How Many Hats Are You Wearing In Your Business?

As a small business owner, you wear many hats and some “fit” better than others. Here is just a few that all creative entrepreneurs wear: 

Marketing & Social Media manager.

Bookkeeper & Tax Preparer.

Content developer.

Coach.

Business Leader

Technical support. 

Photographer/Creative Director.

Sales & Customer Service.

While this type of task juggling is to be expected, you have to be aware that not all of your hats are created equal. Marketing outweighs bookkeeping, for example, because without marketing, there will be no cash to manage. You need to consider how much time you’re spending in each area. 

As creative entrepreneurs, we prefer to spend most of our time working on our craft, however when you look at your business in its totality, the creative part is actually less than 20 percent. If you ignore any of these hats for an extended period of time, you will find you spend most of your time in a reactive posture, constantly putting out fires. If you had a large company, you’d simply put on your CEO hat and delegate the rest, but in the small business world, we don’t always have that option. Instead, we have to work smarter, and concentrate on how we’re spending our time. 

Here are a couple of ideas on how you can be more productive each day:

Prioritize Your Daily Tasks

We all have different skills and “sweet spots” when it comes to the tasks we want and need to do. You might love working closely with your customers and hate bookkeeping, while someone else enjoys reviewing their profit and loss statement but doesn’t like writing blog posts or updating their website. Regardless of your personal preferences, one thing is certain: revenue generating tasks should be at the very top of your to-do list. 

That might mean product creation, photography and coaching sessions, email marketing, client outreach, webinar development, or something entirely different. Identify those money-making tasks in your business and be sure to prioritize them every single day. 

I recommend that you list 3 important items you want to accomplish in a day. Once you do that, schedule time in your day to begin working on one of those three items. If you do this each day, you will build a habit that will continually move your business forward. At the end of the week, take time to look back at what you accomplished and build on that as you head into a new week. If you are looking for a great quarterly planner, check out the Full Focus Planner at www.fullfocusplanner.com. I have been using it for three years, and it has been a great tool to help me accomplish my tasks and goals.

Know the Difference Between Important and Urgent

In his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends prioritizing tasks based on a time-management grid. Every task is assigned to a quadrant on a grid, based on whether it is urgent, important, both, or neither. 

Once you know where a task falls on the grid, you’ll immediately know what you should be working on. For example, marketing and planning are important but not urgent. A ringing phone is urgent, but not important. The sales page for your new program, which is launching tomorrow, is both urgent AND important. 

Before you prioritize your daily to-do list, think about where each of your tasks falls in the quadrant, and schedule them accordingly. Ideally you want most of your activities to fall in the  Important but Not Urgent quadrant.

Will you always be working on the best task for right now? Probably not. Nor will you always use your time as wisely as you should. By making a conscious effort to organize and prioritize your days, you’ll find it less stressful and overwhelming to manage your small business. 

Here is a link to another article 5 Ways to Keep Your Business Running Smoothly.

If you have any tips that you feel might benefit our readers, please share them in the comments section below.