Don't Spend 90% of Your Time on 10% of Your Business

I'm not sure where I first heard the phrase, who said it, or how popular it is, but it's very applicable to me and my business and probably is to you and yours. "Don't spend 90% of your time on 10% of your business." What exactly does that mean? It means don't focus all of your efforts on one part of your business, thus neglecting the rest of it.

I think that this problem infects every business owner in one way or another. In my case, I tend to spend far too much time improving the functionality of SportsLizard.com, and way too little time marketing it. I am making it my New Year's Revolution for 2006 to start spending more time marketing my business.

Part of my problem comes from me having an engineering degree and not a marketing degree. The other part comes from the fact that for the first two years of the business I NEEDED to spend most of my time programming so that I had a competitive service to offer my customers. Without that, I was doomed for failure.

However, now that the business is somewhat established, I need to fight the urge to continue to implement innovative features all the time and focus on getting more awareness for SportsLizard.com. That's not to say that I won't be implementing lots of cool new things, just that I am not going to spend all of my time doing it. I will have better balance in 2006 running my business.

Like I said, I think each and every business owner faces similar circumstances. No person is perfectly balanced, we all have strengths and weaknesses, and sometimes we tend to lean towards our strengths and forget about our weak areas. This might be OK if you have an office job, but it's not if you are an entrepreneur. As entrepreneurs we need to strike a balance between using our strengths to grow our business and working on our weaknesses so that we stay in business.