Understanding How Your Business Should Spend Its Resources

We get so busy running our businesses that we often get confused about what problems are important and which problems are not important. For many people they fail to put the proper components of their business in to perspective and don't know how much time they should be allocating to each major section. In other words, they don't have a clear concept of their business and how it is formed.

You are so busy throughout the day dealing with each task that you feel as though you are unable to grow your business. It is almost as though your wheels are spinning in the mud but you aren't going anywhere. Your engine is working hard but your business isn't doing anything but shaking. With frustration you sit back in your desk chair and think about how to get unstuck.

There is a good possibility that you are not spending your time in the most important functions of your business. Instead you are looking at the trees but missing the forest. In other words you are concentrating on the details of your business and not looking at the overall strategy. A great proportion of your day is spent in unimportant work.

In any business you typically have marketing, operations and maintenance. Each of these major sections should be placed in their proper perspective. To focus on one more than the other can cause you lots of headaches and grief. For example if you are spending most of your time in maintenance functions such as dealing with employee problems, cleaning up your business, filing paperwork, etc. then you are not able to spend your time on the money making sections.

Sales are a very important function next to the operations. However, if you don't have sales then you don't have business and you have no need for operations. In many cases you will have to spend a lot of your time during the growth stages of your business in sales. As time goes on you can rely on your existing customers more.

Operations are also a very important to business. This sector of your business is the one that produces you money. Operations are geared around the actual act of producing or completing your businesses service. For example, a boat repair shop is engage in their money making operations when they are working on a boat. The goal is to spend as much time as possible in this pursuit.

The time spent on the functions of operations, marketing and support/maintenance vary by the stage of growth your company is in. If your business is new it will have to spend a lot of time in sales and maintenance (i.e. buying equipment or hiring new employees) and less time in operations. This may be due to the fact you have little work available to you. However as time goes on maintenance should continue to make up less of your energy expenditures while operations should take up more.