How Website Design Helps Business - by Saving Time
Intro Website Design Helps Your Business by Saving a Great Deal of Time
I spent ten years of my professional life as a business consultant. I traveled all over the country helping businesses that were in trouble get turned around.
One of the things I noticed about struggling businesses is that the owner or leadership (or both) were often spending their time doing things that didn’t move their business forward.
Business owners in particular are often engaged in what I call “productive procrastination.” They are always “busy” doing things. But the things they are busy doing:
- Are Not Their Expertise
- Do Not Contribute in a Significant Way to the Accomplishment of Goals or Mission
- Are Not the Best Use of Their Time
- Do Not Increase Their Capacity as a Business
Building your own website is an example of this.
Website Design is too important to your business to be doing it yourself.
It isn’t in your area of expertise. It may or may not contribute significantly to accomplishing goals or achieving your mission.
It isn’t the best use of the owners time.
It does not increase the viability of your business.
The rest of this article is about How Website Design Helps Your Business – by Saving Time
Productive Procrastination
After ten years of visiting businesses, studying their financials, talking to their employees, and disecting the mistakes they were making.
One thing I realized is that most business owners, and sometimes leadership, waste a lot of time simply because they “fool around” a lot.
They spend time reading blogs, or articles, or scrolling through LinkedIn, or “learning” some new marketing technology (like WordPress as an example).
They are BUSY.
And they are masters at busying themselves doing things that can make it hard for people around them to argue about.
Everyone can see they are busy.
They make sure everyone can see and knows how busy they are.
But there isn’t anyone around to question what it is they are doing.
They employees see the “busy boss” and wonder why sales continue to go down, their product or service hasn’t been updated or improved, and yet, they see the boss is busy constantly.
That is what productive procrastination is – Being productive, but being productive at things that don’t matter to the long term health of the business.
Or – are “somewhat” valuable, but someone else should be doing it.
That is one reason small business owners and leadership LOVE marketing as one of their favorite forms of productive procrastination – because it is harder to argue about.
After all, if the marketing works, then sales go up right?
So it “seems” like they are doing something important. They aren’t. They are just avoiding doing the things that would truly improve their business.
They are creating a lot of commotion, but ultimately, they are just wasting time.
Solutions
Set Reminders to stop and answer these questions
- Is this activity moving me toward one of my goals?
- Is my business growing, stagnating, or backsliding as the result of what I am doing right now?
- What could I do right now to actually advance toward a goal, improve my service or product, or increase the time I have to dedicate to activities that move my business forward?
Not The Best Use of Their Time
Does this mean that a business owner or leader can’t create a good website?
No – it doesn’t mean that.
But is that the BEST use of their time?
With all of the things that need doing, and monitoring, and improving at the leadership level, why is the CEO building the website?
I already told you why – to avoid doing the things they should be doing.
What should they be doing instead:
- Strategic Planning
- Improving Their Product of Service
- Spending Time with Their Team
- Supervising Projects
- Setting Standards and Monitoring Them
- Making Contacts In Their Industry
- Looking Down the Road to See What is Coming
- Learning New Technologies in their OWN industry
- Making Sales Calls or Training The Sales Team
But what about small businesses? Don’t they have to wear “lots of hats.”
Actually, one of the reasons small businesses tend to stay small, is because they think small.
They try to wear lots of hats, and do a mediocre job at all of them.
If you want your business to grow, building your own website is not the way to do it.
Until small business owners figure out how important it is to spend the bulk of their time doing the two or three things that only they can do and hire experts to do the rest, small is what they will stay.
Doing everything yourself is one of the biggest and most common mistakes business owners make.
Solutions
Answer Questions Throughout the Day
- Is this the BEST use of my time?
- What should I be doing instead to move my business forward
- How can I delegate or outsource this task
If you aren’t sure what the best use of your time is, here are some suggestions
- Strategic Planning
- Work on improving your Product of Service
- Spending Time with your Team
- Work on developing standards
- Make a new contact in your Industry
- Learning about a New Technology in you OWN industry
- Make a sales call or go on a sales call with one of the sales team
Doing Things That Are Not Their Area of Expertise
There is a reason hyper specialization has taken over – technology.
There is no way you are keeping current on the technology in your own industry while you are spending your time learning the tech from someone other experts’ industry.
Example – If you are in the landscaping business, and you are spending your time learning WordPress and web design software instead of figuring out landscaping technology, you are falling behind.
Every industry has their own technology now.
There are only so many hours in the day.
So now we all have our own specialty.
If you are spending your time becoming an expert at Google Ads instead of figuring out how to make your roofing company more profitable using your own technology, you are making a mistake.
Also, if you are in a leadership position, if you are doing things that you aren’t an expert at, who is doing what you are best at while you aren’t doing it?
Time matters.
If you are not spending your time honing your own skill. Your own craft. Improving your own products, then you are wasting your time.
Also, you are falling behind everyone else who is focused on improving their own skills, in your industry.
While you are busy fooling around learning MailChimp, someone else is becoming better, faster, and smarter at putting out the same product or service you are.
Someone else is spending time learning industry specific billing software, estimating software, productivity software, etc.
You are spending your time “dabbling” in digital marketing.
This is how website design helps your business – by saving you time. We are experts.
Would you expect us to do a great job the thing you are best at?
Of course not. So why would you expect yourself to be great at website design?
Solutions
Answer These Questions Throughout Your Day:
Is what I am doing making me better at my craft?
Am I improving my own area of expertise or wasting time becoming mediocre at someone else’s?
What could I do or learn right now that would make me even more of an expert?
