Working 5 Days Vs 6 Days Per Week | Edmonton Business Coach

Hi, welcome to another edition of ask spurl CPA. Today we’re talking about working five days versus working six days per week. I’m here with Laura. Laura, thanks for joining me again here. So Laurie to Dritan enjoying that a it’s not my 30 anymore. Yeah. Okay, excellent. So the cool that we have here today, uh, it’s a Gary Keller quote, author of the one thing time on a task over time and then she beats talent every time. And the statistic that we’re always trying to, you know, fight against is a no 50% of all Canadian small businesses going to visit him one year, 30% to 50% by year five. And we think that’s unavoidable. Um, the story that we have here, you know, business owners, they start a business thinking that they’re going to get immediate time freedom. And that’s probably one of those myths of entrepreneurship. So, Laura, what are the questions you think these business owners should be asking?

Should time freedom be a short term or longterm goal and starting a business?

So the timeframe, it should be a goal. I mean, that’s one of the reasons why you start a business this time freedom, but it’s not a realistic short term goal. So if you’re starting a business, you’re working in a job right now and you think, hey, I’m going to start a business. And then the day I start is now all of a sudden I’m going to have a better schedule that I had a before at my job. That’s probably not going to be the case. And unless you know, you’re, we really take a very, very significant income cut. Uh, but normally you have to take an income could anyways just to just to start that business. So, um, you know, if you, if you want to start the business and you want to work less hours, now all of a sudden we’re looking at it, uh, you know, uh, an abnormally income cut. So I would think it’s, it’s not a realistic goal or realistic short term goal. It should be a longterm goal. Business owners start out

okay.

Do Business owners underestimate the time required for administrative functions?

Yeah, 100%. Like business owners, they won’t reveal a, especially if they’re working somewhere else in the same business and then they’re going to go out on their own. I mean, I remember when I started my accounting firm, um, I didn’t really understand, you know, how long it took to get an [inaudible] file number, how long it took to set up all the templates with the letterheads correctly and all things that are particularly hard to do but just extremely time consuming and you had to do them. Edmonton Business Coach, so I would take multiple business owners there. You’re there in the same boat if they’re coming from working from run of the place where they think those things are, are very small because maybe they’re easy and you know, they might be easy, but they take time and most business owners will inherently underestimate those.

Okay.

Do business owners under estimate the time required for marketing and sales?

Yeah, 100%. They, they just think because you know they’re, they’re good and they set up shop and if you build it, they will come. If you build it, no one knows that you’re there. They’re not going to come at all. So, um, really the amount of time that has to happen on marketing and sales and then not the time it has to happen each and every week, all the time. If you want to have, you know, consistent work and consistent businesses and uh, and not have those booms and busts where you have worked one week and you don’t have work the next week, you know, the amount of time you have to spend on sales and marketing, it has to be a consistent time, uh, because any marketing that works efficiently is consistent. Edmonton Business Coach, so you can’t just put it in the time when you’re looking for work, you have to put in that time all the time. And most business owners, they completely underestimate how much time that’s going to take.

What happens if you don’t have time set aside to recruit staff.

So if you don’t have time set aside to recruit staff, now all of a sudden, what’s going to happen is you’re going to need staff and you’re going to need staff when you’re the most busiest you’ve ever been. Um, and you know, you’re not going to have any available, so you’re going to have to start the recruiting process from scratch. You’re going to have to post the ad and you’re going to have to conduct the interviews and you’re going to have to call the references. And if you haven’t been doing this consistently, you know, by the time you need it, you’re two, three, four weeks out from actually having anybody. Um, and a lot of times what’s up going happen as whole business owners are going to take someone that’s not really a good fit, but they just need someone when other people, if there’s better people out there but they just weren’t looking at it

insistently, what happens if you don’t have time set aside to train staff?

So if you don’t have time set aside to train that staff, now you brought that person on to help and you don’t want to maximize your time. We know you’re probably just going to go back around and uh, I know start cleaning up their mistakes, um, because they don’t know, you know, what’s expected of them. They don’t know what to do. You know, you, you set out the parameters and you think that I’m going to hire someone on and, and people think that you bring someone in and they have this telepathy and they’ll know exactly how you want things to be done. And you know, even if you’re a plumber and you hire another journeyman plumber, but guess what? He’s not going to do things the way you want him to do it. And you know, he has no experience, Edmonton Business Coach, you know, working in your business. So, um, you really just set that time aside each and every week to train the staff.

What happens if you don’t have time set aside to write checklists and templates.

So if you don’t have time, it’s a set aside to write checklists and templates. Your, your service offering is never going to get better. Um, you’re always going to be, you know, doing things less efficiently. Um, you know, we ran into, we had a master electrician. He showed us his checklist that he goes through it and, um,

does for finishing basements. And it had, you know, almost 200 items on there where, you know, he’s been doing, he’s a master electrician, been doing it for years. But guess what? You’re going to forget things on that checklist. I don’t care who you are and how long have you been doing it. There’s no way you’re going to remember everything. Edmonton Business Coach, and so you’re just going to be operating at a, at a, at a lower skill level, and you’re always gonna have those issues that arise with clients where things are done according to their standard because you don’t have a protocol in place to improve your standards.

