Originally posted 10/14/22

Are you familiar with the term, Return on Investment? Or ROI? If you do any financial investment, you are most certainly familiar with that term. How about the Return on Investment of your time? Have you considered that as a business owner and entrepreneur? Are you getting the biggest “Bang for Your Buck” when it comes to the tasks that you spend your time on? Well, that's exactly what I want to discuss with you today. Evaluating your ROI in your business.

Over the last few blog posts, you might have read about the prevention and recovery of professional burnout. If not, you can check those blog posts and the accompanying Youtube videos here. One of the ideas presented in the “Prevention” and “Recovery of Professional Burnout” was evaluating your task list. Reviewing and adjusting those tasks that were not earning your desired return on investment. So, how do you go about doing that? If this is your first business or you have never learned the process behind evaluating one's ROI in business, I am glad to help today.

To help you through this process, I will give you a few steps to take. These steps are universal for anyone who is evaluating their ROI. It could be for your business or your education, or your job. It can be applied to so many different areas of your life. So, if you are ready, let's get into it.

Step 1. Organize Your Tasks By The Amount of Time to Complete.

This is an important step to do often. It will not only help you evaluate your ROI, but it will also help you manage your day. If you know it takes 1 hour to make the phone calls you need to make that day, then scheduling your time appropriately will be a great help.

Step 2. Look at The Money.

After evaluating your tasks and the time to complete them, it's time to look at the revenue you gain from them. This step might take a bit of time. You may need to visit different sources to see your revenue for that task. For example, if you are evaluating whether running ads on Google is profitable, you need to take the amount you paid for ads and look at the income you made from those ads. Did you make enough money to pay back the cost of the ads and add revenue to your pocket? Take this step for each task you listed in step one.

Step 3. Cut Them Loose Or Adjust Your Effort.

Now that you have a clear picture of what tasks have the best return on your time invested, it's time to make some choices about the tasks that don’t have the best ROI. You have just two choices to make. First, is this task not meeting your required ROI still worth it for your business? Do you just need to change how you spend your time on that task? Then, make that decision and implement it.

Second, is it clear that you have been spinning your wheels on this task, and after looking at it, you realize what a drain to your time and the income it is? Well, it's time to cut that task loose. Some of my tasks are getting cut loose, like Facebook ads. This cost and time drain has not provided an ample return on my investment over the last two years, so it's out! I am not closing my business Facebook account, but I am no longer spending extra energy or money promoting through that social media profile.

There is a third option in this step, and that is to just take a pause. That's exactly what I am doing with my Youtube Channel. I am taking a break for the rest of this quarter and the entirety of next quarter. Youtube isn’t bringing me any financial return on my investment. I recognize that I can adjust my videos, and there are Youtube algorithms I could learn about and adjust accordingly. However, part of this evaluation is to consider my entire situation. Right now, I need to focus on building my business back up. That means I must hit the streets and focus on my one-on-one marketing. Creating and editing Youtube videos takes much of my time; right now, my time is better spent building back my contacts and income.

If you have gone through these steps and done the work to evaluate what's working and what's not regarding your Return On Investment, you may have also found something else. You may have found that there may be a certain task, like bookkeeping, taking a ton of your time, but your time is more valuable spent elsewhere. You can't just cut bookkeeping, can you? When you encounter a task that can’t be deleted but that you see no value in spending your time on consider outsourcing that task. By outsourcing, you aren’t cutting costs, but you are balancing your ROI by choosing to spend your time on what brings income and value to your business and outsourcing those tasks that can be done by someone else.

If you are a brand new business owner, a one-man or woman show, please don’t outsource your tasks if you can’t afford to. During my crazy busy and profitable first year as a notary, I was looking at office space and looking into hiring an assistant. Well, thank GOODNESS I didn’t do that. My second year was filled with more struggle and uncertainty than the previous one. So my advice is to evaluate your time and return on investment but be careful of paying someone else to do those tasks.

I sincerely hope you found this week's blog post informative and helpful. I want you and your business to grow and succeed, as well as mine.

Thank you for reading today, and I hope to hear from you. If you have any questions or comments, you can contact me anytime.

Till Next Time-

Jennifer K. Cooper jcooper@jkcmobilenotary.com