I can tell how successful your business will be by looking at one thing:
How you spend your time.
This sounds like a big claim, but it actually isn’t. Truth is, it’s very obvious – because the difference between the founders of great businesses and mediocre ones is so glaring that you can’t miss it.
To explain it, let’s start by breaking your time down into the following 4 basic tasks:
- Delivery
- Marketing
- Innovation
- Admin
Delivery is actually producing your product or service for your customer. Actually “doing” the thing the business is there to do.
Marketing is any activity that tries to connect that thing with the customer – be it ads, thought leadership, sales meetings, whatever.
Innovation is the creation of something new for the business to offer, be that a new product, or tweak to the existing product.
Admin is just the general bucket for everything else – HR stuff, finance, and whatever other tedious activities need to be done to keep things ticking.
Clear enough?
Now let’s think about how time is allocated to these tasks by most founders.
Typically they do what’s intuitive, which is to say that they spend the vast majority of their time on delivery.
This stands to reason right? After all, this is the what the business exists to do. It’s the business in its purest form. And what is more, they want to do a good job. This is how they’re going to get more business no? So of course they must ensure they “over-deliver” for their customers – leading to outsized attention on this side of operations.
Next, in a distant second, comes admin. Most founders recognise that this isn’t a growth driver, but even so it has a nasty habit of expanding to fill time. What is more, since this is the petty stuff of office politics, people quite like doing admin. It feels good. Which is why many companies (and institutions) are susceptible to bureaucratic bloat.
Third, we have marketing. Universally recognised as important, but, as we know, the first thing to get “cut” when times are tough. What this tells us is that marketing is emotionally seen as a bolt-on to the “real” business (delivery and admin), rather than being seen as an intrinsic part of the business itself. It’s a bonus. An extra. And it’s kinda understandable since most marketing assets exist “outside” the business rather than embedded within it, so cutting them feels painless – like removing your hat rather than removing your head.
And finally innovation, which in most businesses gets zero attention because founders think that this is something that “tech companies” do, and isn’t really important to them.
In summary we can break it down like this:
Delivery – 70% of time
Admin – 20% of time
Marketing – 10% of time
Innovation – 0% of time
Now let’s consider the picture for a founder in a truly strategic business – which is growing fast, and making a name for itself rather than simply surviving.
The first wild difference you’ll see is in delivery. This shrinks to the absolute minimum level possible – let’s say from 70% to 10% of time and attention.
This seems insane to most people.
How can the thing you do become an afterthought?
There’s a practical answer and a strategic answer.
The practical one is that any task which is repetitive (and delivery of your product should always be repetitive), lends itself to systematisation and streamlining. You want your delivery to be as close as possible to the proverbial “sausage machine”, that can be operated brainlessly by the lowest tier of labour possible. To the founder it should feel like a background task – ideally taking up very little of their headspace.
The strategic answer is that getting business is far higher stakes than servicing business. As you know I’m not a believer in the “do a good job and people will come” school of thought – at least not at scale. Attracting customers is an art independent of servicing customers – and without the former the latter doesn’t really matter.
So yeah, time on delivery needs to be shrunk to the smallest possible level where reasonable quality is maintained.
Now you’ve got all this free time on your hands, how should you fill it?
The answer of course is marketing and innovation.
Marketing and innovation should occupy 70%+ of your time and energy. To put it another day you should be spending at least three entire days a week on marketing and innovation, no matter what sort of business you’re in.
(Does this feel like insane overkill? Then perhaps now you know why you’ve got problems…)
The reason I’ve bundled these two is because I basically see them as the same thing. Innovation is a form of marketing, in that it’s a creative action designed to connect your business with customers – so either way you’re generating attention, differentiation, and growth.
These are not only the most important activities. They’re also the most time consuming activities too, because unlike everything else they require constant new thinking, and can’t be fully systematised.
Hence the 70% figure isn’t just a statement of priority – it’s a practical necessity.
Finally of course we have admin, which it goes without saying should be minimised. But, equally, it is crucial, so will hover around a similar level.
We can summarise our ideal time split something like this:
Marketing and innovation – 70% of time
Delivery – 15% of time
Admin – 15% of time
How does your calendar stack up against this?
You know, people often ask me how I have time to churn out all the content I do. And I can tell from this question that they see marketing as something to be done in the cracks, rather than being the core business function.
So I would ask them: how do you not have time to do this?
The easiest way (by far) to make this transition, is to spend an hour or two a week on a call with me, thinking big about your business.
