Introduction
As a trade business owner you have become accustomed to “wearing all the hats”. You are a tradesperson, the financial controller, marketing manager, admin assistant, debt collector and human resource manager, to name a few.
In short, you have a serious case of ‘busy’ syndrome.
You simply have no time in your day to get anything done and perhaps your world looks a little like this…
Imagine that you have a glass filled to the rim with water. The water in the glass represents all the tasks you have to do in your day. As you pour more and more water in the glass (take on more and more tasks), it overflows! The water (the tasks) are spilling out of the glass all over the place, everything is a mess and you are left with a big clean up. However, if you got more glasses and poured bits of water (tasks) across all of them, the water (the tasks) would be distributed perfectly, with no messy overflow in sight.
The moral of this story is that…
Yes, you have a lot of things to do however perhaps you do not need to do ALL of them. To tell you the truth, the fact that you are trying to do all of them is creating nothing but a big mess – just like the overflowing glass of water!
To overcome your ‘busy’ syndrome, there are 5 things you need to do, which we will teach you throughout this section of the module. You need to:
Delineate
Establish what you actually do in your day, then decide what to ‘stop’, ‘keep’ and ‘start’ doing using the Stop. Keep. Start activity.
Prioritisation
Understand how to prioritise the tasks that you will ‘keep’ (as established in the Stop. Keep. Start. activity) using the 80/20 Rule and Ease/ROI Grid.
Delegation
Using the art of delegation, assign your employees with tasks that you will personally ‘Stop’ (as established in the Stop. Keep. Start. activity) but have chosen to keep within your team.
Outsource
For the tasks that are best completed by an outsider (a non-employee) of your business, learn the four methods of outsourcing.
Manage
Learn the skills in managing delegated tasks, outsourced tasks and your work relationship with your partner, so tasks are completed thoroughly and effectively.
It is time to leverage the potential within your day, your team and yourself. Go from ‘1:1 time to 1:many’.