Entrepreneurial Audit

Most entrepreneurial business owners love chaos and thrive in a state of overwhelm. They must! How else do you explain the fact that so many turn up day in and day out doing the very same things that cause mayhem, anxiety and stress. When we dig deeper, I don’t think it’s the fact that people actually enjoy this environment, but rather, they don’t have a clue how to go about practically changing it, and even if they did, they would not know where to start.

What if there was a simple exercise we could do that would not only identify the actions we need to take now and into the future but also provide some visibility that we could apply in the day to day to make real progress towards a scalable business model. Before we can make any meaningful change, we must understand where we are at now.

A great place to start is an accountability audit. Over the course of a week, fortnight or month, track your time with details on what the tasks were that you had actually done. Upon completion, traffic light each activity under the following categories.

Red – Tasks that someone else in your organisation could be doing today, even if it’s not yet to your skill level.

Amber – Work that when the business has transitioned and is scalable will be done by someone else, but at the moment, there is no one to do this work with enough capability, so you have to.

Green – Activities be they technical or working on the business that it is appropriate for you to do today and would be doing even when the business is scalable.

Count up the total number of each traffic light, then divide each by the total number of activities. Review each percentage.

Reds – Stop doing these immediately and delegate or outsource.

Amber – Set up a training and or mentor program that, over time, will see your people have the ability to do these tasks or, alternatively, outsource.

Green – Keep doing and schedule these tasks in your diary, particularly if they are important but don’t have urgencies such as strategy and business development activities.

What tasks are you doing that should be done by someone else?