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Stop Washing Your Own Car!
Ever since I bought my first car, I have always washed my cars myself. The logic was that I could do a better job than any car wash place could - polishing the outside to a nice shine, scrubbing the interior, making sure the leather seats got some soothing lotion etc. So I went out and bought great car-washing accessories that would make most places green with envy. And I spent at least four to five hours a month washing our cars. That changed when we got the Infiniti QX56! That monster took me six hours all by itself but I persevered.
A few weeks ago I was getting ready to go wash one of our vehicles when I got a desperate-sounding call from a client who just had a server crash. "Can you come right away?", he pleaded. Since this was not a flat-fee, guaranteed SLA client, I was weighing how to accomplish washing the car and fixing a broken server on the same day. That was when my wife said in that "why are you so stubborn?" kind of tone: "You know, there is a car wash around the corner. We can drop the car off and pick it up when you get back. Just a suggestion".
Leverage the expertise of others
So I reluctantly agreed, just this once, to let someone else wash my car. I got there and gruffly asked the manager, "How long is this going to take?". "Oh, based on the premium service you want, about two hours". Aha! Two hours to wash the car, vacuum the interior, polish the exterior, steam-clean the carpets and massage the leather seats! All for less than $100. I knew it. This was not going to work.
I will confess to you, dear reader, that I was wrong, but I got a good a lesson in economics. I decided to hang around for a while to see how they were going to pull it off and I learned a lot about leveraging the expertise of others to your own benefit. As a business owner, I am always looking for ways of improving and doing things better and when I am dealing with other businesses, I try to observe how they operate to see what I can learn.
Here are the lessons I learned:
Do not waste your time doing something that more qualified people can do more efficiently. When I drove up to the car wash place, there was a lane that had the kind of service I wanted - Premium wash: clean outside, scrubbed inside, treated leather seats, shampooed carpets.
As soon as they got my key, about three people descended on my car and went to work. So right there, that was more people washing my car than when I did it myself which meant that it would take less time than it took me to wash my QX56. Not only that, they had very advanced machines that got to the nook and cranny of the vehicle, especially the underside that I had never bothered with. Since they obviously did this kind of stuff all the time, they most likely had a process and/or system in place to get the job done a lot quicker without sacrificing a good outcome.
Stop losing money by pretending to save money:
By washing my cars myself, I thought I was saving money. But in reality, I was actually losing money - lots of it. On average, I charge between $150 to $300 an hour for my services, depending on the severity of the problem I am working on. So every time I went to wash my car myself, that was $900 - $1800 per car wash compared to the $100 I paid for a premium wash. For the six hours it took me to huff and puff my way through washing my car, I could have made several calls to build my customer base, followed up with clients, researched better tools available to make me work smarter, and a host of other things worth $900 - $1800. When I took my car to the car wash place and went on to fix the broken server, that was revenue that could have been lost because the client could have called someone else.
Delegate a task if you can:
I had an emergency come up (the broken server) and I had to delegate the task of washing my car to someone else (the car wash place). Now if for some reason I was not satisfied, I had an option to demand a refund or do-over. When I washed my cars myself and noticed that I forgot to clean the carpets, guess what, I just told myself "Oops, missed a spot. Oh well". More importantly though, delegating freed me up to pursue something more important, valuable and worth my time.
So, are you washing your own car?
If you are not an accountant but insist on doing your own book-keeping, you are.
If you spend days going through legal documents without a clue instead of taking them to a qualified attorney, you are washing your own car.
If you are not a marketing expert and you spend hours, days or weeks "designing" marketing materials yourself, you are washing your own car.
If you are not in real estate but decide to use "gut feeling" in purchasing your next property instead of using the services of a real estate agent, you are washing your own car.
If you, as a business owner, know next to nothing about technology but insist on building your own servers, managing your users and administering your own network, you are washing your own car.
If you are an executive-level personnel and find yourself spending precious time dealing with office issues that could best be left to others, you are washing, waxing and shampooing the carpet of your own car!
As always, there are times when we think we have no option than to do it ourselves, but notice I said "think". Take another look at your processes and see if there are things you are doing that could best be pushed off to someone else. Sure you can get it done, but the bigger question is, should you? Is that what you are paid to do or required of you? What is the value of the task you are performing compared to the value of your time? Should a $500/hr attorney be filing papers or scanning documents? You tell me. When a business owner boasts " I have seven servers and 20 desktops hosted at my house and I got them all going", my response is, really? What happens to the customers those machines are supposed to be serving? Who has them going?
Many of us like to be hands-on, but in the process you may be hurting your business more than you know.
My wife did not say "If only you had listened to me a long time ago" out loud, but I could read it from the look on her face and then it hit me. It was payback. I remember getting home from work a few years ago and seeing her struggling with the ladder and gallons of paint everywhere. "What are you doing sweetie?", I asked. Her reply was "I do not like the color of this room and I want to paint it to a different color" to which I absently responded, "Why don't you just get a painter to come do it and save yourself the trouble"
To your continued success. |
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