“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” — Alan Lakein.
“Nothing is more sobering for a small business owner than properly calculating their true hourly rate — all too often one discovers they’d be better off flipping burgers than running a business.” — Vleppo
A common mistake made by small business owners, particularly in the digital asset space, is not properly understanding the value of their time and not having a plan as to how to allocate their time. This results in businesses operating at a level that is less than optimal which could easily be corrected with a few tweaks. Many business consultants will sell solutions to help in this regard for thousands of dollars (you’ve seen all the ads in Facebook) but in the end their ‘solutions’ basically boil down to consciously and deliberately planning how you allocate your resources.
As set forth in Part 1 of this series, the only asset you have to trade with is your time so it would make sense you should be:
(a) Selling your time at the absolute maximum value you possibly can; and
(b) Directing your as much of your time as possible towards revenue generating activities.
If we assume that you have 40hrs per week for a total of 52 weeks per year and you elect to take 2 weeks leave per year you have 2,000 hours per year available to earn income. As a business owner, however, you are going to have 4 areas in which you will need to allocate time:
Actual income producing work
Business Development and Marketing (to keep the jobs rolling in);
Business as usual administration
The unplanned time-wasting activities of chasing up clients for payment and client defaults.
Activity 1 is the only income generating activity in this list and the one that you want to increase wherever possible without any additional costs. Given the competition in the digital asset creation space is so fierce the ability to increase price is not generally available without the risk of losing clients. That leaves the business owner with the option of broadening its services to generate additional sources of revenue — however broadening services away from a core offering often comes at a cost to the business owner.
Activity 2 is a cost line item however rather than reducing this cost you simply want to maximise its effectiveness (i.e. optimise it) as to reduce your costs would have the counterproductive impact of choking off your pipeline of potential customers (and by extension future revenues).
Activities 3 and 4 are absolute no-brainers that you want to reduce as much as possible. The difference between 3 and 4, however, is that while 3 is relatively easy to plan for and manage, 4 is an open-ended liability. As such 4 represents a potential risk that could suck up much more time than expected and result in significant costs. This is why many business owners choose to write these debts off rather than investing the time to chase them.
Vleppo is developing tools that will assist creators and holders of digital assets to increase Activity 1 and reduce Activity 4 by:
Increasing potential sources of income without a corresponding increase in workload; and
Reducing the effort and stress associated with unplanned activities such as conflict resolution and debt collection.
By addressing these two areas that Vleppo believes it can equip its customers to not only survive but also thrive in the digital asset space. We look forward to sharing more information in Part 3 of this series.
About Vleppo:
Website https://www.vleppo.io
Telegram https://t.me/vleppo_vlx
Medium https://medium.com/@vleppo
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Vleppo-486492781870531/?modal=admin_todo_tour
Twitter https://twitter.com/Vleppo_Official
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/vleppo
Reddit https://www.reddit.com/user/Vleppo_
Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/user-718851213
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STOPI don't want to think about my hourly rate on Steemit, but then I get a lot of fun out of it. I'll have to keep the day job for now