What technology could I learn specific to my own industry that would give me more bandwidth, make me faster, or provide me more time to perfect my craft?
Doing Things That Do Not Increase The Capacity of The Business
This is similar to what we just discussed.
If you are spending your time “dabbling” in website design and other digital marketing platforms, you are not spending your time working on your business.
Though you might be able to finish a website, the time you spent figuring out how it all works, could have been spent reducing costs, researching better equipment, learning about new technology that may impact your industry.
You could have spent that time developing production standards, teaching them to the team, implementing them, and figuring out how to measure.
Maybe you could have been researching cost savings, or better suppliers, or figuring out how to improve what you sell.
Research and development could have been in progress.
Experiments could have been designed, tested, improved, launched, and the results compiled to help make better business decisions.
Maybe you could have been sharing your industry expertise with the production team or the sales staff.
Perhaps you could have been training yourself to improve your own speed or technical ability.
Or you could have been training someone else how to train people.
Website Designers spend all of their time trying to keep up with changing technology.
If you are spending your time working on learning our stuff, there is no way you are getting better at whatever it is that you do.
Solutions
Answer These Questions:
What could I do, learn, buy, or execute to increase the capacity of my business?
How could I cut costs without sacrificing quality?
Is our way of producing things or providing our service the BEST way?
How could we improve productivity, logistics, supply chain, technology or training to become even more efficient and profitable?
Do Not Contribute to Goal Attainment or Mission Objectives
As a business consultant, one thing I noticed about business owners and leaders whose businesses were in bad shape was that their time was never tied to an outcome.
Meaning, when I would ask them questions like:
What goal or mission objective, they were moving close to achieving or reaching by doing what they were doing day to day, I got a lot of blank stares.
They were “doing” all kinds of things day to day.
But the things they were doing, were mostly reactive.
Whatever was in their in-box dictated their day-to-day activities.
Problems that came up that moment, or the evening before dictated their day-to-day activities.
Never were their activities tied directly to, or motivated or even influenced by a goal or mission objective.
If you cannot look at an activity you are doing, and answer EXACTLY how what you are doing moves you closer to the goal, or toward achieving a mission objective, then you are probably wasting time.
But Things Come Up!
I know they do, but they don’t “come up” as often as you think.
Business owners LOVE it when things just “pop up” because it gives them something to do.
Often that thing is urgent, so it gives them a feeling of accomplishment.
They feel productive.
And they have all the answers (excuses) why they couldn’t move toward a goal – because “something came up.”
People who are successful at business, don’t have a lot of things “just come up.”
They do work and activities that contribute to the end game.
They focus on the end game.
They aren’t deciding moment to moment what needs doing to achieve a goal of mission objective.
They plan their time to maximize movement toward attainment of the goal.
They execute around priorities, and they try to anticipate and starve problems.
But I’m a One Person Operation
I have been a one person operation in many of my past businesses.
I developed “maintenance Mondays.”
I did my busy work, errands, problems, call backs, etc. all on one day of the week.
That way I had five more days to go full-commit around priorities.
You can’t do that only one day – fine, do two maintenance days and then you have four full days to work ONLY on things that move you toward goals or mission objectives.
If You Aren’t Moving Purposefully Toward a Goal of Mission Objective
If you aren’t moving with purpose toward a goal or objective, then you might be going backward.
You might be going sideways.
You might be running in place.
People who are successful have goals, and do work that moves them toward attainment of the goal.
Business owners who “muddle along” don’t have goals, don’t remember their goals, and work on whatever crisis comes up in the moment.
And somehow, there is always a crisis more important than attainment of the goal.
PRO TIP – if this last description fits you, and you truly believe that there are just too many things that “come up” and too many “fires to put out” then I suggest you make your new goal to figure out what you need to do to stop it from happening, develop plans and systems to eliminate these problems, and keep moving toward that goal until you achieve it. And then you can start moving your business forward.
Solution
Set reminders throughout your day to pause and ask the following questions:
- How does this activity move me closer to attainment of one of my goals or achieving one of our mission objectives?
- What could I do right now instead that would move me toward one of goals or mission objectives?
- Is this activity the best or most expedient thing I could be doing to move toward attainment of one of my goals or mission objectives?
Actions:
- Don’t do activities that you can’t tie directly to a goal or mission objective
- If you find you struggle to find time to do things that meaningfully move you toward a goal or mission objective – then that should be what you do next; figure out how to remove obstacles or struggles or barriers so you CAN work toward a goal or mission objective.
Summary - How Website Design Helps Your Business - by Saving Time
Business owners in particular are often engaged in what I call “productive procrastination.” They are always “busy.”
But the things they are busy doing:
- Are Not Their Expertise
- Do Not Contribute in a Significant Way to the Accomplishment of Goals or Mission
- Are Not the Best Use of Their Time
- Do Not Increase Their Capacity as a Business
Successful businesses do the opposite.
They work on and improve their own area of expertise. They avoid doing tasks that are not the best use of their time. They work on things that will increase the capacity of their business. They do work day-to-day and moment to moment that move them toward attainment of goals or mission objectives.
So stop “dabbling” in digital marketing. Stop trying to “work on your own website.”
Spend your time instead learning the tech in your own field. In your own industry. Or learning about the technology to come, or be a rock star and be the person who invented the next technology that rocks your industry’s world.
About the Author of how website design helps your business – saving time: Tim Vanderkamp is Co-Owner of Stay Wild Digital Marketing firm. He was a business consultant for over ten years, helping struggling business owners to perform, and thrive. To contact him, please email: tim@staywilddigital.com
