Is better grow a business with fewer people?
We are living in a world of hypercompetition. Before, having studies made the difference, then it was having a university degree and having a degree. Today, having master’s degrees and doctorates in addition to a bachelor’s degree is no longer enough.
When the competition is low, the “nobiliary titles” distinguish you. But when the competition is high it is not about how much education you have, but about what you are able to do with what you have learned in those programs.
Contrary to what many think, to grow in an organization you don’t need more people, but the same collaborators who generate more results. The only way to do that is by increasing your productivity.
In this business world there is no more room for people who go to work to warm up the chair. If you don’t focus on being highly productive in your business or job, in a short time you will be replaced by someone who is.
The 3 strategies to grow your business with fewer people
In order to support you in being more productive, I developed these three strategies to increase your productivity and grow business with fewer people. If you make these strategies part of your daily life, in a short time you will notice the difference in your results.
Strategy 1: Activity Management
We all have 24 hours a day. What makes the difference between productive people and those who are not is what they do in those 24 hours.
Although you have surely heard of the term “Time Management”, the reality is that we cannot manage time, because it is always the same. The only thing we can manage are the activities we do at that time.
Therefore, the recommendations for the implementation of this strategy are:
1. Get to work early (between 30 and 60 mins): that is, if you enter at 8:00 am, try to arrive at 7:00 am. This will allow you time to plan your day without distractions.
2. Write everything down in an agenda: can be physical or digital. An agenda allows you to have a backup and a place to consult the details of your appointments or meetings. At this point you should always follow the rule “if it’s not on my agenda, it doesn’t exist.”
3. Prioritize your activities: People tend to do the easiest and most enjoyable activities first, instead of the most important and contributing activities. Think of Pareto’s 80/20 Law which says that 20% of the things generate 80% of the results. If we transfer that to your daily activities, what activities would belong to the 20%?
4. Delegate what does not add value: to be highly productive it is important that you focus on activities that add a lot of value. You can delegate the rest to someone on your work team, to a outsourcing or you can explore a way for technology to take care of them.
5. Block times for related activities: Concentration is the secret when carrying out an activity. When you abruptly jump from one activity to another, your brain requires a readjustment time and if those activities are not related, the readjustment time is greater. For example, if you need to make several calls during the day, you can block a time in your agenda to make only calls.
6. Simplify activities as much as possible: One of the reasons why people procrastinate and avoid doing an activity is because of its high level of complexity. When you have such an activity, break it down into smaller activities until the activity is easy to understand and implement.
Strategy 2: Energy Management
One of the things that people overlook when running an activity is the issue of energy. We all have 100% energy in the day and decide what to spend it on. Sometimes we do it intelligently and sometimes we don’t, it just gets out of hand.
When we don’t manage energy correctly we become sluggish and end up exhausted at the end of the day.
The expert shares some recommendations for the implementation of this strategy:
1. Power generation: There are two ways you generate energy for your day; the first is through what you eat and the second through the exercise you do. If you eat poor quality food your energy will be of poor quality. If you don’t exercise, your body will be lethargic. Visit a nutritionist and ask for a meal plan and recommendations to be active. An eating plan is not a diet to starve yourself, it is a way of learning to eat well.
2. Power cycle: when do you have your highest energy level? in the morning, in the afternoon or at night? We all have a moment in the day when we can focus better, where we get things done faster, where we are most inspired to move forward. Highly productive people perform the most complex activities at times when they have the most energy. Unproductive people waste time when they have more energy and try to do the complex thing when that moment has passed. So be aware of the time of day when you have the most energy and assign the most important and contributing activities to those times.
3. Energy recovery: the goal is not just to become highly productive, but to stay highly productive. The human mind is like a machine, if you put it to work and don’t give it time to rest, sooner or later it burns out. Highly productive people who don’t give themselves a space to rest end up burned out. Therefore, block in your schedule a time to rest for the day, the week and the quarter. Although at first it seems like a waste of time, in the end you will realize that you will become even more productive.
Strategy 3: Accelerated Implementation
Now that you know what activities you need to do and how to maintain a high energy level to do them, what follows is a methodology that allows you to implement despite yourself.
After many years of teaching entrepreneurs, business owners, independent professionals and entrepreneurs how to manage their money and their businesses, Alejandro Saracho realized that one of his biggest challenges was implementing what they had learned.
By developing an Accelerated Implementation program with a simple, step-by-step methodology, with the aim of attacking the main problems that a person has when implementing, it is possible to be more productive.
Some of the main problems and recommendations are:
1. Not having goals: One of the reasons people don’t generate results is because they don’t have clear goals. And if you don’t know where you’re going, any destination is a destination and when you arrive you won’t like it. The recommendation is that you put numbers on your goals and, if possible, associate them with sales and/or personal gains. The latter will make them more inspiring to work towards and make them come true.
2. Lack of measurement : a goal must always be associated with a measurement. Otherwise you don’t have a goal, you just have good intentions. A numerical measurement of the progress will allow you to know if everything is going in order or if you need to make a greater effort to achieve the goal.
3. Lack of internal detonators: our brain is not designed to finish what we start. Therefore, it is necessary to use certain psychological triggers to finish what we started. One of them, for example, is that of public humiliation. If a woman tells her boss and her work team that if she doesn’t reach the goal, she’s going to shave it off. What is going to happen is that she is going to have breakfast, lunch and dinner at the goal, not for the goal itself, but to avoid shaving her hair and suffering from public humiliation. Triggers are psychological strategies that push you to do what you have to do.
4. Lack of follow-up: One of the biggest challenges in business is not to generate ideas to solve problems or take advantage of opportunities, it is to follow up on things and do what was said to be done. If you want to be a highly productive person, you have to be very good at following up. For this you can rely on technology, on the agenda or on routines that allow you to make sure that you are moving towards what you want to achieve.