The Business Owner’s Primary Game
More in Less.
Every business owner should have a big vision for where they are going and a clear mission statement for building a great result for their clients. Behind both of these is a single game that every business owner should be playing to accomplish them. It’s called “More Money in Less Time.” It’s the central game we need to play to build a successful business.
It’s a very serious game and it will transform your business and your lifestyle. Everything we do should be filtered through this one question, “How do I make more money in less time?”
Most of us started out as employees, who make more money in more time. We then transferred that bad habit to owning our business. Stop it. An employee thinks that way, but a stakeholder won’t (employees are obsolete – I’ll suggest in a future post why this is a bad habit for staff and stakeholders, not just owners). If you as a business owner want to build a successful business, you can’t afford to employ this old Industrial Age habit, either.
So the central game you play to realize your vision and accomplish your mission (and to get a life) is:
a) continually increasing the revenue of your company while
b) continually reducing the time you have to spend on bringing in that revenue.
Every successful business owner at every size of company, small to large, plays this as their main game.
All of us probably put together a spreadsheet at the beginning of every year that shows how you intend to make more money that year. It shows a graph with a line going up. How many of you also put together a similar spreadsheet with a line going down that shows how much less time you intend to invest in your business in those 12 months? See my recent post about two partners THE URL HERE who, after 20 years in a $40 million business decided to do this, and ended up getting five and a half months a year off.
There are two questions you need to ask regularly in order to play the game of “More Money in Less Time”:
1) “Is this (whatever I’m doing right now), the highest and best use of my time?” The answer to 75-90% of what we’re doing will be no. It’s rarely the highest and best us of our time – we’ve just been doing it since starting the business and haven’t bothered to get it off our plate.
If the answer is no, then the second question is:
2) “How do I do this for the last time?” If you are serious about getting things off your plate, you’ll come up with 1-10 ways to get things off your plate that don’t belong there. You only need one. If you’re afraid, distracted, have a big ego (nobody is as good as me at this), or dozen other excuses, you will find 1,000 ways to not get this off your plate. There is always a way to get it off our plate, but if you’re looking for ways to not do it, you’ll find them.
This is the most important game a business owner (and their management staff) can play. We waste more time and money doing things others should be doing than just about any other way. And if you want to get off the treadmill, this is THE game you must play above all others.
If you apply these two simple questions to everything you do for one month, it will change your business and begin to give you the answers that will allow you to make more money in less time, get off the treadmill and get a life.
If you think your situation is unique and you can’t do this, please share it below and we’ll help you see you can do it, too.
The business owners in my post from last week are going to take five and half months off every year now. I take every Friday off, every other Monday, the last week of every month, and one month a year, which allows me to work in Africa to solve poverty. Our (not my) business grew by 41% last year and is projected to grow by 50%+ this year.
You can do this – just play the game, “How do I make more money in less time?”
