I’m obsessed with not wasting resources. I think it has a lot to do with the old cliché that goes along the lines of, “If you have ever been poor or fat, you can never be too skinny or have too much money.” This obsession has translated over to my work with various clients, so here are 7 tips to make sure you aren’t wasting your two most precious resources: time and money!
1. Understand Where Your Profit Centers Are
In working with businesses and clients to make more money, the conversation usually turns to sales. One thing I try to get clients to focus on is where their profits are really coming from.
By this I mean, are you selling a lot of a product or service that is generating a lot of motion, revenue, and trouble, but it isn’t make you a profit?
You’d be surprised how often this occurs. So do some research and figure out where your truly profitable products and services are and work on expanding the market for them. And don’t just fall back on wasting a lot of time and money on products or services that are generating revenue but not making you any money.
2. Center Your Work on Results, Not Around Activity
In my business I charge clients for results. It isn’t an issue for me, but when I talk to other business owners, managers, and leaders, I often find that their business model is still centered around charging for activities: per document, billable hours, etc. If you want to get your time and effort under control, find a way to place the value of your products on the results they provide and not on the activities or time that you spend doing them.
3. Get Your Meetings and Email Communications Under Control
In a past life I sat on an employee empowerment committee at an organization I worked for. Talk about wasting time; this committee never did anything, but we met weekly for an hour or two to talk about ways that we could “engage” or “foster community” or some other thing that never led to any action.
When I go visit clients or talk to colleagues, I see this happening all the time in their organizations. Meetings are held just so that everyone can agree that they met about the issue and talked about, but no action is ever taken to do anything about it … unless that action is to have another meeting.
Same goes for email. I’ve been on the end of email chains that go 20-25 emails deep, where absolutely nothing of note took place.
So if you want to accomplish more with your time, get these two under control. A really great book on getting your meetings in order is Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli.
As far as your email communications go, obviously Tim Ferriss is famous for his email management techniques from The 4-Hour Workweek, but he also posted a really good blog post by Leo Babuta called “10 Steps to Become An Email Ninja.” You probably can’t get away with going as far as Tim Ferriss does, but if you use some of his tips and some of Leo’s, I think you will get a lot more value out of email and not have it run your life.
4. Don’t Waste All Your Time and Energy Trying to Be First at Social Media
Social media is great! Let me be clear that I love it. I like to post pictures of my son on Facebook. I like to mock and dump on my favorite or least favorite sports teams on Twitter. I like to keep track of what my friends and associates are doing in their jobs via LinkedIn. But here is the thing: If you are focused on building a business, you can’t try to win at social media. You may make sales by tweeting or posting links to your product page, but you still need to do the hard work of building relationships and here’s something I feel so deeply about that I am going to put it in bold and in caps. YOU CAN’T BUILD RELATIONSHIPS ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUT YOU CAN DESTROY THEM. So think before you tweet.
5. Understand Your Employees’ Strengths
One way that you can waste a lot of time and money in your business is by not knowing the strengths of your team. Back in the day, I was a terrible manager because I didn’t get this concept. It cost me a lot of time and money … along with energy, which shouldn’t be undersold.
So when you are putting together your team and your company, make sure you take into account what someone’s goals and ideals are. You also need to take a good look at people’s talents and skills. It is very easy to allow a project to get off track or a team to lose focus and consistency if you don’t line up people’s talents, goals, and strengths with the goals and needs of your project or business.
6. Don’t Micromanage Everything
I can feel myself losing you right here. Because as a business owner or manager, you know that you have to take a lot of responsibility for the success or failure of your company or project. But here is something I learned while doing work with the federal government and going to obtain my PMP certification: You can’t do all of the work and be a great manager.
Probably the most important skill you have at your disposal as a leader or manager is the ability to communicate your ideas and your vision. The second most important skill is the ability to trust. You have got to communicate your vision and your needs to your team and then trust them to fulfill those goals.
Once you begin to trust in your team and your ability to communicate effectively with them, you will begin to see that your team will be more trusting of you as a manager and will more readily come to you for feedback and guidance, which will make your team more effective and will save you time and money.
7. Plan and Set Goals
I have saved the best for last. One of the most basic and simple ways to ensure that you are making the wisest decisions about your time and money is to make plans. You need to plan for how you are going to attack your marketing, your sales, and your operations.
I am not a huge fan of making arbitrary numerical goals like “Let’s increase sales by 10 percent next quarter.” I find those kinds of things limiting and counterproductive. But when I am talking about planning and goal setting, I am talking more about process-based plans and goals. Things that you can control, like “We are going to do 25 items on our marketing gravity checklist this month” or “I am going to attend a weekly networking function that will allow me to meet key decision makers.”
When you take the onus of your goals off of arbitrary improvements and place them on inputs and actions that you can control, you will find that you feel much more in control of how you are using your time and money and you will often find that you manage to meet or exceed the number goals that you would have set anyway.
I hope these tips help you. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback and ways that you implement these or ways that you have improved your business. Please comment below or feel free to email me at You can reach him at dave@davewakeman.com.
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The post Stop Wasting Your Two Most Precious Resources: Time and Money appeared first on AllBusiness.com.