Want Your Business to Grow? Complete One Material Action Per Day!

Want Your Business to Grow? Complete One Material Action Per Day!

On the flip side, there are a lot of demands on your time that you think may be important, but just are not a material action, as defined above. To me, if you are not spending at least 20 percent of each day on “material actions” you will not have a reasonable chance to grow your revenues and propel your business to the next level. Within four months of acquiring the business, our annualized revenue run rate had doubled to over $5 million. We focused on material actions to drive the business forward. Our focus was on driving revenues as quickly as we could, and our time was firmly focused on making those material actions happen. Our product offering needed to be fine-tuned, to make the business more scalable. Quickly, the time I had to focus on “material” projects, started to get consumed by “less material” projects. But, even in small businesses, you need to figure out how to keep yourself moving the business forward with “material” projects. Let your head of technology review various systems needed. Don’t let the “less material” work get in the way of you having the time required to drive the business forward by completing material work.

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Making sure you invest your work time wisely can make the difference between rapid growth and flaming out.

Want Your Business to Grow? Complete One Material Action Per Day!

When you are running a small business, it is really easy to get distracted. Firstly, your own CEO job most likely has a lot of different tasks, from chief strategist to chief bottle washer. Secondly, your team makes many demands on your time, mostly to help point them in the right direction on their projects. And, thirdly, it’s just too easy to get sucked into the random inbound contacts that come into your email box or through social media.

All I can say to you entrepreneurs who are “floating in the wind” of poor time management is: unless you are doing at least one material thing each day to move your business forward towards new revenue or profit heights, you are never going to grow your business as quickly as you could. Allow me to explain.

What is a material action?

To me, a material action is something that has meaningful revenue or profit implications from its output. On the revenue side, it could be things like launching a new marketing campaign, or making a new sales call, or ideating a new product line, or expanding into a new target-customer or geographic market, or hiring a new salesperson, or negotiating business merger opportunities, etc. Anything that will drive new revenues.

On the profit side, it could be things like cutting your cost structure, or improving your business efficiency. Or, it could be improving your company morale and productivity, or similar tasks. Anything that will drive higher margins for your business.

What is not a material action?

On the flip side, there are a lot of demands on your time that you think may be important, but just are not a material action, as defined above. This could be things like producing your monthly financial statements, or posting to your social media accounts, or writing a new monthly email newsletter. Or, it could be managing your ad agency, or doing one-on-one meetings with your direct reports, or running payroll checks, or upgrading your systems, or relocating your home office, etc. Yes, these are important tasks that need to get done. But, none are going to propel your business to the next level.

Budget more time for more material action.

I bet if you did a critical assessment of how you are spending each of your working hours, most of you are spending the vast majority of your time, if not all of your time,…

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