I am definitely guilty of this small business trap, that is the battle between profit and fun, which can lead to busyness. Often times, those that are responsible for a business's success and growth spend time doing what is fun and interesting instead of what needs to be done to protect the revenue stream.
Years ago I started up a coffee shop with some friends. If someone followed us around and graphed how we spent our time before we opened, I guarantee you the results would make me cry. We pooled the money together and got cracking. We settled the legal structure, secured a lease, bought equipment, installed the POS (point of sale) machines, bought insurance, wrote employee schedules, and on and on. But just looking back, we spent gobs of time thinking and dealing with pieces to the puzzle that were trivial. We spent a lot of time on decorating, planning the music play lists, booking events (bands), and what not. We spent a lot of time thinking about things that weren't involved with agenda of being profitable. In fact, I can't think of much we did that was on the profitable agenda. That was a mistake of magnificent proportions. We were more concerned with running a cool coffee shop than running a money making machine. We just bought stuff, set up stuff, planned stuff, prettied up stuff, and the like. We should have sat down with excel and planned out to the penny where money was going and where it was going to come from. That was a huge mistake.
When you choose the fun and interesting agenda over the revenue agenda, you become busy. And for the record, busy is not a good thing. In business, busy should be defined as spending too much time doing things that are not important, and not enough time doing what is important.
So why do we business owners drift towards fun and interesting and away from profit from time to time? For one, fun and interesting is easy, and protecting profits is hard. Turning a revenue stream into a moat takes a lot of work. Just visualize a moat. Remember that thing was not built over night. It probably was a stream a long time ago. But someone did a lot of work to stack tens of thousands of stones several meters high to line the walls around and in inside of it. That moat is a revenue stream all grown up. I believe the business owner's job is to turn revenue streams into moats.
So with every agenda, you have to ask yourself: is this truly valuable? Will the time invested have a positive return? A perfect example is one of my favorite charities in Houston put on an $11,000 fishing tournament, but only raised $7,000. They flushed $4,000 because they chose fun and interesting over revenue.
For you business owners out there, focus on revenue. Without revenue, you don't have a business, you have an expensive hobby.
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