If you're a business owner, you're painfully aware of the fact that time is money. For us entrepreneurs who have no choice but to trade hours for dollars, time management may be the most important skill we'll ever learn. This applies not only to sole proprietors or micro-business but to large companies -- in fact, the bigger and faster a business grows, the more money can be lost from tiny individual inefficiencies that add up to a massive waste of time. We must always ask ourselves which tasks earn us money and which activities tie up our time and inhibit our money-making ability. Then we need to offload those time-wasting tasks so we can free up more time for the money-making tasks. Makes sense, right?
Writing professional-quality marketing content is one of those necessary tasks that can propel a business to the next level of fame and profitability, but the time investment is brutal, especially for a non-writer. One of the reason so many people -- including some writers! -- fear writing is the fact that it demands so much time, patience, and mental energy. I've been doing it professionally for decades now, and I can tell you from experience that it's draining, so much so that I have to limit my daily output just to prevent serious burnout. So if it can tire an experienced pro, how exhausting must it be for someone who does something totally different for a living?
Your business needs you. Yes, it needs marketing content too, but doesn't it make a lot more sense to delegate that task to a professional and devote yourself to the daily tasks you must perform to keep the money rolling in?
"But I can't afford to hire a writer." Well, that depends on what your own billable time is worth to your company's bottom line. How many hours of your time will your company lose while you sweat over a blank screen or page? I once remarked at a networking meeting that a professional writer can accomplish more in a few hours than a non-writer, burdened with a host of other responsibilities, could manage in a week. I heard several business owners muttering to each other, "More like two weeks," "You mean three weeks," "For me, three months," et cetera.
That's where time leveraging comes in. You hand the job over to a professional who charges a reasonable rate but does the job in so much less time that you still come out way ahead. Plus, you can be reasonably certain the the final product will actually be good enough to help your business make more money. That's what marketing is supposed to do, after all. How annoyed would you feel to have spent all that time (which, as we've established, is money) and frustration writing content that doesn't even work for you?
Most of us already practice this kind of strategic delegation in some way or other. I could probably do my own taxes, for instance, but it would take me forever and I'd probably miss a lot of valuable deductions or make expensive mistakes because I'm not up on the tax laws. By paying a fair sum to a good professional CPA, I can rest assured that I'll get a more effective result without stressing myself out and wasting huge amounts of time. In the end, I've earned far more in billable time than I've spent on the accounting fee. And if it makes sense for accounting, it makes sense for any other aspect of your business that can be farmed out effectively to a qualified pro.
I'll bet your time is worth a lot to you. Spend it wisely!
