North Star At Home Based Business

If you’re new to being an at home based business professional, you might be having a hard time figuring out how best to spend your time in order to be the most productive you can be.  There is so much to do and if you hope to have any balance in your life, there will not be enough hours in the day to get every little thing accomplished even if you are just trying to earn extra money from home.

So what to do and how the schedule it? One of the things that must be done as a top home based business entrepreneur is to figure out how to prioritize your task list to spend time doing the right things to further your business so you can be as efficient as possible trying to make money from home.

But lets clarify a little before we move forward. You should be aware that your task priorities will change as you build and establish your work from home company. In the beginning it’s all about ”getting the word out”, bringing in new customers and establishing your brand.

As time goes on, and your top home business is beginning to prove itself viable, more and more time will be spent on effective management. Of course, an already established strategy of bringing in more and more business will never go away.

It got me to thinking about the Pareto Principle which roughly says that 80% of your income results from 20% of your efforts.  You can actually apply the 80/20 Rule — as it’s often called — to just about everything in life.  But today, we’re going to apply it to what you do each day.

The trick is to decide what 20% of the activities you do every day, are most likely to bring in revenue? You’re not going to work any less – make no mistake — you are just going to work way smarter by focusing on the right things, which will depend on what stage your business is at?

For this article, I will categorize the different tasks you face each day depending on if you’re building your business or it is already established? You will find that as your work from home company becomes established, or even if you’re just focused on earning extra money from home while your still working a job, more and more of the business building activities can be outsourced.

Let’s just take a quick example:

• Answering email. In almost all cases, I have found that answering emails brings zero money in the door. Obviously, I can’t ignore it, but I can choose when to do it, and I always do it when my creativity is low — I need to spend my creative time doing something that can help with the bottom line. So email is in the 80%.
• Social Media. I need to connect with people — much like email. But the focus here is dependent on what stage your business is in? Building a following of like minded individuals is important for the building stage, but don’t waste your time with purely social contacts. Once established, this chore can be outsourced so this is a grey area.
• Writing an Ebook. For me, writing eBooks, definitely contributes to my bottom line — it either brings money in the door or adds names to my lists of people I can contact and build relationships with — this is definitely a 20% item.

That’s just a small example of how I go through the process with my established  home based small business.

The first thing you need to do is to decide what is most important in your at home based business depending on the stage you’re in? The bottom line of course is to make money! Right? Knowing that, you know you need to continually build and enhance your brand, add to and retain your customers by keeping them happy, and deveop, improve and expand your products and services.  If those are what’s most important to your business, then activities that advance those goals are where you need to spend your time.

You may need to be brutally honest with yourself on what falls into the 20% of activities you spend the majority of your time and ENERGY on.  It’s not to say that the other tasks don’t get done, you just won’t focus on them when your energy is high and you are at your most productive.

Here’s a sample of the tasks that need to be accomplished during the day at my established business:  *I put SEO, article writing and video creation in both categories — sometimes I’d rather be writing and taping more than anything else, but I also know that I just need to get other things done as well.

Here’s and example of the same tasks that need to be accomplished during the day if my business was new and in the building phase:

I know that my articles and videos do not DIRECTLY contribute to my bottom-line immediately, but they do add to the authority image I create as part of my brand as well as my search engine ranking. Unfortunately, I cannot write articles and make videos all day and hope to make money now – so I put them under both categories.

Here’s what I suggest you do:

1. Make a complete list of all the tasks you do for your business.
2. Make a separate list of your end goals.
3. Go over the list you completed in step one and see if they directly impact your goals — if they directly impact your goals — they are in the 20% pile — these are where you spend 80% of your time.  If they do not impact your goals, assess if they need to be done at all.  If so, put them in your 80% stack.  Do them 20% of the time!

This is a great exercise for you to undertake to get clear about your home based small business. Spend time doing the important tasks — whether you enjoy them or not — this will make your business thrive and grow.

Master this concept and you will be head and shoulders above your competition! For great business planning software click here!