Your Helping Business

‘TIME MANAGEMENT’
This title is in quotes because it’s actually something neither you or I can do. We can’t ‘manage’ time. Time passes as you’ll have learned earlier and it doesn’t really exist. What we’re really talking about here is how your ‘Helping’ business fits in with everything else you do.

There is a whole industry around the topic of ‘time management’ and people will want to sell you lots of products and services to ‘help’ you with that.

What you ‘manage’ as regards time, is yourself and how you use the time you have available – and here’s the secret to it.

If you plan and intend to do something at a certain time for a certain period of time – and then you don’t carry out that plan, don’t do what you said you would do at the time you said you would do it – then your ‘day’ starts to fall apart – and you have to spend more time replanning!

Sounds simple doesn’t it – do what you say you’ll do at the time you said you’d do it? But we all know that life, and especially life in business, doesn’t work like that.

What you need is a simple way of quickly reorganising yourself when ‘things go wrong’ and you ‘run out of time’.
You’ve already learned how to integrate all your activities into a ‘Personal Operating System’ so the first thing you need to do is to build in your regular and planned ‘business’ or ‘work’ activities.

Now you need to think about what you have to do and work out what you’re going to do first and then next and so on – a system or prioritisation which starts with a ‘Do List’. Not a ‘To Do List’ because if something is ‘to be’ done your subconscious assumes it doesn’t need to be done now. You might not have realised this but ‘to do’ lists are, in reality, a source of procrastination. Your mind says, “this thing is ‘to be’ done – in the future – I don’t need to do it now”.

Make a list of all the things you have to do and then place them in three categories, A, B and C. Then in each category number them in order. Just one thing, you should never have more than five things in the A list. If you did, you’d be putting unnecessary pressure on yourself.

There are different ways of prioritising tasks and a common one is to distinguish between ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ and do the things that are both of these first. But that doesn’t really take into account the length of time or amount of effort it will take to do them.

Marisa Peer suggests we do what we least like doing (I think she uses the word ‘hate’ doing) first but that’s not always possible, especially if you’re in the habit of making an early start to the day. Sometimes you can’t make that phone call you really don’t want to make until later, sometimes you have an appointment you’re not looking forward to in the afternoon. But it is a good idea to do the things you would prefer to be over and done with as early as possible.

If you do have fixed appointments – on you’re A list and you have ‘spare time’ while you’re waiting you can always fit in a short activity from your B or C list. Having an activity on the A list doesn’t mean you have to do all of you’re a’s before you start on your B’s.

My mentor, Peter Thomson, advises that once you have prioritized your Do List, you need to re-prioritise each time you complete a task on the list. Priorities change, and you need to take that into account.

You have your prioritised list. OK, get the first thing done – but then – before you go onto the next thing on your A list just check your prioritisation. The result of doing ‘Item 1’ may cause the priorities to change. Your list of priorities is a guideline to what you do in the day, not a set of hard and fast rules.

You can make best use of the day, every day, by matching together your daily method of operation and your prioritised ‘Do List’.

There are a lot of tools around that that are supposed to help you with this but predictably, over the years, I’ve always come back to a spreadsheet and a notebook that I write things down in.

It’s very satisfying to see a whole lot of tasks written down on paper and ticked off or crossed out – much more so than seeing it on a screen.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

“Only ever do what only you can do”.
Sir John Harvey Jones

You may be planning to run and operate your business, and deliver its offerings all by yourself, but that’s not really a good idea in the long term, or even the medium term.

As a coach or therapist there are certain things only you can do in your business, primarily delivering the service you provide to your clients, but what else is there, in your business, only you can do?

The CEO of a major company doesn’t ‘do’ much other than create the strategy and ‘front’ the business. Richard Branson doesn’t fly the aircraft in Virgin Atlantic, he doesn’t buy them or service them or any f that stuff. Mind you, there was a time when Richard would be personally packaging up and sending out mail order 12” vinyl albums to his customers but that was a long time ago. He very soon moved on to getting other people to do these things and focussed on promoting his brand, which as the ‘front’ man, was what only he could do at the time.

Because you run a ‘personal’ business and the business is about you and what you do to help others then you also, must be in the ‘front linen’ when it comes to promoting your business and the service you offer. If there are videos to be made explaining what you do then it should be you on screen, not someone else. But you don’t have to be the one who edits the videos or places them on appropriate media.

You are the ‘face’ of your business as well as the one who delivers the service to your clients, whether that be individually or in groups, whether that be face to face or on line. Other than that, all you need to do is to be the Managing Director – managing and directing what other people do for you or on your behalf. You have to know what’s going on and what needs to be done, select people to help you, and make sure what they do for you is fit for purpose and conforms to your requirements. You have to make sure that others supporting you do what you think best, not what they think best, unless they have a very good reason. After all, it’s your business, your reputation, and possibly your livelihood we’re talking about.

WHAT YOU DON’T NEED TO DO

As a coach, healer or therapist, you personally do not need to:

• Manage your IT and technology
• Keep your Accounts
• Look after Compliance
• Do the Marketing
• Manage the Logistics of organising events etc.
• Keep the place clean and tidy
• Manage your appointments

You can get help to do all of these things (and more) – but – that doesn’t mean you can forget all about any of it and it doesn’t mean you don’t have to decide what you need done or how it gets done or who it gets done by. And it doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t do any of these things if you want to do them or you enjoy doing them. It’s like looking after the balance of your life within the four domains you also need to do the same for your business which if course affects and is affected by the four domains of your life.

GETTING HELP

Getting help may not be practical at start-up, although you will need to get some help, for example an accountant and maybe an IT specialist.

There are several different ways that you can take on other people to help you operate your business.

The first is to select specialist suppliers to do the things you personally cannot do or really don’t want to do:

• Accountant
• Printer
• Designer
• IT support

All sorts of different trades and specialities, people to do the things you don’t have to do.

Spend some time networking – not to ‘sell’ but to find the right suppliers, probably small businesses that ‘fit’ with you and will take some of the workload for a reasonable price.

Avoid the temptation to work with suppliers who normally deal with medium sized or large companies. They don’t understand the problems that face personal owner managed businesses at all and can be very unsympathetic towards any problems that may arise.

You could use ‘sub-contractors’ for specific one-off jobs that you can’t do, don’t want to do, or don’t have time for. These go down as an expense, and you have no ‘employment’ responsibilities.

Be careful not to take on ‘permanent’ sub-contractors, people working for you exclusively over an extended period and often referred to a pseudo-employees and subject to the IR35 tax regime.

Formally employing people is probably not a good idea for a personal business like yours. There are just too many rules and regulations to comply with and you need to know a good independent employment law specialist to guide you through this minefield because you will need them! Note that the same rules apply if you are employing your spouse. Not recommended.