4 Secrets to Building a Successful, Profitable Business – Secret #3 Manage Yourself Rather Than “Time Management”

I can hear all the audible gasps at the realization that secret #3 has just landed in your inbox. Hell Yeah!!!!!

A key differentiating factor stopping successful entrepreneurs from achieving their goals is nothing other than Time Management. In this blog, This secret is crucial for you to master if you are going to achieve your goals, vision, and dreams successfully.

The secret is this….manage yourself, not the time! It is a given that the hands of the clock will tick every minute of every day, and time will move forward, something that is not under your conscious or unconscious control. But one thing under your control is how you choose to use your time and perform within the time you have and how you choose to "Manage Yourself". You will never get time back, so you must use every minute as effectively as possible. To use it effectively, you must be effective, and the only person who can control this is you!

I am going to share with you a few key principles for ensuring your maximum personal effectiveness and peak performance. These principles, or "Rules," are a guaranteed recipe for your success.

The Top 5 Rules for Personal Effectiveness and Peak Performance:

Rule 1 - Know Your Numbers

Rule 2 - Eliminate Procrastination

Rule 3 – Prepare, Plan and Prioritise

Rule 4 - Practice Self Discipline

Rule 5 - Make Yourself Accountable, Always!

Know Your Numbers

"If you don't know your numbers, you don't know your business; it's that simple."

-Marcus Lemonis from The Profit

Let me introduce you to a concept that can revolutionize your business -the Pareto Principle. It's a simple idea with profound implications. According to this principle, 20% of your efforts will yield 80% of your business growth and success. In other words, a small portion of your tasks will generate the majority of your results. This means that focusing on high-value, high-productivity, and revenue-generating tasks is not just a good idea but a necessity for daily operations. So, let's start outlining these tasks and

Look at my Top 5 Goals in the last chapter and apply the 80/20 rule. About my Rule of 5, let's say we take 10 tasks and apply the 80/20 rule; 2 of these tasks contributed most to my success. The 2 highest-value tasks for me were:

I made sales calls to prospects/customers and arranged meetings to get in front of them to win business, thus generating revenue through sales growth. I knew I needed to speak to 20 people per week to get in front of 2 of them, and I knew that I had a 50% conversion rate, which meant 1 of them would convert to a new client. Knowing these numbers is vital for your success.
I will send proposals relevant to the needs of my clients and prospects and follow up on these until a decision has been made. I either converted them and began work or archived them and moved on to the next prospect! This "20%" contributed to 80% of my productivity and growth. One thing to note is that I had set a target to make 12 follow-up phone calls to every prospect or client to whom I had sent a proposal. I never gave up before call 12, and often, it was on call 8 or 9 that a decision was reached. I have met many people in business who didn't use this type of number system, and they may likely have given up one call too soon!

Other vital numbers for you to know are:

Know your financial goal. How much money do you want to make annually? This will give you your monthly target to achieve.
Your annual forecast for business and prospects
What is your net profit margin on your product or service? This is a more accurate measurement of your business's profitability. Remember, turnover gives you vanity; profit gives you sanity!
How many products or services must you sell to fulfil this goal?
What is your sales conversion rate?

These are all vital numbers, and if you still need to focus on them, you need to know. Once you know them, you need to track them in terms of your progress. This will tell you if you are reaching your goal or not, and if you are not tracking these key areas, your chances of success will be minimal. The numbers don't lie!

The other number you need to be cognizant of is the number on the clock. While I have already stated that you cannot "manage" how the hands move around-the-clock numbers, you need to know that these numbers are your starting and ending points on any given day. It doesn't really matter whether your day is going to be an 8-hour day, 10-hour day or 12-hour day; what you get done in that number of hours will determine your level of performance, and your level of performance is what determines your level of success.

One of the most powerful tools to assess how effectively you use your time is to keep a time diary, even just for one week. This is one of the biggest eye-opening things I have ever done in terms of self-reflection on my performance. For one week, I kept a diary in 30-minute review chunks and assessed for every 30-minute period exactly how I had used my time. I quickly realized on review of that one week that there were many parts of my day where I needed to perform my highest value and highest productivity tasks. I had total clarity on where I used my time most and least effectively.

