As an entrepreneur, one of the things I guard jealously is my time. I don’t allow anyone to waste my time. There are a lot of things around that can be recovered if lost, but, time, once you lose it, you can never get it again.
Each day, I hold up to 10 meetings with each costing me an average of 30 – 45 minutes. If I don’t guard my time with caution, it’s very easy for me to get lost in the bustle of these and other tasks even if sometimes they are ROI negative.
Let me ask you a question, how much is your time worth? When you ask people this Question, most say a figure, but what I’ve seen with a lot of business leaders is that even though they may claim to know a number, their actions are not consistent with how much value they place on their time.
Take for example, if you say you are worth $75 an hour but spend 1-hour doing email when you could pay someone to do it for you, would that be the best use of your time.
Here’s the thing, as a business leader, executive or entrepreneur, there are some things you just can’t afford to do even if you love or enjoy doing them. For your company to be profitable, you should have a predetermined hourly output that turns into a profit for your company based on your direct contribution. So if your hourly output should be $120 per hour to turn a profit for your company and you spend an hour doing a $20 per hour job, you will be bringing losses to the company.
To effectively manage your time as an entrepreneur, you need to fully understand something that is called opportunity management. Although there are a lot of things demanding your attention, you need to determine the things that deserve your attention. It’s not everything demanding your attention that deserves it. Sometimes, you need to hire and outsource the less deserving things to people with a lower hourly rate so that you can pay attention to the things that are deserving of your attention.
Now, have you thought about how much your time is worth?
If you haven’t, you must. The simplest way to determine your worth is to take the target figure of how much you want to make in a year, then dividing it by 3650 which is the average time someone works in a year. Further that down to how much you make when closing deals which in turn determines your maximum value.
Once you have that figure in mind, it’s now time to take stock of your day to think deeply about things you do daily and ask yourself if they are truly worth your value. What should you outsource and what should you remain with.
If you ask me, I will always refer to what Darren Hardey wrote in his book, the Entrepreneur Rollercoaster that, your role as an entrepreneur is to Quit Everything and focus on two things, Sales and Leading. If you find yourself not doing any of the two throughout your day, then you are costing your company money.
To conclude, time is the only finite resource you have. If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, then you ought to be stingy with it. Guard your time jealously.
The Chartered Vendor!
