Business Opportunities Weblog

August 22, 2007 by Dane Carlson | 1 Comment

The following is a guest post by Cristian Dorobantescu of Small Business Entrepreneur Blog. He is a moonlighting entrepreneur in Romania.

Every couple of weeks I see lists of “entrepreneurship myths” – it seems like it’s a never ending story – some are fueling them and the others are debunking them. There is one myth in particular that really bothers me: “if you are an entrepreneur you will more free time and will be able to set your own working hours”. I have strong feelings about this myth but perhaps I should first let you know that I’m a “moonlight entrepreneur”, taking care of my business while keeping my 9 to 5 job.

OK, so let’s take the “get more free time” myth down. I will talk about the most common reasons why start-ups are not very efficient in time usage, and what you could do about it.

About one month ago, while in Denver, Colorado, I ha the chance to meet and talk to Bob Walsh, the author of several books about Micro-ISV (very small software companies) and blogging. He had a very interesting concept about small companies: any start-up entrepreneur should 47 hats to run a business. You have to be the manager, the legal advisor, the sales department, the development team, the janitor and everything in between.

And still, I’ve seen and done a few business plans and the entrepreneur’s time is never taken into account as a valuable and limited resource. Chances are that you start with limited funding and a limited team, but still, there are a lot of things to be done. You have to do paperwork, talk with customers, get supplies and everything else, but you never take into consideration how much time you have available. And secondly, you are unable to give this time a real commercial value, even if at the end every cost should be translated into the product/service price and paid by the customer. I can’t remember how many times I’ve spent one extra hour into the night, from “my own time” to do this or that.

So, if you are a one man show and most likely:

• You don’t have all the tools to make things as efficient as possible. In the beginning you might not have the best fax machine, best printer or best way to make invoices. But for sure you can manage by spending a little more time.
• You don’t have processes put in place, nor the most skilled work force or knowledge. Most people don’t take time to write processes for themselves. And most likely, even if they hire, they will still not write their processes down. And when they hire they might not be able to afford the best man in town. Or simply they just don’t know how to do things any better than they already do.
• You don’t measure how time is spent and you fail to give it a commercial value. I hardly ever see a start-up owner using a time tracking software to measure the time he spends running his business. Actually, I don’t see bigger companies doing it. And what’s the value of the time? You never know, because you struggle to have just enough invoices out to pay the bills at the end of the month, doesn’t matter how much you worked for.

All this make time a very limited and under-evaluated resource. Why do most of the start-up entrepreneurs ignore their most valuable resource, their time? Because running a business sometimes means to make sacrifices.

My entrepreneurship experience has taught me valuable lessons about time management:

• Say no to things that aren’t getting any real results. I still spend daily useless times checking my blog stats. It’s good to check on the number visitors, but it doesn’t pay my bills at the end of the month.
• Outsource some of the processes to people that could do the work better, cheaper and faster than you do. I know it’s hard to pay for these services, but you can’t really wear 47 hats.
• Don’t be afraid to hire. If you own the business it doesn’t mean the business owns you.
• Get the best tools you can buy and automate everything than can be automated. It’s more expensive in the beginning, but I never felt sorry about buying the best laptop for my needs. (You have to pay attention to this one, I haven’t said the coolest or the most expensive , I said the best for my usage.)

Now if you are a part time entrepreneur like I am, things are a little more complicated. Read about my part-time entrepreneur lifestyle here and 5 reasons not to be a part time entrepreneur. This should ruin the get more free time” myth to the ground.

Photo by ~ Cati Kaoe ~.

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Tags: Entrepreneurial Lifestyle