Make More Money Without Doing Any Extra Work

29 Jan Make More Money Without Doing Any Extra Work

Making more cash by doing every thing you are doing now and almost nothing more.  Sounds far fetched doesn’t it?  Well it isn’t really.  If you are in an business that is driven by billable hours this could be entirely true.

Time after time I encounter business owners who can’t seem to make ends meet.  They work their tails off and can’t seem to get ahead.  “My weeks are full, I’m working all the time but I’m just not generating the revenue I should be” is often the conversation had.  The truth is that they are working long weeks and months.  The problem is that they aren’t tracking their time well.  If you are in a service based business that makes money with billable hours you NEED TO TRACK YOUR TIME BETTER and so do your employees.  To get this under control and make more money you need to:

• get a time and billing program in place.  Minute 7 is a decent one with a good web and smart phone interface and for $4 per month you can’t beat it.  It syncs with Quickbooks both in a hosted or local environment.

• Be consistent about entering your time.  Remember this is how you get paid.  Don’t work for free track your time.  You can set up items/time codes for non-billable sales calls, office admin time, etc but track that time too.

• Analyze your time regularly.  Get to know what percentage of your time is spent taking care of problems and other things you can’t bill for verses things that make you money.

• Improve the percentage!

  • Fix problems that cause you to rack up the non-billable hours.  If your team consistently drops the ball on one thing or another and that leaves you addressing customer service complaint after complaint find the problem and fix it.
  • Look at your overall hours did you forget to enter some of your time?  Find a routine that works for you but includes the time entry.
  • Prioritize the billable hours over non-billable whenever possible.  We all know it isn’t always the case but try when you can.
  • Set a target percentage of billable hours for your team that represents a significant improvement in revenue and reward them for obtaining it.  Give them a goal and some motivation.