Procrastination

"A Man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."

-Hunter S Thompson

Procrastination is defined as the deferring or delaying of action. It is one of the biggest reasons that entrepreneurs do not achieve success. This is usually because their delay or deferring of action results in lost opportunities, which prevent the entrepreneur from moving forward toward their goal. If you are doing this, you risk getting left behind by someone who is doing it.

If you plan on starting your tasks or goals next week or next month, then they will always be in the future, and so too will your success. If you plan on doing your highest-value and revenue-generating task "later on," then it may never get done or not get done as effectively if you leave it late in the day rather than doing it first thing when you are at your most energetic.

Your success starts and is dependent on you taking concentrated action now. Successful entrepreneurs have an action-orientated approach, and they have a sense of urgency and an "impatience" to get things done so they can move on to the next task.

Look at what you need to do today, this week, and this month to move towards your goal. What do you need to do first? You just need to do it. Then, when it is done, what do you need to do second? You need to do that too, and so on.

One of the World's leading Experts and Authors in this subject is Brian Tracy, and his book "Eat That Frog – Get More of the Important Things Done Today" is one of the best books you will ever read to move you forward in avoiding procrastination or at the very least show you that if you are going to procrastinate, which we all do at some stage, make sure it's on the little stuff not the big stuff. Ensure it is on meaningless, low-value, low-productivity tasks rather than high-value, high-productivity tasks. This book has a practical approach and action steps summary at the end of each chapter. But remember, knowledge is only power if you use it. It is only power if you take it and put it into action; the only person who can do that is you.

Prepare, Plan and Prioritise

"Before Anything Else, Preparation is the key to Success."

-Alexandra Graham Bell

Preparation is vital to the implementation of any plan. Preparation ensures that you have everything in place from the outset, the arrangements you make for putting your plan together. Preparing the order of your tasks, preparing the layout of your day and week, preparing to have everything you need in place for achieving your Top five priorities, and preparing for every meeting you attend to ensure that you sell to the needs of your client or prospect are the key elements of preparation for the successful entrepreneur.

Planning your tasks (goals) is essential to maximizing your effectiveness in carrying out high-value tasks in a timely manner. Planning is as simple as writing a list. While your business plan will be your master plan, the vision for your business going forward, planning through writing down a daily, weekly, and monthly list is what will effectively get you towards your overall goal, the master plan.

Commit to planning your goals in writing. This was very easy for me because, as a nurse, there is a universal acceptance that legally, if something has not been documented, there is no evidence it was done; quite simply, if it wasn't written down, it doesn't exist. It is the same for you when you are planning your goals; writing it down is evidence that it exists, and more importantly, when you are assessing your performance, it makes that evaluation very easy. You either did what you wrote down or you didn't!

Although we are living in a digital era, where many of you may have your notes about your goals on computers, tablets and smartphones, there is an abundance of evidence to suggest that physically writing your ideas, goals and targets down on paper is much more beneficial for embedding them in your memory and enhancing your creativity. The Pre pre-frontal cortex area of your brain is one of the primary areas of the brain that takes the information you write down and binds and stores it into your memory, so it might pay to rethink your digital device!

Whatever way you plan to document it, one thing is a given. You will be more productive if you get into the simple habit of planning tomorrow, today, planning next week this week, planning next month this month and most of all, PRIORITISE!

Prioritizing is as simple as giving tasks a numerical order of importance. I used a Rule of 5, with task 1 being the most critical, vital, urgent task to be carried out first and 5 being the task that, although still being important, was to be carried out last. There will always be hundreds of tasks to be done, and you won't get them all done in one day or even one week, month or year, but some of these are not the highest value or productivity tasks to help you achieve your goal, and therefore you don't need to focus on them in the now. Prioritizing is basically about deciding what needs to be done first and what is most important. It is about deciding what needs to be done by you, what can be delegated to other members of your team if you have employees, what can be outsourced to an outsourced provider and what doesn't need to be done by you as a priority or what can be "dumped" because it doesn't need to be done at all.