Yeah.

When starting can all of these functions normally be scheduled in a 40 hour? Yeah. So normally if you actually take the time and you try to plot all these outs, you know, you have to do the administrative functions of the business. You have to do the sales and marketing, you have to have time to recruit. You have to have time to train. You have to have time to, you know, write checklists and templates and you know, even if you, you’re not hiring, you still have to do the, the administrator of the marketing, the checklists and templates. If you actually want to grow this business and get and get bigger and you start plotting that out on a 40 hour week and then all of a sudden if you plot all of those functions out on a 40 hour week, you realize you don’t have that much time at all to be on the tool, so to speak.

Whether you’re a, you know, a dentist, he patient or a, a, a plumber, uh, you know, uh, um, uh, working on the pipes, you’re just not going to have that much time if you’re trying to fit all of those functions, plus enough time to be on the tools, uh, in a 40 hour work week. Um, and there’s probably going to be a certain amount of time that you do need to be on the tools in order to have enough cash in this business. So unless you have a big, you know, startup seed money, you’re probably going to have to spend some, some time working in the business, so to speak. And if you try to plot out all of those other items that you need to do in addition to your time on the tools, probably not going to have enough time to do it in a, in a 40 hour, 40 hour a week.

But the risk is saying is that some of these tasks will be done in your free time. Yeah. So that’s the common story of business. I’ll do that after. I’m going to bring that home with me. I’ll do that on the weekend. Um, and they kind of have this loosey Goosey approach to it. And really what tends to happen is those items, they just don’t get done at all, even though the intentions were there. Edmonton Business Coach, those items that, you know, they’re not going to get done. And you know, the things like all of a sudden we’re busy and we don’t do sales and marketing, and then all of a sudden they’re sitting there two weeks from now, you know, after working 60 hours a week and two weeks later they have nothing, you know, and now they’re, they’re trying to go to the next estimate and be the lowest price guy so they can get the job because they’re desperate and they don’t have anything.

Um, you know, they have, you know, guys who are going out and doing the work the wrong way because they don’t have any time set aside to train them. They don’t have any time set aside to do any, uh, checklists or templates to, you know, make their jobs easier, make sure that the service is consistent with the, uh, the business owner standards. Edmonton Business Coach, and it, it just doesn’t work. You know, it’s what gets scheduled gets done. And these, you recognize that these functions are important. When you have intention to do them in your free time, that free time, it never comes. And it certainly doesn’t come consistently. So, um, if you want to get it done, you actually have to set aside a specific time to do that. Do you most businesses have customers who value evening and weekend? Yeah, hundred percent. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re starting a business or you’re trying to grow a business.

Um, and you know, whether you know, you’re a, you’re a physiotherapist and guess what, if you want the only the appointments that come eight to four, those are harder to come by. You know, people want to see their physiotherapists before work or after work or on a Saturday appointment, then it’s the same thing. If you’re, you know, running a, your general contractor, um, guess what, if you, if you refuse to take any estimates, uh, after five o’clock, you know, you’re just picking from a slimmer pool. So when you’re trying to grow this business and you’re trying to get ahead and you don’t have any evening or weekend time slots available in most businesses, you’re making it harder. There was not an impossible, but you’re making it harder. And that might be something you can work to. Um, you know, it might be something that you can hire someone to do all the the evening and weekend estimates later on, you know, but starting out in the, say I’m closed at five o’clock or I work eight to four, I was like, you’re just reducing your chances of success, uh, significantly there.

You’re no longer an employee. You’re only getting paid if this works. Edmonton Business Coach, you know, if you don’t get customers, if you don’t make money on those jobs, um, you know, no one’s going to pay you. So, um, you know, if you have customers who value weekend and evening appointment times and you’re looking to grow, that’s a neat, that’s an easy lever to pull. How does committing to a long schedule keep you from becoming overwhelmed? So that, that might sound a little bit paradoxical, you know, committing to a long schedule. Well, it doesn’t, committing to a long schedule in itself make you overwhelmed. I would argue it is the opposite. So although it might seem that if I commit to a shorter schedule, I’m going to be less overwhelmed. But the thing is, if you commit to a shorter schedule and all those items that you have to do can’t practically be done in that time parameter, now you’re going to feel overwhelmed.

That’s the definition of overwhelmed as you, you know, you, you can’t get done what you need to get done. Um, so that’s how you end up feeling overwhelmed. So even if you, you know, you do have this, you commit to a six day a week schedule, which might sound wrong, man, that sounds terrible, but in my mind, I think, you know, committing to a schedule that you could actually, you know, finish everything that you need to get done where you actually go home and you think that I’ve done all of the things that need to get done in the business. That’s what keeps you from feeling overwhelmed. So I think, you know, committing to that schedule that might be longer, you don’t want, it reduces those feelings of being overwhelmed because you actually have specific times blocked out to do all the functions that are important to your business. So that’s what we have here today. Edmonton Business Coach, you know, thanks again for joining us. Please hit the like and subscribe button so we can continue to deliver you tips on how to beat the odds at business. And as always, you have any questions or comments or any ideas for future topics in videos, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks very much.