Small entrepreneurs, by virtue of their small size and lack of assistants and other resources, try to do all things for their business. Many of them are their own production man, marketer, bookkeeper, payroll master, promotion and PR man.
No wonder many of them complain: I have so many things to do with so little time; I can’t focus!
They wake up each day facing a hundred and one tasks — big and small — and feeling daunted and confused. They go around in circles, dabbling in a little of this, a little of that. At the end of a frantic day, they feel they have not accomplished anything solid that would really help their business grow and move.
One entrepreneur sums up his situation this way: “ I come up with new ideas and get excited about them all of the time, and it is so hard for me to just put those ideas on the shelf for later.”
Greg Salvoza, who owns a construction company based in Taytay, Rizal, shares what he does to focus better: “I apply the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. I look for the 20 per cent of tasks that are truly important and will make a difference to the business. The rest I will set aside or assign to my foreman or administrative assistant.
Salvoza advices other entrepreneurs: “Take it from me, of the countless things you do daily, only about 20 per cent really matter and will produce 80 per cent of the results needed. You can apply this rule in many aspects of running your business, even in marketing and customer relations.”
Here, from evergreensearch.com, are other how-to-focus tips from the pros who have been there, done that:
“My biggest struggle is focus. I have A.D.H.D. like a lot of entrepreneurs and I want to do many things at once. Not just in the sense of creating multiple companies at the same time but doing too many things within each company. Over the years, I have learned to focus on one company at a time .. and more importantly making sure that my company does only one thing … that one thing I really do well.”
“It was really tough to focus before. Lately, I’ve been doing well at training myself to finish something first before moving on, or at least get to a good stopping point in a project before moving on to the next.”
“I ask myself the following question, ‘What’s the most important thing I can get done today, this week, this month to make the biggest difference in my company?’ Then make sure you spend the majority of this time solving those problems. There’s often a very small set of things that if we do right will make the biggest difference in our businesses. They’re often the hardest to do so we put them off. “
“Waking-up every morning and first deciding what I’m NOT going to do, being ok with it, and sticking to it.”
Photo: “Confused” by , c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved