Are you a small business owner who is constantly putting out fires, juggling tasks, and feeling like there's never enough time in the day? If this describes you, you’re not alone, and your problem might just be you.
You see, the problem is that you might be working in your business instead of on it. Invariably, many small business owners just like you start with a vision of growth and success, but somewhere along the way, they get caught up in the daily grind, becoming their own employees, and just can’t find their way out of it.
While it’s understandable, especially in the early days when resources are tight and you’re wearing multiple hats, this approach can quickly becomes a trap. What’s worse, when you're too busy with the day-to-day, important areas like accounting, inventory management, and marketing all suffer. This leads to invisible problems that will threaten the very success you’re working so hard to achieve.
Accounting and Bookkeeping: The Silent Threat
Let’s talk about accounting and bookkeeping; not the most glamorous part of running a business, but absolutely essential. When you’re knee-deep in daily tasks, it’s easy to push financial management to the back burner. You might think, “I’ll catch up on the books later,” but later often turns into next month or even next quarter. The result? You’re left scrambling to figure out why your cash flow isn’t what it should be, or worse, facing a hefty tax penalty because something important slipped through the cracks.
Imagine finding out that your business missed payroll because your financial tasks weren’t up to date. Or consider the stress of discovering a significant error in your accounts just before tax season. These aren’t just hypotheticals—they’re real problems that happen when you’re too busy working in your business to keep a close eye on its finances.
Cash is a business’ lifeblood without a doubt. But just as important as having cash flow into your corporate body, you must also ensure you’re not bleeding out somewhere else. Keep those books updated!
Inventory Management: Where Profits Go to Die
Then there’s inventory management, another critical area that can easily fall by the wayside when you’re consumed with the everyday running of your business. Poor inventory management is like a silent leak in your boat. It might not seem like a big deal at first, but over time, it will sink you. Overstocking means your money is tied up in products that aren’t selling, while understocking can lead to missed sales and unhappy customers.
Here's a real world example: a client of mine engaged my services to help them organize and optimize their business, a small-scale retail store. During our initial conversations I started putting it together that the owners were too busy working IN their buisness to take care of other important aspects, namely inventory management.
In one of our meetings, I told them that they should begin thinking about their business differently; not as a ‘retail business’ but rather as an inventory management business. In the world of retail, inventory (and its proper management) was top of the heap, even ahead of getting customers in the door. After a short engagement on building processes for proper inventory management (accurate inventories, setting good reorder points and safety stock levels, etc.), they made some very interesting discoveries and quickly realized why their shop had been financially struggling for a year: lack of inventory controls.
Had this shop not corrected course, the store would have ended up with shelves full of last season’s products that no one wanted, forcing the owner to slash prices just to get rid of them. Meanwhile, a popular item that could have driven sales is out of stock, leaving customers frustrated and sending them straight to a competitor. These are the kinds of costly mistakes that happen when inventory isn’t managed properly.
Advertising and Marketing: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Advertising and marketing are the lifeblood of any growing business, yet they’re often the first to suffer when you’re bogged down by operational tasks. Maybe you’re thinking, “I’ll focus on creating a social media ad graphic once I have more time,” but without consistent effort, your business will fade into the background. In today’s digital world, if you’re not actively marketing, you’re not just standing still—you’re falling behind.
Picture this: your competitors are running targeted ad campaigns, engaging with customers online, and building their brands while your business barely maintains an online presence with website visitors slowly trailing off. Over time, this lack of visibility will inevitably lead to declining sales and a shrinking market share, all because you didn’t make marketing a priority. Unfortunately, marketing is not the sort of thing that you can do once and be done with it; it is a constant exercise of creating, running, managing, tweaking and re-creating. It’s a cycle that never ends.
The Growth Constraint: You
Most business owners start out with big dreams—visions of growth, success, and making a mark in their industry. And in the early days, it’s natural to be involved in every little detail. But as your business grows, this hands-on approach becomes less sustainable. At a certain point, you may find that your business isn’t growing as quickly as you’d like, or worse, it’s starting to plateau. What you may not realize is that the biggest constraint on your business’s growth could be you.
