How to spend more time working ON your business
As a business owner, especially when there's just you, the best intentions for your day can be torn apart by a single email. Suddenly there’s something you need to sort out pronto. It’s not necessarily an incoming disaster. You could be side-lined by an unexpected enquiry you want to put a proposal together for ASAP. Nevertheless, how you intended to spend the day is no longer how you will spend the day because that’s the nature of business.
The problem is often that means we spend so much time working IN the business that we don’t work ON the business and we lose out on opportunities for growth.
Working IN vs Working ON Your Business
As a entrepreneur, you do it all when you start out. You make the product or deliver the service and anything else clients need from you when they hand over money to work with you. That’s working IN the business. You also manage the business, determining the vision, mission and direction as well as carrying out the sales and marketing activities that will bring your ambitions to life. That’s working ON the business.
You sort out the day-to-day and the bigger picture, giving you maximum freedom and maximum responsibility. When trying to balance the two it’s very easy to get stuck in periods of working IN the business and not ON the business because the business operations are so demanding. But that means you spend so much time serving everyone else that you and your business fall by the wayside.
Your marketing consists of frantic Instagram posts on a good day. You’ve stopped directing people to your website because you’ve postponed updating it so many times that it no longer reflects your business. If someone were to ask you about your business goals, you’d say to keep your head above water.
You want to find more time to focus on business growth, planning and strategising, reflecting and refining but when and how?
How To Find More Time To Work ON Your Business
I don’t think there’s ever a stage in business where you feel like you have all the time in the world to work on the direction of your business. So it’s really about finding opportunities to focus on business growth when you can and maximising the output of those opportunities. Here are some ideas on how to do more for your own business success.
Plan & Prioritise
Put the specific thing you want to do for your business in your calendar for a certain date and time. Treat it like an appointment with a client and organise your other to-dos around it. When I say I’ll do something at “some point this week”, it never gets done because the time never comes. But I’d never miss an appointment with a client!
Your clients will always be your top priority. If you plan how you’re going to fit in working IN and ON your business, you can prioritise a couple of hours for business growth activities. After all, business development helps you to serve your clients better so it’s a win-win situation.
Allocate Time & Routines
A lot of people find it quite jarring switching between working IN and ON the business randomly. We often use a different, more logical part of our brains to support clients than we do when looking at business growth as that tends to be more creative. So try to allocate certain times for client work and certain times for business development. Some people have a CEO day where they take a day a week away from working IN the business to work ON the business. That’s not suitable for everyone. You could choose a day a month or an afternoon a week.
If I'm honest, I actually shudder when I hear the phrase "time blocking". It's not something my ADHD brain wants to do! Routines are really helpful though and can help you to be organised, so I've developed a flexible routine that works for me - but it's still something I find it tricky to do. I have to make it fun or a reward. I allocate "No appointment" times in my schedule so I can choose what I want to work on in the moment, it satisfies my spontaneity craving but also gets things done.
Figure out what works for you and then find a way to be consistent with it, so you have those regular check-ins for your business development. It will help you to keep up with tasks that need to be completed on a regular basis like finances and marketing.
Success Indicators
As with setting any goal, being specific is the key to success. If you're vague, how do you know you're actually making any progress? Seeing the progress will keep up the motivation to keep going.
Get specific about what you want to achieve in your business, the business development activities that will allow you to do that and how you’re going to make it happen. This is the time to be excited about what's to come and get you fired up to get through the boring day to day stuff that will help you get to where you want to be!
When making plans, decide how you will monitor your progress - these are your success indicators.
Efficiency Boosters
There are things that can mess up your day no matter how prepared you are. That being said, there’s no harm in looking for opportunities to make your work more productive so you can continue to serve clients well and make time for working on your business.
The two main efficiency boosters are automation and outsourcing. You can set up automated workflows on email marketing, websites, project management platforms and all sorts these days. See if there is anything you can automate or even template to make it quicker.
You don’t have to be a big business to outsource. In fact, outsourcing can help you get to the point of being a big business because you aren’t solely reliant on your time and expertise. You can benefit from other people’s input too. As you can, start outsourcing the things you don’t have to do and don’t like to do because those are the biggest burdens on your to-do list.
Telling yourself you can't afford to outsource? Put an hourly rate on your time. How much time does it take you to do the thing you aren't very good at or hate doing so put off? How much procrastination is it causing that is draining your energy for other things? Price up that time with your hourly rate. I bet it's a LOT more than it would cost you to outsource it.
Creativity & Inspiration
Socialise with other business owners, it can be lonely running a business by yourself. Seeing what other people are doing is really inspiring and motivating. You can learn and brainstorm with people who get it. Creativity can’t exist in a vacuum and building a business takes a lot of creative problem solving! Look for local networking opportunities or join group programmes that include a community aspect.
I’m the co-founder of Small Business Vibes, a networking group for female entrepreneurs who want to find business friends and new clients. We’ve created an incredibly supportive and understanding online Facebook community and the number of our in-person meetings opening across the country is constantly growing. We also offer online meetings with many international women attending. Check out our events here.
Don’t Know Where To Start?
Running a business is like a dance. But no one has shown you the steps. And the music keeps changing. You’ll find your rhythm, then things will change and you’ll lose it again. There will be times when you’re on it with business development and times when you’re running around like a headless chicken. Luckily, there are strategies you can put in place to be more on it and less chicken-like.
If you’re feeling out of your depth when it comes to growing your business and you just don’t know what to do next, you can find support inside the Find Your Vibe Business Club. We keep you on track with business development by inspiring you to explore different aspects of business from marketing and sales to money mindset and spring cleaning. By combining daily journal prompts with guided workshops and other monthly live sessions like content creation, you have plenty of opportunities to think about you and your business. Throughout the month of June, we are looking at the topic of business growth, how you’re progressing with your 2024 goals, if you’ve drifted and how to reset to get back on track.
Find Your Vibe Business Club members also got first dibs on Sort Your Shit Out, my 6 month group program for business growth that kicks off with 2 days of in-person workshops for reflection, planning and prioritising. You’ll gain clarity on where you’re going in your business and how you’re going to make it happen followed by 6 months of support as you implement your action plan each month. Find out more info here.
