better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

The £20 PA

26 January 2014

Do you ever get stuck? Is there a task that seems to elude you, no matter how many times you add it to your to-do list or set a pop-up reminder for it? Or perhaps there is a task that you can half do, but need a bit more expertise or exploration in order to complete it? For me, this would include some social media activities, where I know how to tweet, but don’t have the time or the knowledge to sort out using Facebook more effectively. However…

…Our business life is full of tasks and we don’t have to do them all.

That’s right – we can choose to not do things. The world wont end!

We can decide to have a to-not-do list and collect up tasks that are getting in the way on our to-do list. What we do with these not-do tasks is up to us. We can drop them, change them, or delegate them. If they are genuinely helpful to our business we can find someone to sort them out for us.

When I talk to people about delegating tasks they often tell me that they can’t afford to hire more staff and so they stay stuck. My response is to suggest they hire a bit of a person for the specific task in hand, so that they get the benefit of someone’s expertise for just that task. Hire a social media person to run twitter, hire a book-keeper to keep books, hire a call centre to manage your incoming calls. We don’t have to have one person to cover all these tasks – a person who may not be able to perform such a wide variety of things with any skill.

We can spend £20 and hire someone for an hour to do that task which has been getting in our way. The task is done and we can get on with our lives. And let’s not kid ourselves – although it is ‘easy to find an hour’ we really know that we haven’t managed it so far!

What could you get done for £20? What would another £20 buy you? More tweets? Update your sales spreadsheet? Create a simple contact list?

The choice is yours. You can get a £20 PA and stop being stuck. It feels great!

Next week: Do You Sell On Price Alone?