Small Business Online: Thriving in a Virtual World

Time: The Richest Commodity - Part Two

There are unimaginable rewards to having this type of foundation solidly in place at the start of your business, especially a small business. One is that you will obviously build and KEEP a great client base – and the other is free time. Without a system, believe me, you’ll find yourself working twice as hard and for many more hours than you would otherwise, and you’ll be so busy treading water that even finding ONE day off will feel like a miracle.

Another pitfall of poorly managed time? Money! I won’t even talk about the potential money that you can’t make because you’re busy spinning your wheels ineffectively and NOT marketing in those lost hours. Let’s just talk about the inaccurately tracked project time that you can’t invoice your clients for. Or the time that is forever lost when you spend it tracking down team members and following up missing documents and unmet deadlines.

Look, when it comes to running your own business, big or small, you MUST have a time tracking system BEFORE you start invoicing. Preferably you’ll choose one with easy reporting. That will allow you to not only invoice your clients simply and correctly, it will also let you easily cross-check your incoming subcontractor’s invoices.

The POM Factor. Finally, when it comes to the business of business, NOTHING beats POM: Peace of Mind. It’s tough enough to do the work, run the show, and please everyone on every side of every equation. Putting foundational tools into place before things get crazy will allow you to focus on creating great work and marketing your services and your company. It’s extremely difficult to be mentally available for great, unexpected opportunities when you’re tracing and retracing the same issues and questions every day. Managing your time and your projects is like having a safety net under your high-wire act. It leaves you free to focus on the work directly in front of you and the other people you’re performing with (and for).

The Richest Commodity: Time

Time management is probably the number one most effective success building tool for any small business or entrepreneur. Without it, creating long-term success is like trying to catch that elusive brass ring on a merry-go round. Round and round you go, just hoping to grab that ring (and more than likely missing it over and over). If you can put a reliable time management system into place from the beginning, however, week after week you get to avoid some pretty big pitfalls. What kind of pitfalls? Let’s start with missed deadlines.

There’s no way around it, deadlines are hard to manage if you work on your own. Projects and clients can easily start to become a blur during busy times. And if you get busy enough and are lucky to have a team – or need to hire subcontractors to contribute to one or more projects – well, you get the picture. People and tasks and timing can get pretty overwhelming. The sooner you have a flexible mechanism in place to help you make sure that project benchmarks are met and things stay on track, the better.