Escaping the Brick Wall
Last December on a dark, snowy night my wife asked me to run an errand, and with my arms full I headed for the truck. Concentrating on my “lazy man’s load”, I completely forgot about the pile of rocks I had placed years before to keep my kids from hitting a power box as they backed out of the driveway. When my foot hit the pile of rocks two options quickly came to mind: 1) fall, or 2) try and out round gravity and hopefully regain my balance.
Choosing option two, I began my attempt to outrun gravity. However, in making that choice, I had not yet calculated the distance I might have to run before I recovered my balance. The 4-foot high brick wall that separates my yard from my neighbors interrupted my computational efforts. Results, lazy man load scattered in all directions and me laying in the snow seeing stars that seemed much closer to earth than I remember.
The Brick Wall your Business Faces
Several great analogies from this experience can be related to owning a business.
Too often we miss the smaller tasks in our business until they become a small pile that can cause us to lose our balance. In our efforts to maintain stability, we continue to trip on tasks that we’re missing. Finally, we run right into the proverbial brick wall where everything comes crashing down, and we lay there wondering where it all went wrong.
Business Owners have many responsibilities and different “hats” that they must wear all at once. We have defined eleven major responsibilities that you face daily and have to juggle to manage. It becomes very easy to fixate on what we know, procrastinating or ignoring the other things that might turn into hidden rocks. If we don’t take care of them, it will be hard to find balance when we start to fall.
Managing the Responsibilities of your Business
The best ways to manage these responsibilities is through delegation and programs that will do it for you. busybusy offers a way to track your employees, job costing and production. A few small tasks are handled so that you don’t have to worry about them.
Employees: With busybusy you are able to manage your employees by tracking their time. You can see how many hours were spent working on certain projects, and where they were at. Payroll is very simple because everything is automatically synced and calculated on the desk top, so you can send it right off to the payroll company you use. No more collecting time cards and entering the data in manually.
Job Costing: The features that help manage your employees tie right into your job costing. When you know exactly how many hours were worked on a specific project it will help estimating for future jobs. Documentation outlines exactly what each project is costing, so you’ll know exactly how to meet your budgets.
Production: Each time an employee clocks in or uploads a photo they are able to add a note. Notes can be used to not only document progress of your production but also what supplies have been used. You can have your employees detail supplies used on that project, supplies left over, or anything they need for the job tomorrow. It is completely customizable to your business.
It is important to adopt and embrace technology that will help manage all the responsibilities you face, because you never know when rocks and a red brick wall will team up against you.
