Mastering skill of doing less for more key to success

Investors may be plotting their own downfall by ignoring the business plan. PHOTO | FILE 

By MURORI KIUNGA

In Summary

• Sadly, very few people know how to value their time so as to engage in profitable activities.

One of the best kept secrets of entrepreneurial success is the ability to do less but earn more. This almost entirely depends on mastery of two key skills; time management and daily activities.

You must manage your time effectively by engaging in activities that yield the highest returns. It is doing more of the things that have higher value and reducing or eliminating things that have lower or no value at all that make one healthy and wealthy.

Sadly, very few people know how to value their time so as to engage in profitable activities.

As a business owner or manager it is important to examine how you have spent your time in the past. What is it that makes you busy every day? If you are honest with yourself you might realise that some things are not worth your time because they are of lower value.

The road to success begins the minute you know where most of your money comes from. Look at activities that give you highest returns, more pleasure and happiness and focus on them. Look at your hourly earnings to determine which activities are worthy your time.

Ideally you should work for 2,000 hours per year. This means working 8 hours per day with two week holiday. By dividing your annual income by 2,000 you get the average hourly rate.

Once you know your hourly rate, then you should not do any work that yields less than this hourly rate. For instance, if your annual income or projected income is five million shillings, then your hourly rate is Sh2,500. ( five million divided by 2000 hours.)

In this regard, you should only do work that gives you Sh2,500 or more, delegate or outsource all other activities as long as you can get someone who can do it at cheaper rate. You can delegate time consuming but low paying activities like filing document, packing, processing orders and delivering.

Most entrepreneurs spend too much time on petty and trivial activities that can be outsourced or delegated to someone else at a lesser cost. This robs them the precious time needed to engage in high paying activities.

As guide, the highest paying activities in any business include prospecting or sourcing potential clients, selling, developing new products, planning and strategising. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs delegate these highly rewarding activities to employees and stay in office doing low rewarding activities such as filling and other clerical work.

In reality there are some activities that pay less but you have to do them either because you cannot get someone to do them for you at whatever cost or doing so would like to do them yourself for security or confidential reasons. This is fine.

The issue is you should do more of high rewarding activities than low rewarding activities in order to take your business to the next level.

One question that we ought to ask is why some entrepreneurs earn three figures salary while others in the same industry spend years struggling to meet the basics?

The difference is not intelligence, ability, talent, not being well connected or simply taking short-cuts. The difference is how they spend their time. It is how they choose their activities every day.

In business as in hunting, you can choose to use your arrows on small animals like hare and gazelles or chase buffalos and elephants. Although the former are easier to find and shoot, your household will always be struggling for meat.

The latter are hard to find but once you bring one down, you have plenty for a while. Remember the old saying that turnover is vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is reality.

Mr Kiunga is a business trainer and the author of The Art of Entrepreneurship: Strategies to Succeed in a Competitive Market.