Sometimes in Small Business You Can be Too Busy
In the last four months the amount of work that we and our writers have been doing has just continued to escalate. It has reached the point now where if there were two of Toni and two of me we could have easily worked 24 hours a day and still not seen the end of it.
Of course we don’t have the luxury of clones and so we have been working flat out and that can be dangerous not only to our health but to the health of our business. Perhaps that might seem hard to believe but running a small business involves more than just filling orders for your clients.
You also need to keep a watch on your business to make sure that you are putting the maximum effort into those areas that produce the most money. You also need to identify those areas that are not producing income as they should so that you can make an informed decision on whether or not to continue offering those services.
When Toni and I sat down earlier this week and identified all the little streams that come together to make up our cash flow we were able to see which regular clients and tasks were bringing us the most income and we were also suprised to see that, over the last few months, one of the services we have offered has actually had a negative cashflow.
We also took the time to look at those people who work for us. We wanted to know which writers produced the work we wanted with the least supervison and time spent on editing their work. Once again, that produced some surprises too.
Now, in the coming week we’re going to be using those figures to look at the direction that we want- and need - to take the business to make it even more profitable.
If we hadn’t stopped being busy for a moment and actually looked at the facts and figures we could have so easily made the wrong decisions simply because we had been too busy to keep on top of our own business.
