Who’s not busy now days? We are all busy, and as things get tougher we seem to get busier. But here’s the thing: Are we being truthful with ourselves? Is our time being spent doing things that is actively making money for our businesses or are we spending time doing things that would be done more efficiently by someone else?

Try this simple exercise:

1. List the 5-10 activities that occupy your time on any average day. List everything from answer calls, deal with suppliers, manage staff etc.
2. Asign the average time that you spend on each activity
3. Add up the total number of hours in your average day
4. Add up the hours in each day that you spend generating new sales and growing your business.
5. Divide point 4 above by point 3 above.

If the answer you get is less than 0.70 or 70%, then guess what? You are not spending enough time growing your business and you are spending too much time on task that should be done by someone else in your organisation.

Now try another simple activity. Use the list that you generated in point 1 above and then work out which non revenue generating activities can be performed by someone else in your organisation. If you don’t have the right people in your organisation that can perform these tasks then contract them out to a specialist, like an accountant, book keeper, or an IT specialist.

Finally, and here’s the great bit. Add up all of the hours that you would have created by delegating these tasks to the people who can most likely perform them more effeciently than you. Divide the current number of hours that you were dedicating to growing your business by the number of hours that you have created. For example if you used to only spend 2 hours per day growing your business and you just created another 4 hours a day, then 2/4 = 2. This will be factor by which you will be able to increase your sales based on your past track history of hours converted to sales, i.e. 200% in this instance!!!

Sounds easy? Well it is really. The hardest thing is convincing yourself that there are often other people out there that can do these non revenue generating tasks better than you. Yes that’s right there are. And the beauty about that is once you recognise this then you will be able to grow your business.

A good friend of mine Joe Dorfman taught me this valuable lesson a number of years ago and I haven’t looked back. Here are his details if you are interested:

http://www.thepoweroffocus.com.au/