Ask business owners about their time management. Every day there are unplanned tasks that “waste their time.” Customers, vendors, landlords, deliveries, and employees thwart their plans. Sales reports always reveal what poor time management has done to the bottom line. Business owners struggle with setting goals and managing their time. When you have your plans scuttled so often, the very act of planning seems wasteful.

            Sound familiar?

Think of driving a car on a highway. As you travel along at 60 mph, where are your eyes? All drivers know their eyes should be where the car will bein 5-10 seconds. If you watched the pavement as it whizzed beneath your tires at 60 mph, you would crash within minutes. The same is true in a business. If management is focused on the immediate activities of the moment and does not look up and plan for where the business is going, performance will decline in a virtual crash. Successful owners direct their business activities to meet the future without becoming victims to the day’s operational distractions. The first step to take control of your time and productivity, is focusing on goals. Like the driver in the car analogy, owners must have an idea of where they want to arrive. Businesses need to have destinations. It can be purely financial (revenues +15% versus year ago) or focus on other levers to achieve financial goals.

For example:

• reduce employee turnover by -50%.
• 60% of customers return every 6 months.
• Ship to customers within 6 hours of receiving an online order.

Usually, there are many goals and many paths to achieve them. But the high-achieving business owner intensely focuses on a smallnumber of outcomes rather than fragmenting resources across too many goals. Remember that deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to achieve. Keenly focus your business resources on just a few items to make progress. In a world where there is opportunity to improve in every area, smart business owners focus on a few critical areas to generate real improvements. I help franchise owners understand which goals will be meaningful to their business and which ones to delegate or de-prioritize. Want to learn more?