In Today’s hyper competitive Business landscape, Entrepreneurs and Business owners are increasingly under pressure to get more productive-create more value in less time, not only for themselves but also for their businesses. Only by being more productive than the guy next door can your business generate superior returns to your critical stakeholders-customers, employees and investors.

One great resource that is available to the entrepreneur to deliver greater productivity but which is often sub-optimized by the entrepreneur and Business owner is time and she does this by focusing on the ‘wrong’ end of the entrepreneurial process with resulting sub-optimization of  value creation –lower turnover and profits relative to business potential.

Most entrepreneurs and business owners act like technicians: getting engrossed in doing it, that is working in their businesses rather than on their businesses. They keep doing it, doing it and doing it (apologies to Michael Gerber, founder of E-myth Corporation) to the neglect of working on the business-running the business: visioning, implementing the vision, seeking and aligning with others to ensure the actualization of the vision. So, the Medical Doctor turned ‘entrepreneur’ spends most of his time attending to the sick, the Lawyer attending to cases in the chamber, the accountant balancing the books of her clients, the caterer baking more cakes and so on and so forth. In such ‘entrepreneurial ‘cases the time left for the ‘right’ end of the entrepreneurial process-working on the business- is so little thus, hurting the future of the business!

No one is saying that doing it is not necessary. Far from it, without doing it, value cannot be delivered to your customer and therefore cannot be exchanged. Everybody will end up as a loser. In fact, it is the love of doing it that transformed the ‘entrepreneur’ into a business owner. However, successful entrepreneurs and business owners know that doing it adds very little value to a business. Hence,’ entrepreneurs’ who get engrossed  doing it will not only create far less value for everybody including themselves but will also burn their time and energy for so little. They are holding the ‘wrong’ end of the process.

So how do Winning Entrepreneurs, Business owners and CEOs get value out of their time? How do they turn their time into Profits, ultimately creating so much value for everybody, including themselves, retiring rich and Young? What are they doing that you need to start doing?

They focus their time and efforts on the ‘right’ end of the entrepreneurial process: Working on their businesses rather than in their businesses:

·         Visioning:crafting the vision of the business, implementing the vision and moulding the business for greater success

·         Structuring alliances: Seeking and structuring strategic partnerships that can deliver the vision

·         Clients’ Needs: Identifying and Farming out the clients’ needs to competent and empowered internal and external associates to deliver to clients

·         Systems:Creating systems that are designed to deliver world class services to clients

·         Growth:Growing their businesses beyond its founders limitations

·         Succession:Developing leaders within their businesses that will not only succeed them but take the business to the next level and outlive its founders, creating more value for everybody

Want Examples? Here they are: Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Aliko Dangote, Fola Adeola etc