We’ve all been there…It’s the end of the week, you feel stressed, no matter how long the days have been you didn’t get your tasks completed…it sucks.
The question is do you have a system in place to help you look back at how you spent you time last week so you can look to improve and plan for how to improve your situation? If the answer is NO, then you’ll never fix the cause of your stress – and you deserve it.
Keep in mind that you can not improve what you do not measure, that quote has always stuck with me and as was part of the inspiration for this post…
As data driven marketers it should be in our blood to analyze data over and over and over again. Finding opportunities and optimizing to a goal. Its what we are born to do, but we don’t do that with our time.
So let me tell you a personal goal I have been tracking since Feb 2008 – my time spent on new business.
I have said it over and over again, I never wanted to be a “CEO” – I wanted to do something I loved every day, I didn’t start SEER to be a boss and manage people, I just wanted to something I loved everyday, plain and simple.
So it was critical for me as SEER grew to make sure I kept in check to my #1 work goal, spend time doing SEO every day.
So here is my journey on how I used time tracking & how you can use it to make sure you are working on what you love.
1 – Get a time tracking system – I use harvest, I prefer time trackers that run WHILE I work (harvest does this) my recommendation is to NOT wait till the end of the day or god forbid the end of the week to put your time in. You will MISS time and render any work useless.
Yes I track my time writing blog posts too, its important and I have goals on how often I want to spend writing.
2 – Ask yourself how you think you spend your time across your responsibilities.
3 – Pick one task that you spend a lot of time on that you want to track and change at some point.
For me that task was new business – I love doing SEO, so I decided that I had to track my time to make sure I was not spending more than 25% of my time on new business in a given month – I picked 25% arbitrarily, it sounded right.
Remember SEER does NO sales solicitations, so all this time is spent on chatting with referrals & writing proposals ONLY.
I had my asisstant send me a report every month with 2 graphs (one is above):
- my raw # of hours spent on new business
- the % of my time spent on new business vs all other tasks
This means that every month, I was going to see the graph and have that stare me in the face reminding me that every month where I am spending over 25% of my time on new business, I am not doing what I started this business for and where my biggest value lies.
And the data rolled in, you can see it yourself, several weeks I was over again and again and again. But every month I got notification staring me in the face, so I had to do something about it. There was no random spike for a few weeks, there was a sustained overage month after month, ugh.
So, the great problem with being a referral based business is that as people at our clients move on to new companies they bring us along, existing clients re-up (and don’t leave), and most clients refer us to others at some point – this is a snowball rolling down a hill – the more business we do (and do well) the more new business we get – I had to make sure I spent all my time making sure we did our jobs well.
So you might be thinking, Wil – how did you chose to give up Sales?
I had given up everything else, banking, books, payroll, HR, Tech, you name it – if it wasn’t SEO or client related I got rid of it, there was only one thing left, business development or day to day SEO.
Are you thinking, Wil, how can you give up sales, you seem to be good at it?
It was tough, it was a massive leap of faith, but here’s how I made the decision…I asked myself this question…
What has driven SEER’s “success” so far? Is it:
That we are good at selling
or
That we are good at search, have a great team, and amazing client service?
I knew the answer, no matter how hard it was to admit…it was time to hire someone to come in and help so I could focus on what got us here so far.
We hired Clare Block, our business development lead, in October and I’m proud to say that my time on new business has plummeted in the last few months to all time lows, even though our raw # of monthly leads is at an all time high (2x over last year this time).
I’ll never lose sight of the fact that our success is based on our doing well for our existing clients, not going looking for new ones.
Having the new business hours drop as drastically as they have has resulted in one thing…more time to work on driving client success, ahhh where I should be and where I belong.