Running from task to task, believing that being busy equals being productive, can feel normal, especially after you’ve been living that life for the entire time you’ve had your business.
The Corporate America Equivalent
But in reality, this approach is a hallmark of a poorly managed company. It may surprise you to learn that this problem isn’t just a small business problem. It also exists in corporate America too. It just goes by a different name: Micro-Managing. I am absolutely positive that you have had a manager who couldn’t trust you to do your job, so he either did it himself or hovered over you. All that time he spent ‘doing it himself’ or hovering over you was wasted and took away from his real job: Management where things like strategic planning go completely neglected.
I’ve seen it time and time again in corporate environments where micromanagers are stuck in the weeds, unable to delegate because even they, themselves, haven’t made the shift in their mentality from an employee mindset to a leadership mindset.
If you’re constantly involved in the day-to-day, you’re not leaving yourself any time to work on your business—thinking about strategy, planning for growth, and setting the direction for the future. Instead, you’re keeping your business stuck at its current level, because you’re so busy managing it that you can’t step back to see the bigger picture.
The Solution – Boss Hours to Manage Your Business
This solution will work equally well if you are just starting out or if you’ve been in business for a while. Let’s assume that you have been in business for a while and you’ve noticed that the errors and missed opportunities are starting to pile up or occur more often than you’d like. Over the past several months, you’ve noticed:
Your books don’t match up with your bank accounts.
You find yourself telling your customers, “we don’t have it in stock, but we can order it for you.”
You notice that you haven’t received an inquiry coming from your website contact form in quite a while.
What’s going on? It's you, friend. You’re likely paying too much attention to the day to day and not enough on the month to month, if you catch my meaning.
So what do we do to fix this? University professors have something called “Office Hours.” This short window of time, usually 2-4 hours, 2-3 times a week is when they make themselves available to speak to students outside of class, typically to answer questions on the material.
You can employ this very same tactic, employed in reverse, to address the boss-tasks that have accumulated in the past couple days. I call it ‘Boss Hours.’
If your business closes at 4PM, then you must cease being an employee at 4PM and all the responsibilities that go with it. At exactly 4:15PM you put on your owner hat, march into your office, lock the door and begin working ON your business, addressing all the items on your “boss-list.”
Books need reconciling? Open QuickBooks and get to work.
Inventory need updating? Pull out your scanner and clip board and start updating.
New Social Media Ad need creating? Create it.
And yes, I said 4:15. Go ahead, take a 15-minute break, you worked hard all day and I’m pretty sure the boss won’t mind.
When you have dedicated time carved out from the day, you avoid getting pulled in a million directions at once. Simple focus and the discipline to say ‘no’ to your interrupting employees is all it takes.
A Small Prediction
Yes, your employees will come and try to interrupt you with some task or decision that they desperately need, but you will tell them to, “figure it out yourself and let me know what you come up with.” Remember, this is YOUR time to MANAGE your business. If your business fails, it will be you left to pick up the pieces while your employees, while out of a job temporarily, have no skin in the game. It falls to you to ensure your business acts like a business.
Now, over time, your employees will know not to bother you during your ‘Boss Hours’ and they will (haltingly and with some error) eventually rise to the occasion to handle anything that comes up while you’re locked up in your office.
But guess what? The more you focus, the more you will lose track of time and sooner or later, you’re going to find yourself working till 8, 9 or 10PM. And eventually you will decide that you can’t work 18 hour days so you begin to start “Boss Hours” a little earlier, before your shop closes.
But guess what? You find that, now that your employees have been weaned off your ‘decision-teet’ and trained to handle issues on their own (and been successful at it), you are effectively pulling away from the day to day and making the transition from glorified employee to a true business owner.
This is how it’s done. And suddenly, you are no longer your own worst enemy. You are no longer your business’s constraint on growth. You have released the strangle hold on your business’s neck and it is now free to breathe, succeed and grow.
Go Get ‘Em
Sincerely,
R. Altomare
Founder, BreathEasy Business Management and Consulting
Comentarios