In my first year in business, I tried to keep all the balls in the air; the temptation is to try and "save money" by doing things yourself. This is not a good use of your time, and you will likely get swamped with low-value tasks that are not a priority and will not move your business forward. I grew my team in year 5, but from year 2 onwards, I outsourced tasks such as basic administration to a virtual office provider, monthly management accounts, credit control, IT, and social media. These were all tasks that were eating into my time and preventing me from prioritizing my highest value and revenue-generating functions in the time I was losing to doing those lower-value tasks.

Practice Self Discipline

"A Disciplined Mind leads to happiness, An Undisciplined Mind leads to Suffering"

-Dali Lama

Discipline, self-control, motivation, will power—it doesn't really matter what you call it. Self-discipline is one thing you must master if you want success at anything in life, not just your business. Self-discipline is the foundation that separates the successful from the unsuccessful as it relates to your ability to consistently make yourself do the things you need to do to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

Disciplined people are usually very structured in the approach they take and the energy they use to get the things they must get done in order for them to achieve their goal. Discipline in my opinion, is even more important than talent, more important than circumstance and this can be seen from the examples of people who have gained success even when there were more talented people in their field who didn't or people whose perceived circumstances should have brought them more opportunities for success but they still didn't achieve it.

Self-discipline is about pushing yourself to "do" at all costs, no matter what. It is about controlling your own behaviour to do what it takes to achieve your goals. It's about taking a systematic approach and holding yourself accountable to control your behaviour to ensure you get there.

In our earliest day's discipline was about conforming to rules, regulations, and systems, if you think of being in school forexample. Your discipline in business isn't really that different. Self-discipline in business is about how you show up! How you show up in performing your goals, what behaviours or self-imposed "rules" you engage to get you results for your business, this includes things such as accountability, persistence, focus, action and consistency.

Make Yourself Accountable, Always!

You can spend hours planning; you can write down plans in every detail. You can have a vision for achieving the biggestgoal, and you can write down your weekly and monthly goals all day long, but there comes the point where you must review them and ask yourself, am I achieving my goals or not? This, the cornerstone of your success, is called "Accountability".

Accountability is basically where you take responsibility for your action(s) or inaction if that is the case. As an entrepreneur or business owner it is you that must take 100% responsibility for every single action or inaction that leads to the success or failure of your business. It's also important in taking responsibility for how your level of success is progressing, or not progressing, that you adopt a no excuses policy. We can all make excuses like economic uncertainty, multiple competitors, and inefficient staff, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with you!

There are useful things you can do to help you maintain your accountability structure.

You can be your own accountability assessor using a rewards/penalty system for when goals have been achieved (reward) or not achieved (penalty).
You can use an Accountability Partner (Someone who assesses the goals you have set for a given period with you and assesses whether you have achieved them).
You can become part of a Mastermind Group where you set goals within and in front of the group and they become your accountability partners. A Mastermind Group is a group of people who meet with a common purpose, e.g. business owners who want to grow their business. The best groups I have been in have had between 6-8 people in them, met monthly and they had a good gender mix. The meetings should be timed and chaired to ensure they are effective. It is also best that if you are joining a group, you join one with people who are at a level above where you are currently at but where you would like to get to. The main reason for this is that you will likely be pushed out of your comfort zone, thus enhancing your performance, and you can learn from them, both of which will inevitably bring you more success.

Conclusion & Action Points

Applying the 80/20 Rule, What are your 5 most important tasks?

1. ---------------------------------

2. ---------------------------------

3. ----------------------------------

4. ----------------------------------

5. ----------------------------------

What are your target numbers this year for the following?

Annual Financial Goal: -------------------------------------------

Profit Margin on your top 5 products or services:

Product/Service 1. ---------------------------------

Product/Service 2. ---------------------------------