Practical Solutions to Help Business Owners Solve Their 5 Biggest Challenges

This is the first of five articles that will provide you with actionable solutions to your most pressing challenges and concerns as a business owner. We will provide you with useful tools and resources that can help you actively address the things that keep you up at night. We have researched best practices of the most successful business owners in a specific market and compiled practical advice and tools from business experts.

To help you make the greatest impact with your limited time, we have identified a set of simple, low-cost but highly effective actions you can take to address the first challenge in our series of five:

• Leverage Your Time - Leveraging time seems to be the top challenge with most business owners. We have identified resources that will make it easy for you to put in place some simple systems that will help you free up time, reduce your stress level and get your business working harder for you.

Business owners work 50 percent more than employees of large companies. The average business owner holds five “jobs” within his or her own company and many entrepreneurs must invest their time as “sweat equity” because they are funding their own business.

Successful owners have created leverage and found more time to do the things that were most important to them by:
• Understanding how they use their time
• Treating their time as an asset on the balance sheet – not a free resource
• Allocating their time to five most productive activities

Four actions you can take to generate more time:
1. Know your time
2. Structure your time
3. Reallocate your time
4. Put in place systems that help you automate and delegate tasks

Eight things you can do to leverage you time:

1. Keep a journal of how you spend your time in a week
2. Draw a pie graph of how you would ideally spend your time if you could
3. Create job descriptions for the 5+ jobs you do as an owner
4. Fire Yourself from at least one job
5. Create a “not-to-do” list
6. Put a price on your time in terms of dollars per hour
7. Shift more of your time to the five highest ROI activities
8. Create an advisory board that expects a high return on your time

“Owner time is the single most scarce and irreplaceable asset in a business”

Resources to Help You Understand How to Structure, Focus, and Reallocate Your Time
• The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: Proven Strategies for Increased Productivity and Inner Peace, by Hyrum W. Smith, (Time Warner, 1994)
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, By Stephen R. Covey, (Free Press, 1993)
• The Superman Complex: Achieving the Balance that Leads to Success, by Max Carey (Longstreet Press, 1999)
• The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker (Harper B

Article Source: http://interesting-articles.com

Resources to Help You Understand How to Structure, Focus, and Reallocate Your Time " The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: Proven Strategies for Increased Productivity and Inner Peace, by Hyrum W. Smith, (Time Warner, 1994) "

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