In the past 3 years I have sat down with over 1000 business owners and property investors (actually 1012 as at yesterday – I keep lists of everything!) and discussed their business, their goals and their struggles.

Most of the time we can help, sometimes we can’t.

One of the things I see is how some entrepreneurs are so busy, but busy at the wrong things. I recognise it because I was the same, still am sometimes …

Rather than get on the phone to a potential customer I would clear my emails (“inbox zero” what a load of business guru rubbish! More on that later) or tweak my social media strategy or design a new flyer. In fact anything but actually do what it takes to grow the business.

I’d get home exhausted but with none of the important things on my to do list actually done.

I think we can kid ourselves that because we are busy we are doing everything we can to help our business, if we hustle and bustle then when the business fails we convince ourselves that we did everything possible but its not true. I know it and I suspect all but the most skilled self deniers know it too.

As passionate adopters of cloud based technology – not because its cool but because it delivers real value – the other thing I used to be surprised to see (not anymore – its so frequent) is the crestfallen look.

The crestfallen look on an owner operators face, or their supporting spouse, when I tell them they don’t need to be up till midnight to be doing their GST returns.
They don’t need to enter their supplier invoices and business transactions into some creaky desktop piece of software. The machines do it automatically. No human required.

Suppliers email your invoices to ReceiptBank or you take a shot of them with your phone. RB stores them, codes them, works out the GST and due dates and puts it all in Xero. Xero gets your bank and credit card transactions daily and it all gets matched. No drama and not a single piece of data entry.

“But…but … what will I do with all that spare time now?”
Well duh – how about work on your business?

You’ve got to work smart, do the things that matter and let the rest sort itself out.

What matters? That for you to figure out — tip it isn’t the most perfect website, or handwritten cashbook. Its isnt witty perfectly timed tweets or the 1000’s of Facebook likes you gather.

Now, if you can work smart and hard you will join the ranks of the unstoppable.