As An Executive Leader, How Exactly Should I Prioritise My Time To Grow My Business?

Last week I worked with a leadership team on helping them build a three year vision of where they’re going.

We had three specific themes that they were working on and what struck them really personally during that process of setting that vision was that they all recognised they were going to change what they were working on, and they all recognised that what they were working on at the moment was not going to get them the growth that they needed in three years time and they set a clear revenue target and a profit target.

The question for you is with where you’re going and how you want your business to change and how you want your team to change, is what you’re doing now going to get you there?

What I said to these guys was there is a formula that you should think about in terms of how you’re using your time.

And it’s about splitting your time up into three thirds.

If you follow these three thirds what you get is an ability not just to service your current revenue but also build for the future. If you get sucked into using your time only on current revenue, you’ll never grow.

This is a formula for how you both maintain the current and build for the future.

If you don’t align what you’re doing with the growth you want in the business you can hold the business back from where it’s going and you can hold you back from achieving your goals.

This is the model and the framework I use to help leaders and businesses calibrate how they’re spending their time, and its a simple way of you looking at your current calendar and comparing it against what might be a better way of you balancing out your time and priorities. So…

What do I do if this is all your available time at work,? Take out time at the gym, time with the family and the balance that you want in your life.

Then of all the time you’ve got at work basically what we would do is split your time between these three activities.

You want to spend about a third of your time on current “Business as Usual”. This is delivering the current money, current clients, current projects, the current team you’ve got to deliver on that current revenue.

You then want to spend a third of your time building for the future, and obviously when I say revenue I mean revenue and profit, so you want to spend a third of your time on building capacity and capability and the platform that will deliver more money and increased profit in the future and the projects associated with these.

Now the biggest problem that I see with executives is you look at their time between 9 and 5, and all of their time bleeds this whole future project piece out. So it’s all in B.A.U. and they’re never spending any time building for the future.

What we want to do is through delegation, as much as possible is to keep this third available for you to build for the future.

This other third? Admin, reports, training, spending time with your own boss, all of those things that fill up your day. Alright?

Now… one of the things that I do particularly want to mention is meetings. OK? Because a number of you sitting here will be going “Yeah that’s all fine but I’m in meetings like, 10 hours a day!”

I’m not here to say that’s wrong, all I’m saying is again, your meetings should be split across these thirds. If all your meetings are about current business you won’t be planning for the future, if all your meetings are about admin and reports and training, again, you won’t be planning for the future money or the future revenue.

So look at your calendar and look at how you’re spending your time and aim for it to be split across these three thirds.

This is going to take you up to three to six months to implement, so what I’d like you to do is start with the first week, start with next week. Look at your calendar and look at how you’re spending your time and aim to shift the dial towards a third and a third and a third.

Once you’ve got your weeks aligned up leave me a comment: What difference has it made to your confidence about the future?

Talk to you soon. Cheers, bye.