Organization is generally broken down into three sections: sales & marketing, operations and finance. A lot of business owners spend like 90% of their time in operations, maybe 5% in finance and the rest of it in sales & marketing. Depending on the organization and where it is in its life cycle, maybe more time in the beginning is spent on sales & marketing because there are no customers. Once things start rolling, you may tend to spend a lot more time in operations and that means sales are going to drop off because nobody’s paying attention to bringing in the new deals.
If you look at how Pareto’s principle works, you can break down most things into 80% and 20%. For instance, 80% of your marketing is bringing in 20% of your clients. Or, 20% of your team is producing 80% of the revenue. Lastly, 80% of your team is taking up 20% of your time. This principle can be applied all over life, and especially business.
As a CEO, you’re going to spend time bringing in customers, running the company and managing money. It may not be an equivalent time in each area, but those are the three main things you will be spending your time on.
When you look at how much time you spend on sales & marketing compared to your time on an analysis and your budgeting, it varies on what stage of business you are currently at. In the beginning, it’s going to be heavily weighted on sales, but if you ask most business owners who have been in business for a few years or more, they are going to be spending time on tasks such as accounting, legal, and HR rather than the actual work of the company ie landscaping, or manufacturing a product.
Most people are investing at least 80% of their time doing the work. This may be how your organization is working as well. It will be cyclical during tax season, which means you may kick up your focus on finance for a little bit. In general, you can expect that this is going to ring true for most people. Of course, most things stated are not going to be applicable to 100% of situations. If something that is mentioned doesn’t ring true for you, all that means is that you’re in the minority and maybe that is good for you, maybe it’s not, depending on what the topic is.