Closing the Knowing Doing Gap

I recently presented this to “Grow A Small Business”a monthly meet up group which is focused on helping businesses grow, with less stress and more support.

You know that there are things that you need to be doing, right? Then why aren’t you doing them? You know that list of things that you know you need to do but you keep putting off? The phone calls you know you need to make, the emails, the invoices, the difficult conversations etc. A lot of time and mental energy is wasted procrastinating and avoiding. I love sharing with business owners how to close this knowing doing gap for themselves and their staff.

This is the biggest killer to productivity and efficiency in the workplace and your business.

When you understand the mindset behind what you are avoiding you can start to create a shift. Success in your business means having the right plan, pus the right mindset and the right action. I believe it is 95%MINDSET 5 % ACTION. You can have the best plan in place but not execute it. You can take massive action but not have it backed up with the right mindset.

And sometimes this moving beast called your business doesn’t even allow you to come up for a breath to evaluate this. It is critical that you do otherwise you will keep doing the same thing over and over and get the same result, Albert Einsteins definition of insanity.

You may or not have heard of WOTB and WITB. This is the acronym for working on the business and working in the business. Where do you put your time?

I like to put a dollar value on the time for these as well. You can choose the amount that you think suits you. The WOTB hours is that time that you spend strategising, working on the vision, getting clear about the big picture, the solutions, the opportunities. This is the $1000 an hour job. If this is you, then you know one else can do this in the business for you. But you may avoid spending the time doing this and going and doing the WITB jobs which is the implementation, working on the tools. The jobs that you are employing staff to do but you find yourself getting caught up doing it. I call these the $30 – $50 hour jobs. Now it doesn’t matter what this figure is. You’ve got to ask yourself, “Where do I spend my time and is this an effective use of my time?

I worked with a client who spent 9 hours on her bookwork a week. It wasn’t something she enjoyed, she regularly put it off, didn’t enjoy it and made mistakes. I introduced the 3 D’s to her. Either DO it, DELEGATE it or DITCH it. Do what you love and are good at, Delegate the stuff you are not enjoying, avoiding or is not an effective use of your time and then ditch stuff that is taking up space in your head and is taking away your focus.

She employed a book keeper. It took this person 3 hours to do the book keeping, which gave the business owner 9 hours to do what she was good at. She poured this time into training her staff and putting systems in place as well as writing a grant application which brought $150K into her business for development. The key here is to understand that bringing in a book keeper for her saved her over $27 000/per year in her business, giving her head space as well as allowing her time to do the things that she was good at.

On the other hand the WOTB ( working on the business) stuff might not be your strength and you need someone to help you.

How do you determine what it is that you need?

That’s where a mentor comes in. I have always had a mentor in business and the agricultural operation that my husband and I run has a number of mentors for different parts of the business. Why? Because we both know what we are good at and where we are not. We are aware that you have to leverage your time and be very effective at what you do. This means understanding yourself, your habits, your limitations, your mindset and what makes you tick.

For example websites and all that tech stuff is not something I enjoy or understand – I am always going to delegate that in my business.

There are a number of people in the Business Blindspots group that are experts in their field and would be happy to have a conversation with you and find out what you need in your business to help you move forward.

Written by Rachael Downie for Business Blindspots.