My 5% Activities As A Business Owner

The average worker whether working with an employer or self-employed spends 51% of every workday on low to no value tasks and only 20% of people feel that their work is under control every day.

For a long time, I was a part of this statistic. Would wake up excited to work on my business and make a difference in the world but when it came down to the nitty-gritty step-by-step details of exactly what I needed to work on to make the business profitable or to build an audience of people who would benefit from the content I was creating I had no plan and would just focus on what was needed for the moment.

So if I needed a podcast episode. My day would be full of show note writing and podcast recording. If I needed a sales funnel inviting my email list into an exclusive offer I would block off a few hours for that. It was all about working on the immediate needs of the business, not the long-term growth, and strategetic moves I could be making for the business. And the reality was I was an employee in my business and the pay…was not worth it!

I knew there were so many more productive, high-level things I could be focusing on, new skills I could be mastering, and techniques I could be testing out. but here I was week after week doing my best to keep up with the workload.

Now that I’ve taken the CEO role in my business, I’ve delegated as much as possible with the team I have. In the near future, we will probably be welcoming more talented people to the team as there will be more roles to fill. As the CEO

You get to:

• • Establish the company values

• • Establish company culture

• • Support and coach your team

• • Set the standard – performance, mindset, practices

• • Envision ways to better support your clients

• • And a whole lot more

There is no time for micromanaging or doing tasks that can be delegated, automated, or postponed. So what do you focus on? Your 5% activities!

These are the activities that only you can do and produce 95% of your results. It’s like the Pareto or 80/20 principle except instead of focusing on your 20% that produces 80% of your results you’re going to crush your 5% that brings in 95% of your results and here’s the kicker!

Your team will bang out the 80/20. They’ll naturally cover the 20% that established 80% of your day-to-day results. Depending on your business this includes things like podcast editing, blog show notes, scheduling, responding to emails, project management, team management, social media management, and so on. These things add to the overall effectiveness and awareness of your business online and around the world but it doesn’t directly initiate sales which is a major growth metric in business.

So How Do You Identify Your 5% Activities?

Look at the overall performance of your business. What are you on track for this year and is that what you want? So let’s say, for example, you have an ice cream shop, and last year you sold $200,000 worth of products including ice cream cakes, ice cream tubs, and ice cream cones. You even got creative and started hosting make-your-own ice cream workshops. Cool. Now with a team of 5, an accountant, a social media manager, and 3 in-store employees. Plus let’s say you own the ice cream shop so you only pay for maintenance here and there and let’s pretend your taxes were around 26,000.

Your take-home pay as the business owner could be $60k. Cool. Now, as the business owner you get to answer this question. Is that what you want? Do you wanna be making 60k/year? If yes, awesome. Keep doing what you’re currently doing. It’s working. You can focus on maintenance. If not, what can you let go of in order to make room for the increase you want? If you keep doing what you’ve been doing you’ll be on track for the same results. So what are some things that need to be true in order for your salary to double, triple, or even quadruple? Instead of making 60k/year you have $240,00 to invest, cover tuition for your kids school, pay off debt, give generously, and build your financial independence. The money you get to manage and steward to make the world better.

Now along with the goal of quadrupling your salary comes quadrupling sales in the business. So instead of generating $200k, the biz is making $800k. Cool.

What most coaches would say is to run ads, drive traffic to your store, and wah-lah, you’ve hit your goal. Now, this can work but ads take away from your bottom line and people aren’t guaranteed to show up to your store just because they’ve seen your ads. And I’m not saying ads are bad. I use ads in my business. I just wanna expand your thinking a little bit and show you there are multiple ways to hit the same goal. So let’s look at another option.

What Can You Do To Increase Sales With Your Current Customers?

You wanna think about:

• • How can you spruce up the customer experience which would add value to your customers and entice them to come back?

     

    • • Maybe you can create a points system where they get 1 point every time they buy a cone and once they hit 5 they get a free tub of their favorite ice cream
    • • Or maybe you can offer an exclusive behind-the-scenes ice cream experience for customers who visit 3x in one week.
    • • You can have fun with this! Think about the type of customers you have and the things they might enjoy then make it available to them! They buy in which will result in higher sales!

• • You could also add seasonal flavors or introduce a flavor of the week. This gives people a reason to come back.

• • Add delivery options for residents within a certain radius of the store

• • After-school special pricing to attract students or families in the area to grab an after-school snack

• • There is so much you could do to turn $1 into $5 so get creative

Once you increase the customer value which means their spending more with you at your store than they did last year hitting your goals becomes easier.

Will it take work? 100%. Will you see results overnight? The only thing that happens overnight is you know what. So you won’t get a return overnight and that’s okay. The law of momentum kicks in, you learn and grow and implement new strategies and before you know it 800k won’t be the goal for the year it’ll become your monthly, weekly, and daily revenue. It will be the norm.

Now in order for this to happen you get to focus on $800k activities. This means as much as you enjoy these tasks you will not be the one cleaning the store, serving customers, or placing orders for new tubs of ice cream. You get to focus on solidifying contracts with vendors who would benefit from partnering with you on a large scale. You could connect with hotel owners and get your ice cream brand distributed in their hotel as special desserts. You could partner with a local grocery store and sell tubs of your ice cream directly to consumers. There are so many avenues you could take to get to 800k. The main thing is that you establish a clear path then you focus on what only you can do. Don’t get lost in customer feedback emails or drama with the team. Take care of those things when necessary. Your primary objective is growth.

Master Your 5% Activities The Workshop

Now we have a full-blown workshop you can grab called Master Your 5% Activities. It’s our best-selling time management workshop when you enroll you get a dashboard that helps you to practically implement some of the things we discussed here. The Workshop takes you through what time is and how to use your time to increase productivity and make better use of your life. It’s fun. It’s challenging. And you get unlimited support once you’re in there so if you know you need it, jump in and I’ll meet you in the workshop! Until next week Trailblazer, I hope you found this helpful. Let me know on the gram! Chat soon.

Important Links Mentioned This Week:

Our best-selling time management workshop – Master Your 5% Activities

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