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Practical Solutions to Help Business Owners Solve Their 5 Biggest Challenges Part 1

Written by: Rick and Susan Amato

Article Overview: Leverage Your Time - Leveraging time seems to be the top challenge with most business owners. We have identified resources that will make it easy for you to put in place some simple systems that will help you free up time, reduce your stress level and get your business working harder for you. Business owners work 50 percent more than employees of large companies. The average business owner holds five "jobs" within his or her own company and many entrepreneurs must invest their time as "sweat equity" because they are funding their own business. Successful owners have created leverage and found more time to do the things that were most important to them by:

Practical Solutions to Help Business Owners Solve Their 5 Biggest Challenges Part 1

This is the first of five articles that will provide you with actionable solutions to your most pressing challenges and concerns as a business owner.We will provide you with useful tools and resources that can help you actively address the things that keep you up at night.We have researched best practices of the most successful business owners in a specific market and compiled practical advice and tools from business experts. To help you make the greatest impact with your limited time, we have identified a set of simple, low-cost but highly effective actions you can take to address the first challenge in our series of five:

Leverage Your Time - Leveraging time seems to be the top challenge with most business owners. We have identified resources that will make it easy for you to put in place some simple systems that will help you free up time, reduce your stress level and get your business working harder for you.

Business owners work 50 percent more than employees of large companies.The average business owner holds five "jobs" within his or her own company and many entrepreneurs must invest their time as "sweat equity" because they are funding their own business.

Successful owners have created leverage and found more time to do the things that were most important to them by:

* Understanding how they use their time

* Treating their time as an asset on the balance sheet - not a free resource

* Allocating their time to five most productive activities

Four actions you can take to generate more time:

1. Know your time

2. Structure your time

3. Reallocate your time

4. Put in place systems that help you automate and delegate tasks

Eight things you can do to leverage you time:

1. Keep a journal of how you spend your time in a week

2. Draw a pie graph of how you would ideally spend your time if you could

3. Create job descriptions for the 5+ jobs you do as an owner

4. Fire Yourself from at least one job

5. Create a "not-to-do" list

6. Put a price on your time in terms of dollars per hour

7. Shift more of your time to the five highest ROI activities

8. Create an advisory board that expects a high return on your time

"Owner time is the single most scarce and irreplaceable asset in a business"

Resources to Help You Understand How to Structure, Focus, and Reallocate Your Time

* The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management: Proven Strategies for Increased Productivity and Inner Peace, by Hyrum W. Smith, (Time Warner, 1994)

* The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, By Stephen R. Covey, (Free Press, 1993)

* The Superman Complex: Achieving the Balance that Leads to Success, by Max Carey (Longstreet Press, 1999)

* The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker (Harper Business, 1966)

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Article Tags: balance sheet, best practices, business experts, business owner, business owners, challenges, free resource, jobs, leverage your time, limited time, nbsp, own business, pie graph, productive activities, stress level, successful business, sweat equity, useful tools
Referred by: http://itsyourmoneyanswers.com



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Re: Website Name Help - Its good that you have come up with the idea of setting up a website for your business. Now As it is into Business Solutions, I would recommend that you also include this into the name of the website. This will help you getting better results as far as SEO is concerned. You can start building a brand with this name. As you have already got the name booked, you can try changing it to something on the lines of Business Solutions as in azimabusiness or azimabusinesssolutions. Its a long name but still is good from the SEO point.
A ton of Great Women - You might want to profile Teresa Cascioli of LakePort Brewery. She has an amazing story! I met her at at the celebratory luncheon for the Profit/Chatelaine Top 100 Women Business Owners. The Top 100 list is also a great resource for inspirational stories of Women Entrepreneurs.
Help me name my moms business - I think Infinity Cleaning Services sounds better than Elite Cleaning Solutions... Why the Solutions? What is there to be solved? You simply get a rag with some Windex on it and wipe away.... plug the vacuum and Vac Away, get a mop and mop away. Stick to Infinity Cleaning Services... ICS sounds cool...
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Artist vs Biz Owner - I think there is a fine line between "artists" and "business owners". Artists begin with their passion and self expression and try to find a market for it. e.g. I like painting flowers and I think people out there like flowers too so that is what I am going to sell. This is where hard-selling starts and the starving-artist persona. Business Owners (who can be artists too) first find out wants and needs in the market and deliver that. e.g. Ashley may have noticed that MySpace had some real yukky backgrounds and thought I can do better - then filled that need. would love if Ashley were on this site too...


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