Thoughts on Weekends

Good morning and Happy Monday!

I hope everyone had a fun and memorable 4th of July weekend.  Attached are some pictures of the fireworks display held at the Fort of Vancouver.  This is from our condo downtown Vancouver.  We always have an incredible view and it is one of the things we love about living downtown.    The pictures are a little blurry as we were sitting inside (it was a cool 63 degrees out there) and I was using my Samsung phone which is really not suited for night photography.  But we still had an awesome viewing experience.

Are you a small business owner who ended up working all weekend?  I imagine most of your efforts involved paperwork.  From emailing quotes to entering bills, you likely have forgotten why you wanted to work for yourself in the first place.  If your business is consuming all of your time, perhaps you should rethink your efforts.

Working harder in your business doesn’t really save you anything – not time, not money, not effort.  But what exactly do I mean by that?  Well, first thing is doing a job you have hired people to do.  You have a customer call on Friday for special work for delivery on Monday and what do you do?  You don’t want an employee to do it because it is A) the weekend and B) it will cost you overtime so you spend your weekend doing the work.  Why did it happen this way?  Inertia.

You are used to being the chief problem solver.  Whether you have 2 employees or 20, you cannot get over the inertia of you starting your business and trying to do everything.  The problem with you being the only solution is that your Company doesn’t grow, even as you add new employees.  Think about it… has your workload increased or decreased when you added new employees?  I bet your workload increased didn’t it?

The one thing your business needs is you.  No, it doesn’t need you doing the technical work that you hired competent employees to do – your business needs you to think clearly about how to grow, how to succeed.  How are you going to land that new contract?  Who is our target customer next year?  These are the things your business needs you to work on.

If you hired good employees and you have given them effective written instructions, you will get a good result. But hiring well and not having effective written instructions leads to poor results.  You don’t even want to think about the mess that happens when you combine hiring the wrong people along with not having written instructions.  Sadly, we have seen all too many of these situations.

So, set a priority to take weekends off.  This means work on your business, not in it.  Rethink how people work to reduce the paperwork and emails and questions.  Spend your time creating the “How we do it here” manual so that you can eliminate most of the verbal instructions that go on.  Start simply and let your employees finish the rest of the manual. I bet that in no time you are actually able to enjoy a Saturday off and not feel buried when you come back in Monday.

I strongly encourage you to talk with someone who can help you create effective work processing documents and checklists.  Believe it or not, your accountant actually follows many checklists in doing their work so start there.  If you do not have an accountant or are looking for a second opinion, feel free to contact me to schedule your free no obligation consultation about how you can once again enjoy the weekend.

Have a great week.