Business owners sometimes tell me that they do not want to do any marketing because they are so busy that they cannot service all the clients that they have now.
For small businesses a who have only a few employees, this can be a really serious problem. Going from two to three or three to four employees can be quite a headache, especially when trying to find good people. If you are in this place, and you can’t hire a new person to expand, what can you do?
There is a natural limit to how much you can grow without increasing staffing, but there may be some things that you can do which will allow you to increase your revenues by better deploying the assets you have.
Let’s take a simple example. You are a consultant that clients will pay $100 per hour for your service. You have enough clients that you are working as many hours as you want to work and possibly more. As a consultant, you are selling your skills and knowledge, so it is very difficult to hire a second person who can help do what you do.
So, you’re stuck, right? Wrong.
While it may be impossible to hire someone who can do what you get paid $100 per hour for, you can hire someone to do the stuff you don’t get paid for.
Your time is worth $100 per hour. That means that if you have to take your car into the shop and it takes 2 hours, you lost $200 of potential revenue. Could you have hired someone for $40 to take your car to the shop and wait for it? You’d be up $160 on the transaction.
What else do you do that is not your most profitable activity? Cleaning? Errands? Administrative work? Bookkeeping? Answering the phone? Look at how you spend every hour in your week. What do you do which you could hire someone else to do for less than someone will pay you? Even if it would cost $50 per hour to get someone to take a particular task off your plate, you still net $50 in the deal.
Many of us don’t think of hiring someone to help with these kinds of tasks because that seems like the kind of thing that millionaires do. Of course, millionaires do that, but anyone whose time has a high value should be doing it. If your time is worth more than the cost to hire someone to take over a task, and the task is not core to your business, then hire out the task.
Do you not have enough hours in the week to capitalize on all the opportunities in your business? Contact Michael Whitehouse. He can analyze how you are deploying your resources and see if there are inefficiencies that you can take advantage of.