Generally speaking, employees in the wedding industry are paid hourly and work a finite period of time. Many wedding business owners set no boundaries on the amount of time he or she dedicate to his or her business. While the rewards of owning a business go beyond financial, analyzing your own time expenditure in your business can prove insightful and help cultivate experience for efficiency, balance, and profitability.
Owner operators tend to take on many responsibilities and a default mentality that, if they do something themselves, they do not have pay someone else to do it, which saves of money. However, if someone else easily does those tasks and you can spend more time selling, marketing, or networking to generate more clients that can easily pay for the assistance, doing things yourself may actually cost you money.
One of the best ways to explore how you can make the most of your time is to write a list of every responsibility associated with running your business. Then create a wish list of initiatives that can help your business but you have not had the time to handle. Take items from both lists and decide which things only you can do and which things you could delegate to someone else.
However, the challenge of handling business needs and prioritizing is just the beginning of your time analysis. Do you spend enough time with family? Are you eating 3 meals a day? Do you exercise regularly? Are you getting enough sleep? Such questions are just as important to ask because they help your inner pendulum swing in a more balanced manner.
In addition, taking care of your personal life, time management establishes a pattern where you are more likely to put quality into your work and work more efficiently and effectively, which can result in smarter decision making and creative new ways to run your business.
It comes down to making a pledge to yourself: you will run your business rather than your business running you. We are all aware of the bottom line, but two business owners that make the same annual revenue may not have an equivalent amount of success and certainly can vary in growth potential. The person who has managed their time gains value from other areas of their life and is better positioned to allocate more time as the business grows in a way that fits with the rest of their lives instead of simply being overwhelmed.