Ready to cut your to-do list in half?
Yesterday in my IG stories, I talked about chargeable hours. I gave some stats which might have challenged you, friend.
Aka: here’s what “big data” says about the workweeks of successful service businesses:
Owners should aim for 50-55% chargeability = 20-22hrs/week chargeable and 18-20hrs/wk non-chargeable
Managers should aim for about 65-70% chargeability = 26-28hrs/week chargeable and 12-14hrs/wk hours non-chargeable
Technical hires should aim for about 75-80% chargeability = 30-32hrs/wk and 8-10 hours/wk non-chargeable
And if you’re not hitting those numbers - join the club. I’m working hard to get closer to those numbers too.
The problem - for you and me - is that if we don’t spend 18-20hrs on non-chargeable work each week, who is going to put on their visionary CEO glasses and think about expansion goals? 🤔
Who is going to think about how to improve the effectiveness of how your team serves Client X? 🤔🤔
And who is going to consider what financial changes should be made to improve profitability next q? 🤔🤔🤔
It can all be a bit overwhelming, but if you aren’t considering these big-picture-questions, chances are no one in your biz is.
And you might not see the impact of your non-action today, but I can guarantee it will start to creep up over time… it might look like:
❌ slower/negative revenue growth (especially if you've been leaning on the strength of the USD relative to CAD to bolster your $$ growth),
❌ less word of mouth referrals because your clients aren’t singing your praises to their friends, and
❌ quietly shrinking profit margins because no one is looking at the pay-back period of big investments.
In re-reading “Essentialism” by Greg McKeown for the hundredth time this past weekend, one statement stood out for me:
🌟🌟🌟What would happen if you could figure out the one thing you could do that would make the highest contribution to your business? 🌟🌟🌟
It’s a simple question, but don’t let that fool you - it’s a complex ask. I'm really asking you to consider three things that I'll call “Alignment Questions”:
What do you feel deeply inspired by?
What are you particularly talented at?
What meets a significant need in the world?
Back to earth - you see, it’s easy to generate a to-do list of 6 things for the time period 9am-10:30am on Wednesday morning.
It’s far more challenging to look at that list, one by one, and ask “Will this activity make the highest possible contribution to my goal? Is this task something I'm deeply inspired by? Am I really good at it? Is there customer demand for it?”
This is hard, but it's exactly what I’m asking you (and myself) to do today, friend.
And the reason I want you to do this is because I want to cut your to-do list in half. I want you to make huge progress on ONE thing this week - not millimetres of progress on 14 tasks.
Illustration from Essentialism by Greg McKeown
I’ll use myself as an example of how to do this.
Alignment questions:
What do you feel deeply inspired by? The clients I work with. Full stop. They are industry leaders.
What are you particularly talented at? Taking my clients from where they are to where they want to be (i.e. from A to B with the least amount of resistance).
What meets a significant need in the world? My clients are super talented, but I can't give them more than 24hrs in a day. My team and I support them with the execution/implementation side of things.
So, when I consider what's the one thing I can do to make the highest contribution to my business today it's to bring in new client projects for a Sept start.
Here’s how I am attacking this priority:
That’s not to say that ‘Reading and research,’ ‘Updating Asana,’ etc., aren’t important - they are. But this day/week, I’m focused on building relationships that will turn into work. Maybe next week/month I will have a different focus and that will allow for Asana updates or Team OKR review. And that’s okay.
How does this relate to your chargeable hours, friend?
Well, you can see that 2 of the items on my 'Revised task list' are chargeable tasks (i.e. ‘Client session prep’ and ‘Respond to client messages’).
The remaining one - ‘Draft newsletter/stories’ - is not.
If I have 3hrs to work on Weds AM, I’ll devote 1.5hrs to ‘Client session prep’ and ‘Responding to client messages’ and 1.5hrs to ‘Drafting newsletter/stories.’ This gets me to my 50%/50% chargeable/non-chargeable split. Make sense?
Are you going to try this exercise? Send me an email at tanya@tanyabuddcpa.ca and LMK. I’d love to hear from you
Take care and talk soon,
Tanya