your job to make your business grow and you’ll be good at that provided that is where you use your time and direct your energies.
If you insist upon doing everything yourself, whether you are good at it or not, you will use up all of your thought and energy and have nothing left to do the things that only YOU can do to make your business grow.
- Hire an accountant or a bookkeeping service: Every business must keep a record of its day to day financial transactions and even the smallest of transactions add up to big tax deductions over the period of a year.
You can’t simply file everything under ‘miscellaneous’ and you can’t spend an hour or so every day taking care of just mundane bookkeeping duties either. Bookkeepers and accountants only charge for the time that they actually spend working for you. Usually they have many clients and are a great addition to any business. Unless your zone of genius is in this area it is one of the first areas to look to outsource
If they spend one hour working on your records then you will only be charged for that one hour. YOU aren’t a bookkeeper or an accountant and you would have likely spent three or four hours doing the same tasks and then with questionable results. Hire an accountant or a bookkeeping service!
- Hire a VA (Virtual Assistant): A virtual assistant can save you hours and hours of time on the mundane tasks that are required to be accomplished in order to run a successful internet business.
A VA can check your email and send only the emails that you need to personally deal with to you. Book appointments, process quotes and help you work on your social media visibility.
- Use ghost writers or copywriter: Writing social media posts and blogs is always a part of all small businesses that want to have an online presence no matter what the niche might be. You will need to have website content and you will also need to submit articles and E-books to use in your resource box which will help with your online credibility.
Ghost writers will post to blogs and forums for you above your own signature file that includes your name and website. Some ghost writers will also submit articles and E-books to banks and repositories for you. If the ghost writer that you employ does not, then you can seek an articles submission company to do that time consuming task for you as well.
- Use consultants where needed: Now consultants don’t also come cheap so you will need to be very, very specific about what you want them to do for your business. When considering hiring a consultant always ask yourself… do I have the skill to complete the task myself? How lg would it take me? How much does that cost in at my standard hourly rate that I charge clients? How does that stack up to the consultant charge?
There are only just so many hours in a day and you can only spend just so many of those hours working at making your business successful. There IS still life outside of business.
You have friends and family that do require some measure of your time. That makes it even more vital that you use your time to make your business grow and not waste your time by spending doing the everyday tasks that can take so much of your valuable time.
Think outsourcing, in all areas of life to allow you to do what you love more and that helps your business grow and be more profitable.
Learn more about how to scale your business at the National Home Staging Symposium, for more information click here.
