Are You Making The Most Of Your Time and Money?

We all have a limited amount of time in the day. And we also don't have a bottomless pocketbook.

We all know that . . . far too well.

Most of my clients tell me that if I could just get them an extra 4 hours added to the day (a 28 hour day) and 5 more clients per week, things would be perfect.

So, let me ask YOU, would 4 more hours in the day or 5 new clients really help you?

Do you think you need more time and money?

Or do you think you need to better manage and even leverage the time and money you do have first?

In my opinion, most people will fill the void with whatever they are doing. It's not a matter of having more time or making more money - in most cases. Instead, it's a matter of knowing where to spend you time and money to get the most bang for the buck - it's all about leveraging.

Leverage, as we are talking here, is defined as "Positional advantage and or the power to act effectively". So the goal isn't just to figure out where you can apply your efforts and / or money to create the improvement, but instead how to generate the best advantage or biggest change for the least amount of your effort.

Measure, Analyze and Modify Regularly To Make Constant Improvements

Measuring and analyzing will tell you where you should invest your time and money to yield the biggest bang for the buck.

If your sales are falling, most people will spend more time (and money) to generate more leads. They will commit their efforts to more marketing. But what they don't know is that they may already be getting enough leads. In fact they "may" already be spending more than they need to. In these cases, their leverage point isn't lead generation, it's lead conversion.

Through diligent measurement and analysis, they might see that their sales aren't down because people aren't finding them - their sales are down because their sales staff is lazy . . . or inconsistent in their approaches.

If they could simply increase the conversion rate of leads to clients from say 5% to 10%, this would double their sales.

Conversely, if they blindly just tried doubling their marketing efforts, they might find that they are spending a whole lot more time and money to get the same results.

Or, if their conversion rate is already high (above 60-70%, depending on their industry), then they may in fact need to find out which lead sources are working best (and which ones aren't working at all) and try to increase the volume through that lead source.

This might cost some money, but it would sure beat spending marketing dollars on leads that you KNOW aren't going to buy.

We need to think about all of these things - not just in sales, but in life. When you look at "what's not working" and "what is working", it's important to know which things provide the best leverage point for you to improve your life and which ones are just time consumers and money pits.

Another Example of the 80/20 Rule

They say that 20% of effort, yields 80% of your results - if you could increase your 20% to 25% and get 100% results, then you could take the other 75% of the time off.

Conversely, if you increase your 80% effort (that yields 20% of your results) to 100% effort, you will still only be getting 25% of the results, and you will feel completely useless and wonder why things are working out for you.

So, which would you rather have, 25% effort meeting all of your goals? Or 100% effort where you only achieve a quarter of your goals?

Your choice, but my lazy butt would rather do less and get more.