The concept of having a work-life balance gets a huge clamor nowadays. This movement advocates want people to know that they can still be effective even if they spend lesser time at work, and spending 50 to 70 hours grueling at the office per week is unsustainable, toxic, and unnecessary.
While maintaining work-life balance sounds attainable, the experience proved that a business would not prosper if the business owner will not put his time and effort to keep it up and running.
I embarked upon my first business venture in the early 2000s. Like most entrepreneurs, I had to work tremendously for long hours. My typical day at work was about 12 hours, and I only had at least one weekend off per month. On average, I spent 60 hours every week for half a decade while my business grew over the years.
After a few years, I started another venture. Like what happened during the first one, I found myself spending 50 to 60 hours per week to manage everything needed to grow the new business. The cycle continues as I open another business.
While this process seemed tedious, there is a good explanation of why this has to happen. Businesses earn money due to the assets that they control. It is also the outcome of all the efforts that make those assets work. If your business is still taking off, you are the only one responsible for keeping the business afloat since it has no assets or strong labor force.
The secret of making a business succeed is to make valuable assets while recruiting a valuable team to handle menial tasks on top of running the daily operations. The valuable assets include products, brand, operational systems, and intellectual property, among others. If these sounds difficult, then you are right. You need to learn the trick of constantly balancing the business’s ins and outs and recruiting other people to join you in the business. All these tasks need to be accomplished without the risk of running out of capital.
The opportunity to work with a credible team can help maintain momentum and efficiency at work. These are hardly noticeable until you find yourself lacking in these aspects. Having a well trained and experienced team can be an asset for any company, which is why it is better to hire experienced staff that getting a newbie who you need to train from scratch.
Also, building the business’ assets requires a lot of effort. The processes of hiring and training staff and running the daily operations are full-time jobs. It is why an entrepreneur can spend more than 12 hours in the office per day to accomplish everything that the company needs.
If you want to have a work-life balance and to avoid burning out, you can follow these recommendations:
- Spend 50% of your time working on the operations side of the business. It includes boosting the business’ marketing strategies, administrative work, sales, and providing value to customers.
- Allocate 25% of the time to asset creation. It covers the development of software, intellectual property, system, and recording all the best practices.
- Use 25% of the time in hiring and training the best team. You must begin by looking for an efficient executive assistant, then hire a salesperson and a star that can handle the client’s needs.
By following this formula, you will spend at least 30 hours in the business operations, 15 hours in developing assets, and another 15 hours in human resource development. It may sound like an impossible workload, but all the successful entrepreneurs endure these long hours to succeed in their industries. Once everything is in place, you will reach the point when the team and the assets are working for the business in the long run.
