Common Time Leaks in Growing Businesses (How to Fix Them)

Time leaks are straight to untracked, unbilled or waste billable time. These leaks involve unplanned meetings, switching from deep work, no clear roles, poor knowledge transfer, tool overload and poor prioritization. Therefore, your growing business will face losses and stop progress further.

In this blog, you’ll learn on how to identify the reason for time blocking, and identify your core jobs. Thereupon, you can  assign repetitive tasks to support assistants, and get more time to concentrate on major activities that enhance business.

What is a Time Leak in Business?

Time leak in business means your staff provide billing times to clients but are not charged for the service. Every employee hired in your business with hourly or monthly payment.

Think about how unpaid services trap your business. When your staff give service to your client without payment, it costs individual loss. But collective free service results in great loss – over your entire team members.

See the simple example, on how time leaks financial impact in your business.

• Imagine you have a support team with 20 members. One staff member provides 30 minutes of free services daily to your customers beyond his regular job.
• Means 20 members provide, 20X30 = 600 minutes daily, and monthly 600X20 = 12000 minutes (or 200 hours).
• Which is equal to a $35 USD multiply with 200 hours, results $7000 USD monthly.

Besides, financial impacts, time leak outflows company resources, operations and strategies.

The 7 Most Common Time Leaks in Growing Businesses

A growing business survives in the market by capitalizing on three key aspects. These are operations, strategies and financial aspects. Most of the growing businesses’ don’t care about key time leaks issues.

The Major time traps issues are aimless meeting, change context, unspecific roles, missing system. Here see the 7 most common leaks may happen in your business:

1. Unstructured Meetings

Effective meetings build relations between teams, and improve communications. An ineffective meeting starts with no clear agenda or objectives. So, this meeting will end with no decision-making or a unclear actionable plan. Here is how unstructured meeting costs your business with driving gradually into loss on a massive scale.

Incomplete Projects

• A group of people attend a meeting with no agenda or meeting direction.
• The project manager can’t explain the purpose or expected outcome of the meeting.
• The meeting finished with no clear decision-making, and next action plan.
• Consequence no advance plan to execute tasks resulting in delayed project.
• Incomplete project receives no bills due to exceeding submission deadline.

Waste of Time and Money

• Individuals spend an average of 6 hours on weekdays at meetings with no results.
• Business losses one-third of salary costs due ineffective meetings.
• Ineffective meetings cost over $35 billion every year, says Gallup researchers.

Lost Productivity

Business counts overtime due to meeting wastes working hours

• Ineffective meeting can’t solve ongoing problems
• Meeting overload is draining the company’s focus and delaying key projects.

An ineffective meeting charges hidden costs that wastes your time, money and drains team members’ morale.

2. Context Switching and Multitasking

A sudden quick email or slack message comes while you’re managing a big project’s report. Thus, you stop what you are doing, answering the message – then you try to go back to your work. This is context switching, working as a “productivity tax” you pay every time you shift your brain from one task to another.

Why Multitasking is a Trap for Your Brain

Your brain is not a computer; therefore, it cannot run multiple programs at a time. When you switch into other tasks, your brain can’t “load” the new information. This creates a mental delay.

• Research shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back into deep focus after a single interruption shows University of California research.
• Context switching between tasks can cost you up to 40% of your productive time, says Gerald Weinberg.
• Your brain gets tired when it jumps around. You start making “silly” mistakes in email, invoices, or data.

3. Manual and Repetitive Administrative Tasks

Growing business is exciting but time leaks grows faster than your sales. These are small and repetitive tasks you do like, data entry, scheduling or chasing invoices. These major time leaks stop you from doing work that you could plan for making money.

The High Price of Low-value Tasks

• You spend all day typing into spreadsheets or cleaning up your inbox. At the end of the day, you are tired, but you haven’t closed any new deals.
• You spend every hour on manual administrative tasks, which means killing your strategic times. This drains your growth because you physically run out of hours in the day.
• While you are fixing a broken link on your site or formatting a report. By this time, your competitor is out there talking to your next big client.

In this case assign an assistant who can act as your gatekeeper. It’s a prudent decision to outsource a remote virtual assistant service, then you can stay focused on your growing business.

4. Unclear Roles and Decision-making Bottlenecks

In a new business, the owner is usually involved with every process. If everything goes under your supervision, it’s a bottleneck for your business operation. You must function roles and decision-making positions to stop massive time leaks in your strategy setting.

How “waiting on you” tasks kill your core activities.

A Bootlenect is like a narrow pipe. No matter how much water you enter on it, only a small portion comes out at a time. Your business never grows without your massive involvement in decision-making.

• Fixing no lead person in every segmented works at ongoing project, slows project’s working process.
• While setting goals with executive members, team members wait for your answers in tiny issues. This exhausts you and halts business operations.

5. Inefficient Onboarding and Knowledge Transfer

Suppose you hired some newbies and asked them to drive your company’s car. They must have crashed it due to no knowledge of driving a car. Similarly, asking newcomers to perform strategic work is a huge time leak, when they don’t know how things actually work.

How a Weak Start Drains Time

• You or other executive members of the business spend hours everyday answering the basic question. This takes them away from their main activities.
• Hiring new people takes time to fit your operation. Until then, you are paying a full salary for new talents’ small output.
• When the team leader or supervisor resigns, the next person starts with zero. This happens when you have no backup plan.

You must have written a guide for every job. Use video tutorials, documentation guides. This will educate new hirings very fast.

6. Tool Overload and Disconnected Systems

Your team operates multiple tools or software, one app for chat, another for tasks, and a third for storing files. This is called tool overload. Again, when your system does not “talk” to each other, it means your team members are disconnected from the system.

Why Too Many Tools Cost You Money

• Always copies a name from CRM (client list) into the invoicing tool, wasting time. It needs a typo, and you have a new mistake to fix later.
• Your office staff trying to remember where a file is. Does it in slack, or o dropbox, or in an email? This search effort is a leak.
• Operating three types of tools that can synchronize with one system. This is also a clear money leak.

7. Reactive Work Patterns and Poor Prioritization

You rush from one urgent task to the next. You never get to the big, important work. This is called a reactive work pattern.

Again, you’re working in the business, not on the business. This is the biggest time leak that stops your business growth.

The Leak of Always Being “Busy”

• You spend the day performing a task but need to be attentive urgent works. (For example, answering an email is always important, instead of finishing a client report.)
• Spending more time on small tasks, while you need to plan for new products, market and growth. This leaks your business due to poor prioritization.

Instead of much, it’s important to plan for building a new market, and prioritize work that values best.

Conclusion

Every business has time leaks, it’s important to detect them to fix those leakages. Address those common time leaks in your growing business like aimless meetings, switch to other jobs, manual tasks, insufficient onboarding, etc. It’s necessary to stop profit drains and set your business for long-term success.

As a business leader, you can play a vital role to detect and take necessary steps that will stop leaks and ensure growth. Be stick to core jobs that have greater value, and handover the rest of the repetitive jobs to your support assistant.