You know the old phrase. Time and money are as equal as ever in the modern world. If not more so. The average American works 35 hours a week.
And with so many other demands pulling at your attention, from business to health to creative to social or family time, few things are more important that managing time. Even the ways people talk about time is infused with money – you spend time on a task or you save time by working more efficiently.
But what about business specifically? In an entrepreneurial context, managing time efficiently can lead to huge growth and can reduce costs significantly.
Plus, it will let everyone involved in the business, from senior management to employees to customers to investors, find more time to spend on things that actually matter and not just busywork.
Time as an Asset for Efficiency and Competitive Advantage
Every hour spent on low efficiency tasks costs money that could be spent on something that drives revenue more efficiently. If you're a founder and you spend all ten hours at in the office dealing with administration tasks for existing work, rather than thinking of or securing new growth opportunities – you're wasting your time. And a wasted hour cannot be earned back, while a dollar can.
This translates to customers too. In a busy world, no-one wants to waste their time. That goes for a blue collar worker to a startup founder to creatives. Any delays in the customer or client-facing end of the business can cause reputational damage that may be hard to come back from if you don't have a world-class or unique product or service.
Delays in launching products or services or delivering them to customers once available, wastes customers time and does not foster trust. All of this means the most successful businesses focus on spending time where it generates maximum returns.
Fast Payments are Essential for Customers and Users
One feature that illustrates this arguably more than any in today's online world, is the importance of fast payments to customers in businesses that use them often.
A great example is online casinos. These platforms can thrive or fall in reputation based on the time it takes for winning customers to get paid. If you've gambled online, you'll know you want a system set up to get your winnings quickly. This is often a non-negotiable for customers in competitive online casino markets like Canada's. Comparative platforms like Casino.org now dedicated payment guides, where players can assess which casinos have the fastest systems.
As well as gambling, other online platforms with two-way payments as a core of their model also require fast transactions. Because customers demand them. Such as:
- Freelance work platforms
- Trading or financial investment
- B2B payments supplying ecommerce owners
Studies have proven time and time again that payment and payout speeds are a big factor for people when making online choices. Especially in freelance or gig economy work, where payments are often split across multiple platforms and admin work between them is often unpaid. Time is money, once again.
Even if payouts are for entertainment and not essential, such as in online casinos, fast and seamless systems increase customer satisfaction and lower churn rate.
Fast Decisions and Rapid Iteration
Another advantage of spending time wisely in a business is in decision making and adaptability. Companies that move through processes quickly are more able to make fast changes when market conditions require.
First mover advantage is a well known concept. And what is speed but time divided by distance? So if you can condense the time it takes for your business to get moving on new projects, you can react faster when the market inevitably changes.
One actionable strategy is to consider launching products when they are at a minimally viable stage. You might be surprised, as long as you're honest with customers about continued development, at how successful great products can be without being fully finished.
Video games that launch in alpha or early access and still sell millions of copies to happy customers illustrate this point nicely. Being able to then rapidly improve on that initial success is also key.
Social media and marketing firms or individuals that spend a lot of time reiterating until they find a proven effective formulae for content creation are dynamite. They can quickly produce results as they can produce content in less time with first mover advantage.
Investing Time Wisely for Long-Term Thinking
That leads into a final point on long-term thinking. Investing more time now into:
- frameworks
- models
- systems
- processes
- training
can save time later on, and is often invaluable. As well as freeing up time for other tasks, strategic planning helps avoid mistakes than can cost more time in the future.
Ironically, it is possible to spend too much time trying to save time. For example, without careful cost-benefit analysis you could easily spend years teaching employees how to use a system only for a far better one to come along and make that all redundant.
Time spent on long-term planning is more conservative than short term time saving. However it is a more sustainable strategy in the long run.
In either case real time saving requires time investment, initially. Then later it will have compounding effects. Money, again.
