Time is the enemy in the world of startups. Time spent, time wasted, time shortage, it drives and exhausts leadership. Keeping time in the startup world can be quite the challenge.
Writing for USA Today, Laura Petrecca comments, “Small stumbles and all-out defeats are common for entrepreneurs.” And, with the failure rate of new businesses, this may be an understatement. Some challenges are obvious, including financing, compliance, risk management, and more. But, they are all functions of time.
What’s the problem?
For starters, time remains a silent partner, so quiet and subtle that you forget it is there. It pushes and pulls and presses on you and your business performance.
- Deadlines loom over everything. Appointments demand attention to complete formal plans, write finance applications, file documents, and so on.
- Calendars govern projects. Projects are segmented in weekly increments, monthly targets, quarterly results, and the like. And, any new business has multiple projects working on their own calendars at the same time.
- Vision drives the business founder or entrepreneur. That vision often underestimates the sweat equity contributed by others. After all, the owner does not follow the clock and expects others to work off the clock, too.
- Founders often cannot manage their own time. They see themselves as jugglers, but that masks a risky self-interest. Ironically, they begin to manage their time when they start delegating tasks.
- Business is a process from innovation to securing resources through product development and customer satisfaction. Each of these steps represents a cycle, and time measures cycles.
Overall, starting a business exhausts time. Even though many business owners seek the independence to work when they want, they wind up surrendering to the pressures of time. Even when they run their own shop, they find they cannot take time off or spend it with their families. They find themselves on the clock 24/7 just to keep the lights on and to make agile response. And, when they are accessible by email and mobile phone, they never leave the office.
All the things you can think of
In its directive on Time Management, the U.S. Government’s Small Business Agency recommends a self-audit: In what ways have you wasted or not optimally managed your time? You might ask these questions about how you manage your startup:
- How many times have time gotten out of your hands?
- How many times have you failed to finish the business of the day?
- How many times have you blown off family dinner or activities?
Then, ask how much you time you need to:
- Maximize a day’s work
- Improve the use of limited resources
- Identify areas that require critical attention
- Delegate tasks to others
- Track the progress you are making
Study time
Well ahead of opening your business doors, and regularly thereafter, you have to study time and how your business and people use it.
- Examine the time a project takes. Include the preparation time, the potential for downtime, and the finish and debriefing time.
- Projects have beginnings and ends, but they also have increments, smaller units of time that have their own schedule.
- In business, time is relative. Processes run differently as weather and daylight conditions vary. Workers handle hours differently in extreme heat and cold and during overtime or swing shift hours.
And, you need to understand and manage the work of others in time. Products like a web time clock provide accurate records on time and attendance. But, they also provide the data necessary for benchmarking performance and process in time. Linked with payroll and available to authorized management, it administers compensation and archives records for deeper study. A web time clock frees time to startup a business and provides a tool to manage performance into the future.
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