When starting an internet business one of the things that I think we all struggled with to some extent, is where to spend the majority of our time. There were so many things that we had to figure out. We had products or opportunities, market demographics, determining niches, marketing strategies, auto-responders, capture pages, sales pages, web sites, blogs, social media, fulfillment, phones, fax, etc… to worry about. Then to make things worse, while doing research to find information and recommendations on all of those things, we ended up finding that there are a thousand other choices we had to make. We started wondering if it is all worth it and saw other opportunities that somehow seemed a little bit easier than what our original choice had been. Bottom line, it’s was and still is easy to get distracted.
Another factor that we end up with is having to deal with the 80-20 rule otherwise known as the Pareto Principal. Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who observed that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. This later was expanded and is true for many things. A popular business axiom is that 80% of our sales come from 20% of the business. The one we (especially new entrepreneurs) have to worry about is that we ended up spending 80% of our time on things that don’t contribute to the bottom line. We need to concentrate on the 20% and refine it as much as possible. So how do we go about that?
The first things that that we need to do is prioritize our tasks and spend 80% of our time on the top 20% of that pile. I literally used to have a boss who taught me to take my “in basket”, back when email wasn’t as prevalent, sort it by importance with the most important on top and work from the top. There were items that never got attended to. The people requesting things figured out where to get their answers from someone else or they did their own research. The long term consequences were that people started relying on me for important items because I gave them the attention they needed and the minutia of the daily grind went somewhere else. I ended up getting higher visibility in management’s eyes, got noticed and was handsomely rewarded come review time.
You can do the same thing managing your own business. You may not have the luxury of ridding yourself of the daily minutia, but you can automate it, pay someone to automate it, pay someone to deal with it, or even, getting rid of it altogether. You need to be spending as much time as possible on those actions that give you 80% of your income. You need to outsource or automate as many routine or mundane tasks that you have to perform. By practicing these principals and understanding Pareto’s Law, the bottom line on your balance sheet at the end of the year will reward you.
