From the course: Consulting Foundations: Client Management and Relationships

Managing your time

From the course: Consulting Foundations: Client Management and Relationships

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Managing your time

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- If you have several clients at once, it can feel like you're being pulled in a million different directions and if you own your own business, on top of managing clients, you're responsible for marketing, networking, contracting, sales and every other aspect that goes into running a small business. When Lisa and I prioritize in our business, we use the Eisenhower box because, hey, if it was good enough to run the United States, it should probably be good enough to run a small consulting firm. The matrix delegates tasks into four categories, urgent and important, not urgent and important, not important and urgent, and not important and not urgent. Let's apply this to consulting. Urgent and important. These are your clients' immediate needs and responding to RFPs, requests for proposals. You know you need to do them, because if you don't there's an immediate consequence. If you do, there's an immediate payoff. Not urgent and important. These are things you plan to do, like networking and marketing and blogging. This quadrant is what makes or breaks your consulting business, but it's so easy to kick that can down the road. Now, I confess. Lisa and I struggled here when we first started working together. We got so consumed with our project work that we totally neglected our marketing, and then when we finished all the project work, we had no pipeline. The urgent and not important are the things that are particularly tricky if you're a solo consultant, so learn to delegate. Could you spend three days learning WordPress and making those website edits yourself? Yeah, probably? Is that the best use of your time? Eh, probably not. Many consultants are afraid of outsourcing these urgent, but not crucially important things, but if you're pulling your hair out over something that would take a web developer a few minutes to fix or pouring over tax laws for hours when an accountant could explain it to you pretty easily, you're wasting time that could be spent on project work, speaking, or finding new business. Finally, as Eisenhower suggests, if something is not important and not urgent, then why the heck are you doing it? Get rid of it. What comes first? We recommend that you split your time with 40% on urgent and important things and 40% on not urgent, but important things. That remaining 20% gets spent on the not-so-important things that are still urgent enough to contribute to the functioning of your business. Whether that's slugging through it yourself or managing the outsourcing. As a consultant, time is your most precious resource and you're never gonna get more of it. Be strategic and set priorities for how you spend your time.

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