One of the biggest barriers to productivity in a small business isn’t a lack of time. It’s the business owner spending their time doing the wrong things.

When you first start a business, doing everything yourself is often unavoidable. You do the sales, answer the phone, send the invoices, update the website, sort out the accounts and probably empty the bins as well. But as the business grows, something has to change.

Unfortunately, for many business owners, it doesn’t. They continue doing tasks simply because they can do them, rather than asking a much more important question: should I be doing this at all?

What Is Your Time Actually Worth?

Let’s take a simple example. Imagine you’re a business owner whose productive time can generate £500 to £600 per day for the business. Every month, you spend two days sorting out invoices, receipts, expenses and bookkeeping. You might look at that and think you’re saving money because you’re doing the bookkeeping yourself. But are you?

Those two days potentially represent £1,000 to £1,200 of your productive capacity. If a professional bookkeeper could complete the work more efficiently and it cost you, say, £200, paying someone else suddenly doesn’t look like an expense. It looks like an investment.

Obviously, the exact figures will be different for every business, but the principle remains the same. If somebody can do a task for considerably less than the value you could generate in the same amount of time, why are you doing it yourself?

Being Capable of Doing Something Doesn’t Mean You Should Do It

This is where many business owners get caught. They’ll tell me, “I can do my own bookkeeping.” I’m sure you can. You can probably clean the office as well. You could learn to build your own website, spend hours creating graphics for social media, answer every telephone call, process every invoice, chase every payment and carry out every administrative task in the business.

The question isn’t whether you can do those things. The question is whether doing them represents the best use of your time.

According to research by Sage, administrative burdens can consume significant amounts of small businesses’ working time, with tasks such as accounting, HR and other administrative requirements taking owners away from activities that directly develop the business. That is time that isn’t being spent finding customers, developing relationships, improving products and services, managing employees or planning the future of the business.

Productivity Isn’t About Working Faster

When we talk about improving productivity, the natural reaction is often to look for ways to work faster. How can I answer emails more quickly? How can I squeeze another meeting into the day? How can I get through my to-do list? But genuine productivity isn’t about cramming more activity into the same number of hours. It’s about producing greater value from those hours.

If you spend an hour doing something worth £20 to the business when you could have spent that hour doing something worth £100, being extremely efficient at the £20 task doesn’t make you productive. You’ve simply become very efficient at doing the wrong thing.

What Should You Be Doing?

There are certain things in your business that you are probably uniquely placed to do. Perhaps you’re the best salesperson. Maybe you have the technical knowledge customers are buying. You may be responsible for developing key relationships, managing the team, winning major contracts or deciding the strategic direction of the company. Those are the areas where your time is potentially most valuable.

Now compare those activities with everything else you do during a typical week: bookkeeping, administration, diary management, social media, IT support, payroll, marketing, website updates, telephone answering, data entry, cleaning. Do you genuinely need to personally do all of them? Probably not.

Outsourcing Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Employing Someone

One reason business owners are reluctant to delegate is because they immediately think about employing another member of staff. That means salary, National Insurance, pensions, holidays and another person to manage. But employment isn’t the only option.

There is a huge range of specialist businesses, freelancers and subcontractors available to SMEs. You could use a bookkeeper for a few hours each month, a virtual assistant for administration, an external marketing company, an IT support business or a specialist to manage your payroll. You don’t necessarily need somebody for 40 hours a week. You might only need them for four.

The advantage is that you’re buying the particular expertise you need when you need it. There is also another productivity benefit: a specialist will often complete a task much faster than you can. Something that takes you most of a day because you only do it occasionally might take an experienced professional two hours because they do it every day. You’re therefore not simply buying their time. You’re buying their experience and efficiency.

But Don’t Outsource Responsibility

There is an important distinction here. Delegating a task doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility for it. If you outsource your bookkeeping, you still need to understand the financial position of your business. If somebody manages your marketing, you still need to know whether that marketing is generating results. If you use a virtual assistant, you still need appropriate processes and controls.

The objective is to remove the doing, not the management. You remain responsible for the business.

Start With Your Own Working Week

Here’s an exercise I regularly recommend. For the next week, keep a record of what you do. Not roughly. Actually write it down. Then put every activity into one of four categories:

1. Only I can do this.
2. Someone else could do this.
3. A specialist could do this better or faster than me.
4. This probably doesn’t need doing at all.

Then look particularly closely at categories two and three. How many hours could you release every month? And, more importantly, what could you do with those hours instead?

If outsourcing £200 worth of work gives you back a day in which you can generate £500, win a new customer or work on improving the business, the important figure isn’t the £200 you’ve spent. It’s the value you’ve created with the time you’ve bought back.

Work on the Business, Not Just in It

One of the biggest changes a business owner has to make as their company grows is moving from being the person who does everything to the person who makes sure everything gets done. That’s a very different job. It requires delegation, systems, processes and, occasionally, accepting that somebody else may actually be better at a particular job than you are.

Your time is one of the most valuable resources your business has. Don’t waste it trying to save £20 an hour when you could be using it to generate £100. Sometimes the quickest way to improve productivity isn’t to work harder or faster. It’s to stop doing the work somebody else should be doing.

How ETC Can Help

If you constantly feel busy but never seem to have enough time to work on growing the business, our free two-hour business review can help. We will look at how the business currently operates, where your time is being spent and identify practical opportunities to improve productivity, delegation and profitability.

The objective isn’t to help you fit more work into your day. It’s to make sure you’re spending your day doing the work that really matters.

Call 01384 355444 or email enquiries@exec-tc.com to arrange your review.