How To Work On Your Business

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

“Work on your business, not in it.”

It’s not easy.

These are thoughts, ideas and concepts that have actually worked for me as I extricated myself from day-to-day operations at my company, RL Property Management.

Two Book Recommendations

First I can’t go any further without recommending you read one of two excellent books on this topic (or both):

• If your business does under 1 million in revenue per year, and you haven’t read The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, drop everything and order it now.

• If your business does over 1 million in revenue, order Traction by Gino Wickman and read it as soon as possible. While you wait, take the Organizational Checkup to find out where you stand.

Looking for even more book suggestions? I wrote an article on my top 8 books for small business owners.

OK without those preliminaries out of the way, let’s jump to a few of my own thoughts on this difficult topic.

The Ivy Lee Method

At the end of each day, grab a post-it note and write down the 2 or 3 most important things you need to accomplish the following day. These shouldn’t be day-to-day things like returning an email or finishing some bookkeeping. Instead, the items you pick must be related to broader goals or have the potential to move your business forward in a significant way.

When you get into the office the following morning, immediately go to work on these items — before you open your email. This technique is known as the Ivy Lee Method.

Gaining Leverage

If you want to work on your business instead of being stuck in operations, you need to achieve leverage. In this context, leverage means the ability to get a lot done with little effort. Tools can provide leverage — picture using a hammer instead of your fist to pound a nail in. Software is a type of sophisticated tool, and can provide unbelievable leverage. You should look for places to deploy software in your business to gain leverage.

No Code Tools For Property Management

Labor is another form of leverage. To put it bluntly, hire people to do the work instead of doing it yourself. A lot of small business owners have trouble with this. They get hung up on the idea that certain parts of the business operations can only be done by them (sales, bookkeeping, core tasks, whatever it is).

What held me back from letting go of certain operational tasks, and maybe you too, is a toxic combination of ego and fear. Ego says “nobody can do this as well as me.” And fear says “if I hire someone and they mess up, the business will fail.” Ignore these twin demons and press forward.

Procrastination is a Signal (But Not What You Think)

If you commit to doing something (for yourself or someone else), and it doesn’t get done within a few weeks, this is an important signal. Not of your laziness, but that you are unsuited to the task and it should be delegated. Do not waste any time dwelling on questions of why you didn’t do it, or what you could do to motivate yourself to get it done. Just outsource the task to someone on your team or Upwork, and move on with life. You have my permission.

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Shed the Puritan Work Ethic

I had puritanical ideas about hard work and laziness drilled into me from a very young age. And those lessons may have even been appropriate given my natural inclinations, especially as a teenager and young man. But they no longer serve any useful function. Working is a functional task. It has no moral value. This mindset shift is a journey that I am still on.

You do not need to be working every moment that you are at work. In fact some of your most transformation and important “work” will be done while you are explicitly not working.

It can be difficult to feel OK with leaving the office to go on a long walk at 10am on a Tuesday, especially as you head out the door on a warm spring day past your hard-working employees. But this is the way.

“If you see me working, I’m not doing my job.” — Jessica Pearson, Suits.

Get Comfortable with 85%

As you start to gain leverage by hiring people, you will notice mistakes. You may start to doubt yourself — maybe hiring someone to do this was the wrong move after all? And it can be very frustrating when you see a job done incorrectly or an error on a document that was sent to a customer.

Or maybe you feel like your employees are slacking — they’re simply not working as hard or as fast as you did, back when you did that job.

I’m here to tell you to get comfortable with this. It’s not going away. Nobody is going to give as much attention or speed to tasks as an owner. But if you want to grow and scale, you’ve got to get over this. As long as you have some systems in place to address problems as they come up, it’s truly OK if things go wrong once in a while. People are understanding; if anything it can be an opportunity to show customers how you conduct yourself professionally and make things right. This can actually strengthen your relationship with the customer.

And when you find the right person for the job, don’t be surprised when they end up doing it better than you ever did. This happened to me with sales at RL Property Management. Seven years after starting the company, I finally turned over the reins on new business development, thinking there was no way that a salesperson with no property management experience could ever sell property management services (at my own company!) better than I could. I hired someone anyway, because I was starting to get overwhelmed with work and burnt out on sales — but I was not expecting much. Instead, sales exploded. To whit: in the nine months prior to hiring our salesperson, we closed 13 new clients. In the nine months afterward, we closed 47.

It’s amazing what happens when you get the right person in the right seat and get out of the way.

Powerful Planning

Every Sunday evening or Monday morning, sit somewhere quiet and plan your week. Think broadly about what’s wanted and needed in all areas of your business (and life). This is simple but exceptionally powerful. It’s helpful for me to break it out into categories. So on a blank piece of paper I’ll write:

• RL Property Management

• Project X, Y, Z, etc.

• Personal

• Household

Then under each category, I think about my quarterly and annual goals for that part of my life, and what needs to happen this week to move toward those goals.

I leave the planning sheet visible on my desk all week, and constantly refer back to it when I find myself wondering what I should be working on.

If you don’t do this, you’ll just end up spinning your wheels all week and feeling like you’ve accomplished nothing come Friday.

Your Environment Is Make-or-Break

Your environment has an enormous effect on your brain. The neighborhood, streets, parking lots, lighting, sounds, smells, air quality, temperature, office design/age, your coworkers, literally everything around you, is causing you to think and behave in certain ways. I’ve noticed that if I drive through a bad neighborhood on the way to work in the morning, it affects my whole mindset around what’s possible to accomplish that day.

Take time to design your environment (take drastic measures) to align with your goals. If you are surrounded by environmental cues telling you that you are a small-business owner with no more than 4 employees, guess where you’re likely to remain?

It can be hard to completely uproot your business or your home, so start small. During the work week, I prefer the nicest locations possible for meetings or meals, rather than something quick and cheap. A small thing like that can really alter your thinking for hours or days.

In Closing — Brief Thoughts about Email & Communication

• Email is not “work”, in fact, it’s usually happening at the expense of real work. Take time to reduce and streamline the amount of time you spend emailing. Business still got done when we all communicated using memos and letters. In fact, I would argue it was completed more efficiently.

• Control the channels through which people are permitted to contact you. (Phone/voicemail/email/social/text message, etc). Don’t provide a large surface area for people to contact you. That’s just more places to check and keep up with, and more dopamine hits to distract you.

• Set reasonable boundaries on the time of day and the day of the week that you check & reply to emails (people will respect you for it).

• There is absolutely no reason, and I mean NO reason, you need to be checking email more than 3 to 4 times a day. People will call or text if it is urgent (and really, none of us are ER doctors. Come on, people. It’s not urgent.)

I’m Peter Lohmann, CEO and founder of RL Property Management, a residential property management company located in Columbus Ohio. If you enjoyed this article, you can connect with me on Twitter, subscribe to my podcast Owner Occupied, or sign up for my mailing list.