How much time do you spend making yourself look busy?
Let me get straight to the point here – if you’re not making the income you want to make, but your days are full and you’re constantly busy, then one of three things are going on. You’re either not charging enough for your services, you don’t have a truly sustainable business or you’re making yourself look busy doing ‘stuff’ that’s not important.
I’m predicting if it’s the later. It normally is with coaches.
Now the team here at MiBizness have been coaches and consultants. We understand what it’s like, particularly if you’re working for yourself, by yourself. It’s easier to fill up your days sorting out your filing, organising your marketing, spending an extra couple of hours doing up a report for one of your handful of clients than it is to go out and actually find new clients.
But the reality is, when you’re busy making yourself busy you’re living in denial. You are also living in fear.
And the longer you let that happen the worse the situation gets, to the point where you almost feel incapable of making a sales appointment let alone making an actual sale.
The pressure builds
If you’ve been a coach or a consultant for a while then you’ve always had bills to deal with. And when things are going well those bills are easy enough to handle. But if you’ve gotten into the rut of looking busy rather than being busy, chances are those bills are starting to get harder and harder to manage.
If you’re married and/or have a family the situation gets even worse. They see you working all the time, but they’re not seeing any results for the time that you’re putting in. Questions start being asked, questions that you can’t answer. So your answers start to become defensive. You snap, telling people that they don’t understand. That you’re doing your best when deep down you know you’re not. You know that you’re working hard doing nothing instead of working smart and making money.
Turning it around
As bad as it seems at times there is a solution. There is always a solution. And that is to come up with a new plan. A simple plan that involves getting more clients, who pay you more money.
But before you can do that you need to free up your time.
You see successful business owners, particularly those who are one-person operators, always have some spare time that allows them to take advantage of any opportunities that come along. In your case, you need to free up time to allow you to handle the extra clients you are going to bring on board.
In our next article we’ll look at the things that you need to do, step by step, to get yourself out of this rut. But in the meantime, I want you to start recording what you’re doing each hour. Just write down the time and the task that you’re undertaking. BE HONEST with your records. Playing Solitaire is not computer maintenance!
Also, don’t spend the next 5 hours creating a spreadsheet to use to record your time. I know what you’re like and I know how much you would love to see the creation of this spreadsheet as being a worthwhile investment of your time. It isn’t a worthwhile investment of your time if it takes you any longer than 5 minutes. A simple Word document containing a table with a couple of columns is fine.
Go and do that now and start recording. And keep an eye out for our next article on why coaches need a coach.