The #1 Challenge for Small Business Leaders

The number one challenge that most small business owners have is that they don’t have enough time to get everything done. Your time is amazingly constrained, and the amount of things that you do in any given day is mind-boggling. I don’t know how you keep it up, year after year. But, to be honest, this challenge of leaders having very compressed time schedules has been around for a long time.

There are all sorts of studies out there about executives and how they spend their time. Most studies say that executives, whether a Fortune 500 or a small business leader, tend to waste about 40-50% of their time. Of course, waste might be too strong a word. Rather, they spend their time in under-productive ways. They don’t focus on the things that have enormous payoff for their businesses. As an executive in your business, you have to focus your executive time on $5000 an hour tasks.

Your time is worth a lot, so you need to stop spending it doing things you know anybody else on the team could do. You’re busy running errands to the post office or foolish things like that, when you should be interacting with customers or interacting with your employees, and building up the success of the entire company.

What you need to do is to hire some good people and appoint them to supervise. After all, no matter how charismatic or talented a business leader is, they can only go as far as their people will let them go. If you’ve got great people and you can get them in alignment and have focus on a common vision and a common purpose, there’s nothing you can’t achieve.