Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

I’m really struggling with my time management. I feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Any tips?

As a small business owner you wear many hats and it is a never ending challenge to prioritize and manage your time more effectively. One of the first suggestions is to identify what your monthly sales target is, not your annual goal. Then build your day upon three activities of high value from a business development perspective. These activities are usually selected from your marketing plan. Consider these activities baby steps or baby business development steps. When you can complete two or three of them on a daily basis, then you can get on to the other important and urgent tasks. Most professionals focus on the urgent and operational issues hoping they will have time at the end of the day for business development, and then become so consumed and exhausted that the day runs out before doing anything to grow their business or practice. A high value activity can be as simple as making a phone call to a prospect you have been putting off, spending thirty minutes writing an article, or calling a preferred client to coordinate a lunch meeting. It’s that simple. Look to your marketing strategies and the creation of your marketing tools to help you identify these little baby steps. When you create a level of consistency in marketing yourself, you tend to feel better, and as a result create more momentum.You actually become more productive every day because you are focusing on the right things and doing them in the right order. Trust this process and work your plan. The benefits are cumulative and will help you get into shape for success!

Mark LeBlanc
Author of Growing Your Business!
www.SmallBusinessSuccess.com
2007-2008 President, National Speakers Association

Posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Boardroom, Entrepreneurial, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.