Your Business’s Scarcest Resource

04/03/2006 | 4 Comments

If you’ve kept at it and tracked your time you should now have crystal clarity about how you are currently using your time.

Any surprises?

Are you doing things that you shouldn’t be doing?

If so, it’s costing you a lot more than you think, here’s why…

When you study systems you learn that the maximum output of any process is set by its scarcest resource. Your business is a system.

And what are the key resources needed by your business?

1. Money

2. People

3. Time

Money

If you have the right business model and you are effectively progressing toward your business goals you should either have, or have access to enough money. And the ability to get more isn’t constrained, there are plenty of investors for the right businesses.

People – There is no limit usually to the people you can hire or outsource to, especially when you have enough money.

Time – Of the 3 major resources time is scarcest. It’s also totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday’s time is gone forever and will never come back.

Everything you and your business does requires time.

All work (whether useful or not) eats away your time. But, most entrepreneurs (at least the unsuccessful ones) take for granted the unique, irreplaceable, totally perishable, and necessary resource.

Effective entrepreneurs realize that time is the limiting factor.

So, with your time logs in front of you answer the question:

What are some of the activities that I am currently doing that does not contribute to my effectiveness?

And once you come up with some answers the next question to think about is:

How can I either eliminate these time drains, automate them, or pass them off to someone else?

If you are not sure what are the activities that you should be doing, have no fear, I’ll quickly explain how you can arrive at the right answer.

Let’s pretend for a moment you were leaving your company for a while and you were going to hire a company president to grow your business while you were away. Before you left, the new company president asked you – what are the activities I must focus on, on a daily basis if I really want to grow your company as quickly as possible?

Your answer is where you should be spending your time. Because if you are running your company then you are the company’s president. And if you want to be effective you better be able to answer these two questions.

What am I getting paid to do?

What should I be paid to do if I am being paid for the right things to be done in my position?

Once you are clear about that – begin to ruthlessly cut away at activities that don’t make the list. In my upcoming notes to you I’ll show you how to do exactly that – get rid on the wasteful activities that clog up your cashflow.

To Your Effectiveness,

Rich Schefren