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Business success is dependent on a solid financial foundation & success looks different to everyone & there is a lack of equity of access to resources and information for small business owners and independent contractors & there is a societal narrative making us believe “balance” is our ultimate goal & … There are so many “&”s that impact being your own boss. Let’s have some frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success.
Molly Beyer: [00:00:08] Hello, hello, I am Molly Beyer, host of The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond, a podcast where we have frank discussions on the basics of business with a holistic focus on everything that helps business owners define and find success. There are so many ands that impact being your own boss. Join us as we explore all these ands and more. Like, subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts and let's explore these ambiguous ands.
Molly Beyer: [00:00:38] Hello and welcome to The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. I'm your host, Molly Beyer, and I'm here to lead you through frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. Last time we talked about time tracking as a pricing tool, really diving deep into how much time you're spending on products and services to make sure you're pricing them correctly. Today, we're going to go a little bit farther and talk about time tracking for goals and productivity by identifying opportunities to innovate, automate, and delegate. So to jump back a little bit into time tracking, it's really important to create buckets of time for yourself to track where it is you're spending your time. When you're creating buckets, you want to think about all of the things that you're doing on a regular basis and break them out into categories. Again, mine are things like administrative, client work, and professional development, things like that. And especially my big one that I try to focus most of my time on is my rainmaker or CEO visionary space.
Molly Beyer: [00:01:53] Now, when we're using these to highlight opportunities like automate, innovate and delegate, visualization becomes a very valuable tool. Now I've color-coded my buckets for clarity and have kept that consistent through all of the areas that I use for task management: my email, my to-do list, and then again in my time tracking app. So when I'm looking through all of my data, I know what colors I'm looking for. For me, when I was creating mine, tasks that I wanted to eliminate are marked in red. So when I see that color, I know that I am working on a task that isn't necessarily in my zone of genius. And we're going to talk about that in just a minute. But a great way that I've heard a number of people use - my colors are a little different, again, my reds are definitely those things that are the things that are not fully supporting my business in the most effective way. Green is a great color to use for things in your zone of genius. Yellow are those things that they kind of cross over, maybe you're the right person to be working on them now, or it's more cost-effective for you to be working on them now, but they will likely eventually need some innovate, automate, or delegate. And those reds are definitely those things that need to get off of your to-do list.
Molly Beyer: [00:03:24] So the zone of genius. What do I mean when I say that? That's really that sort of marriage of your unique abilities and your interests. This is your really high-value space. When we talked about the Pareto Principle, that 80/20 rule, 20% of your tasks are going to generate 80% of your outcome. So what we need to do is find that 20% that is best suited to you. What are the things that you are doing that either only you can do or that you do best, as well as they are things that interest you, that fulfill you, that excite you. When you find that space, that is where you want to focus the most of your energy, because you are going to get immense return for that time that you spend. And then that's where you're going to prioritize spending your time. Things that are outside of your zone of genius, those 80% things, those are in those yellow and red categories. Those are things that need to be delegated automated, or find some sort of innovation to move beyond those. For me, when I started time tracking, particularly in relation to creating proposals, developing pricing, it took a lot of time. We use a project-based pricing system as opposed to an hourly based, and I realized that the amount of time I was spending creating each proposal for each client was astronomical. And in the beginning, when it was just me and I had just a couple of leads and just a couple of clients, that was fine. I had the time to do that. But as the business has grown, I don't have time to do that anymore.
Molly Beyer: [00:05:29] So I needed to find a way to take the particular pieces of that fall into my zone of genius, like very quickly being able to identify patterns and discrepancies, areas for improvement within the data sets that I'm reviewing, as well as being able to very quickly look at something like a chart of accounts, which is, you know, all of the areas that you're categorizing your accounting and see where it can be tweaked. I can identify very quickly where it needs to be tweaked, how it needs to be tweaked to make sure that it's most optimized for taxes, as well as making it most optimized for the business owner to use when they're running their business. So I can do this very quickly. What then becomes less quick is taking that view and moving that into the pricing. So we talked a bit about pricing last time when recognizing how much time we are spending on individual little tasks, we were able to break out and create a pricing calculator because we know how much time it takes to reconcile a bank account on average, we know about how much time it's going to take to handle a certain number of transactions.
