Understanding how to effectively manage time is arguably the most important skill for a business owner with a growing business. As an entrepreneur’s business scales up, he or she will no longer have enough time to manage all aspects of the business directly. So, in order for a business to grow beyond a small enterprise, the entrepreneur must build an effective process to allow his or her personal time spent on the business to be minimized. This may sound simple, but putting this strategy into practice is usually never easy since most entrepreneurs are perfectionists and are used to managing and overseeing all aspects of their businesses.
Therefore, one of the key junctures in the evolution of a business is the point at which the entrepreneur must let go of the reins on some aspects of the process and re-focus time on the highest value aspects. Normally, what this means in a consulting-style business is shifting into a management structure like that of a large institutional law firm like Cravath or similar global management consulting firm like the Boston Consulting Group, where I worked for two years after graduating. In these types of organizations, the managing partners or owners of the business are able to successfully scale their impact by building out effective process management below them.
To simplify this concept, I will break my experience into two critical lessons:
1. Build Detailed Process Workflows
You have to get into the habit of breaking down entire projects into concrete steps with detailed instructions for each step, and then identifying the key milestones between steps. Initially, this process requires personal time spent reviewing the work in progress as it moves through the entire delivery process. Simply put, design the process in a way that minimizes the amount you need to be involved while still achieving the outcome you want. For an example of a detailed process workflow, see my separate post on website blog content generation.
2. Limit Personal Time to Tasks that Absolutely Cannot be Done by Anyone Else
Focus on spending your personal time on things that others cannot do, such as (i) completing tasks that physically have to be done by you, such as exercise and eating, (ii) spending quality time with family and close friends, (iii) managing business relationships that you own (and cannot be handed off to an associate), (iv) making high level strategy decisions, and (v) engaging in personal improvement (e.g., reading the newspaper, watching Udemy courses, etc.).
