photo by dimnikolov

Being a business owner often feels like being in a race…only it’s a race that never ends and it seems like you have to keep running harder just to keep up as you go!

The one thing that most business owners fantasize about, maybe even more than having more money, is having more time!  Think about an average week for you – how much time did you have to just sit and kick back without your mind racing, or the phone ringing?  Staring at a list of 100 things not getting done doesn’t count!

Imagine if you could find a way to free up 1 hour of your week while still getting the same amount of things done?  What about 10 hours a week?  What would you do with the extra time?

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  photo by icatus

When you’re talking about overall business effectiveness, the first thing you have to figure out is where the bottleneck is within your business (side note – it’s really challenging to find a good picture to represent a bottleneck).

Of course the bottleneck is the constriction / constraint in terms of your growth potential.  As an example, a lot of businesses have the issue of getting enough leads generated or getting interest in buying.  They have plenty of capacity in all other aspects of the business, so in this case, the bottleneck of the business is marketing.

Of course using that example, it wouldn’t make any sense to invest time, money or resources into anything but better marketing…at least until you uncover the next bottleneck. 

I thought it would be worthwhile to dig up a post I did a while back that has a pretty good model to talk through this idea – I call it the 8 Pillars Model and it’s a good way to think through your business.   What Pillars are holding you back?

Can you identify the primary bottleneck in your business success right now?  When’s the last time you tried to identify where things were getting hung up?  I’d love to hear your thoughts – share them in the comments below.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

  photo by Sam Howzit

I had the ‘opportunity’ to participate in Jury duty last week.  It was the 3rd time in the last 10 months that I had been called, but the first one that actually went to selection.  If you haven’t gone through the process before, you receive a notice in the mail and they have you call in the Friday before your date to find out if you need to show up that following Monday at the courthouse. 

Because my previous experience had been a non-event, I didn’t really clear my schedule other than that Monday…and unfortunately I had a pretty full week planned.  At least until I actually got selected for a jury!  Everyone will tell you their theory or favorite way to get out of being selected (including wearing red because it implies you are assertive, which attorneys don’t like).  In this particular situation, I’m not sure it would have mattered – the court was very aggressive with reasons why jurors should be excused, and even most that were excused were sent to another courtroom that was still short of jury candidates.  End result -  I was on a live jury for the first time.

Here’s what I learned from the ordeal overall:

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I had the chance to watch Hoosiers over the holidays – it had been a long time since I’d seen it (and the rest of the family hadn’t seen it!).  Great movie – I’d highly recommend catching it again!

If you’re not familiar with the movie – it was made in 1986 and it’s the story about a basketball coach (Gene Hackman) who gets a final chance at redemption by coaching at a very small rural Indiana school.

Although it’s a very small school they have some talented players and reasons to believe they can compete but they’re undisciplined and raw when the coach makes it to town.

One of the things that stood out to me is the coach’s approach to bringing the team around – early on he tells the team:

“I’ve seen you guys can shoot but there’s more to the game than shooting. There’s fundamentals and defense.”

There’s more to the game than shooting…now how would that apply to small business owners? (you knew I was going to tie this into business somehow didn’t you…?)

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photo by sean rogers1

You have to love the clarity and power of numbers.

Now that school’s started up again, homework is ramping up as well and my wife and I had a great ‘tutoring’ session with my daughter on her math homework.  My daughter was struggling with one of the concepts and wanted to argue that the answer we had led her to wasn’t right….

But that’s the beauty of math and numbers…they are either right or they’re not.  You may be asking the wrong question, but when the answer is in numbers, it’s very clear where you stand.  43 is bigger than 35 – and it’s always going to be bigger.

That’s why when you’re analyzing your business and your goals, the more things you can tie to a number, the better off you’ll be.

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