Molly Beyer: [00:06:53] We know how long it's going to take to deal with certain payment processors. So when I can take all of that information, put it into a spreadsheet that I created with all of the different formulas, have those be based on sort of our ideal hourly rate, I can create project pricing that is specific to the account that I am working on. We do review those pretty regularly and have realized that they're very, very accurate. We have gotten very close through time tracking to that accurate space with this tool. So that's innovation, finding that thing that can move you from spending a lot of time on something to not. So the innovation was the recognition of what could be done and the creation then of that automation tool. This process is now super automated. The individual proposals themselves, they're based off of a template that can be very quickly altered to be very specific to the person that we are talking to. So that takes my zone of genius, recognizing, using the Pareto principle, which pieces of that fall into my 20%, innovating a process, and then creating that automation tool. That has made it so much easier to create proposals in a very timely manner. It's easier for the client, the potential client, they get it faster, and it takes me a fraction of the time that it took me before.
Molly Beyer: [00:08:41] On the other end of the spectrum, that 80%, we have things like email management, client organizing, our calendar organizing, billing, admin, these kinds of things. These are things that are important to the business, but they don't directly contribute to income. These are very, very well suited for that innovation, automation, delegation space. So for me those are in my red categories. Those are my administrative space. Those are my operations space. Those, for me, need to move. So a way that you can do that, there's a lot of opportunities there, so many AI tools, so many automation tools. Again, we talked last time about using a time tracking app, but a lot of the CRM, the client relations management systems and project management systems, a lot of them have that opportunity to have that time tracking opportunity in them as well. And then you can use that app additionally, for a whole bunch of different automations. You can automate onboarding processes. You can automate some of your client work depending on what it is you're doing. There's also the opportunity beyond these tools to delegate out to somebody like a virtual assistant. And that's what we've done. I will make all kinds of random folders. And I think they make sense, and they make sense to me when I create them, but maybe they're not super organized. And my jumpy little ADHD brain thinks I know where this stuff is going to go in the future, but if there's a couple of options, I might put it in a couple of different places.
Molly Beyer: [00:10:29] So having somebody whose zone of genius - again, here we're honing in on everyone's zone of genius - somebody whose zone of genius is that very specific organization space, that takes time and energy away from me, delegates it out to somebody who is really, really good at it and really enjoys it. So they get to sit in their zone of genius, their 20% space, and maybe they're delegating tasks to automation tools or to somebody else if there's other people in their business. It's also the opportunity to delegate to my own team. I am not the one who should be doing data entry for our bookkeeping clients. It's not the best use of my time. So I have a bookkeeping team that does that because that is a better use of their time. And we also use as much automation through those processes as we can to make sure that their time is also best spent. When there's a time-consuming process, when there is a time-consuming task, even if it doesn't consume a lot of time, or you don't think it consumes a lot of time, if it is not in your zone of genius, you need to find a way to get it automated or to delegate it to somebody whose zone of genius it is in.
Molly Beyer: [00:12:04] I did not like to think that I spent as much time on email and calendar management as I did, and it still makes me a little sick when I look at how much time is spent in that space, but it is a ridiculous amount of time that could be better spent in other spaces. So having my virtual assistant to help keep those things organized takes a lot of time off of my plate. Repetitive tasks as well. Again, those items like an onboarding process, there's a lot of an onboarding process that could be automated. Things like creating emails to send out to clients or to prospects, those things can be automated through CRMs. Having your emails automatically be labelled or moved into a specific folder, automatically highlighted, tagged, starred so that you know what they are, it takes a little bit of time to set those processes up, but it pays back exponentially in the long run.
Molly Beyer: [00:13:12] So a couple of things to do. Review your current time tracking buckets. Make sure that they are aligned with the tasks you are doing every day. And think about where is that space that gets you into your zone of genius, that 20%. That space where you are best at it, best suited for it, and also enjoy what you're doing. And those are your green tasks. Those are your go. Yes. Always. Please. Those tasks that you're still pretty good at that are still right now, best as your responsibility, or it's most cost effective to have them be your responsibility, those are your yellow tasks. Those might someday be a part of that innovate, automate, or delegate process. Those tasks that anybody could do that are not enjoyable to you. Those are your red tasks. Those need to be automated or delegated ASAP.
Molly Beyer: [00:14:31] I love the colors. Do not discount the opportunity to have that visual representation, because when you look at your hours at the end of the week in a graph form with those colors, you will be floored by how much time you are spending in the red. You want to be in the green as much as possible. And remember, attempting to be a jack of all trades rarely ends well. You have to identify your zone of genius. You have to get yourself into that space. So utilize your time tracking wisely. It's not just a tool to track your hours, but to really drive innovation, enable automation, and delegate effectively, always staying within your zone of genius. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today. We would love to hear your feedback on today's episode as well as requests for future content. Drop a comment or suggestion and join us next time for more frank and holistic conversations on the basics of business. Please also like, subscribe or follow so you never miss an episode. And until next time, I am Molly Beyer and this has been The Ambiguous &: Business Basics and Beyond. Have a wonderful day!