Personal Efficiency
Why did you go into business for yourself? I bet it wasn’t as a means to avoid your family and miss your friends. At a certain point, “daddy has to work” or ” mommy is bringing home McDonald’s” just doesn’t cut it and you need to scale back your time at work. How do you do that? Why should you do that? Does your family really “understand” why you’re not home?
Let’s go with the last part first. Does your family really “understand” why you’re not home? Absolutely not! For a little while they will, but eventually they will want to see you more than your cash flow and resent you for not being there. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine, but don’t be shocked if they grow more and more distant from you over time. Let me play out a scenario for you. You work all the time, but you have two kids. Now your two kids want for nothing. You teach them work ethic by always being at work. You make the kids study and send them to college and give them an opportunity you never had. Now they graduate and get jobs where they put in the same work load you did. You retire and want to spend time with your family but it’s too late. They are gone, resentful that they never really felt important to you (if it’s true or not doesn’t matter as much as their perception of the truth), and they are just as busy as you were; missing every holiday. You can say how proud you are of them, but you know you wish they would come visit. Turnaround is a real bitch.
I’m not proposing being home constantly, working from home (which I couldn’t do long-term) or anything radical. Every entrepreneur needs to establish a work-life balance. This can be established by observation of key distractions at work and asking the key questions of how to fix them.
Establish a Process.
The first recommendation I have is to look at your routine tasks that have a set process that repeats. How much time do you spend repeating the same task on a daily basis? Generally this task can be broken down by various methods. When I’m working on FullTiltBusiness.com, most of my work is now automated. With the exception of the writing of pieces like this one (which is generally written on my iPhone while I lay in bed or while I wait for waitresses to bring food out), I generally spend thirty minutes a week on Full Tilt Business. Sometimes I know that isn’t possible and need to put a specific amount of time into growth of something or designing a new section, but I generally only do 30 minutes a week. Thirsty Thursday Tip of the Week (T3) is automated on Facebook. Facebook posts directly to Twitter. I post myself to Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and the FTB LinkedIn business page. That takes fifteen minutes. That’s Thursday. On Monday my blog posts. I use an interface that posts to Tumblr, Facebook (which automatically posts directly to Twitter), Tumblr (when the interface works), Google+, and my personal LinkedIn page. I manually post to Tumblr (when automation didn’t work), Pinterest, and the LinkedIn business page. I share it on my personal Facebook and Google+ accounts and I am all done. It’s not worth it to me to hire a virtual assistant to handle all of those tasks. With VA’s working for as low as$2 an hour, the price is there, but I can’t justify spending $1 a week for these routine tasks. Do you have to repeat the same process over and over again? Does bookkeeping take up half your day? It might be a faster and more efficient use of your time to email scans of your daily receipts and email them to a virtual assistant in the Philippines to work on organizing for you. You create the process and they can duplicate it and you can’t even find an illegal to work for the wages they work for over there.
I know it was a long preceding paragraph, but the concepts of the duplicating of a process and using a virtual assistant are potentially two sides of the same coin.
Outsource.
Moving on, what are the other things you can or need to do? How about a lawn service? As a hypothetical, let’s say you have a lawn service and you’re doing well. You have a couple crews and they are working all the time. You have employees out there working and you’re making good money, but you have to be the boss. So why do you have employees? With all the independent contractors doing that work, why not work with one to represent your company and go out to do the work for you? Let them handle all the human resources crap of the crew they run and you just make your same profit. Now you can be on the phone for the day and make your contacts with clients without pushing a lawnmower yourself. Most importantly, you can reduce your overhead from keeping a full sized garage full of lawn equipment to just keeping an office space.
Website.
Using the same lawn care service as an example, how can a website help you? We all know websites are fantastic marketing methods, as are social media accounts, but what more can a website do? How about booking customers? With various types of simple widgets and low-cost paid services, your business can accept scheduled jobs and set prices automatically. Customers can pay with credit cards online and the money is directly deposited into your account, minus their fee. This benefits everyone involved. While you’ll make slightly less money per client, you are not limited by the number of contractors you have that bring their own equipment and you won’t run out of storage space.
With maximizing productivity as your main goal, you can have it all. You can have the business everyone knows, the family life you dreamt about, and extra time to go golfing.
Why did I write this piece for today? On April 21 I bought the domain name HoosierPoliticsToday.com, which is designed to be a political blog emanating from the great Hoosier state. On May 1, I will be forming Beebe Digital Media, Inc, as an entirely new venture, which is owned by my holding company and will feature a large scope of associated websites. I needed to remind myself of this more than my readers, but I think my readers will appreciate the information from here.
For more pieces like this please go to TheMichaelBeebe.com.
Picture a young Michael Beebe, fresh out of La Porte High School in ’93, diving headfirst into the world of hospitality with a busboy gig at the old La Porte Holiday Inn. That hustle led him to an Associate of Science from Purdue-North Central in ’95 and a Bachelor’s in Hospitality Management from Purdue-Calumet in ’97 (those schools are now merged into Purdue-Northwest, by the way). Michael’s early career was a whirlwind—running a 140-room hotel in Indianapolis, where he learned the ins and outs of the industry but realized it wasn’t his true calling. What did spark his passion? Teaching. He found himself thriving in front of students at Ivy Tech Community College and Lake Michigan College, sharing the art and science of hospitality management. Oh, and he also moonlighted at WIMS radio in Michigan City, juggling both on-air and behind-the-scenes roles with his signature high energy.
Politics? That’s been Michael’s sidekick since he was 18, registering to vote with a fire in his belly to make a difference. He threw his hat in the ring for La Porte County Council in 2010, where he got a crash course in the power of social media marketing. Undeterred by not winning, he campaigned for Indiana’s General Assembly in 2012 and took another shot at the County Council in 2014 and 2016. Though he hasn’t clinched a seat yet, Michael’s relentless drive to serve shines through. Lately, he’s been pouring that energy into helping other candidates who champion personal liberty, amplifying their voices with his knack for strategy.
Here’s a twist: Michael once co-owned a tattoo shop, despite having no ink himself. As the business manager and marketing guru, he leaned hard into low-cost, social media-driven campaigns to put the shop on the map. That experience fueled his love for digital marketing, and now he spends his free time crafting websites and boosting businesses online—a true labor of love.
These days, Michael’s living the dream as an independent contracted transporter, crisscrossing the country while getting paid to soak up new places and cultures. When he’s not exploring, he’s parked somewhere scenic, laptop open, building his digital consulting company, Spark Plug Strategies, or penning his thoughts. He even wrote a few books.
Based in La Porte County, Indiana, Michael’s embraced a “decentralized laptop lifestyle,” blending work, travel, and passion projects into a life that’s as dynamic as he is.