The One Appointment That Moves Your Business Forward
If you never schedule time to work on your business, it never happens.
As business owners, we get overwhelmed with the daily demands of working in the business. We have clients to see, sales taxes to remit, social media to maintain, holes in the drywall to patch up.
Running a business is a never-ending slew of responsibilities, immediate demands, and fires to put out.
We don’t avoid working on the business because we don’t care. We don’t work on business improvement because we don’t schedule time for it.
In my personal opinion, there is nothing more important to building a healthy, sustainable, joyful business than scheduling time to work on the systems that make your business better. Systemization, structure, and process improvement are always postponed until some magical “later”, which ultimately becomes “never”.
This can be solved with one simple calendar entry.
The Recurring Self-Appointment
To foster true business improvement, treat your business development time like an appointment with a client. In this case, the client is you. Whatever your normal appointment length for a client is, be it 45 minutes, an hour, 90 minutes — book that time with yourself, for your business.
At least once per week. Daily if you can. Make it recurring.
This is just as important as a paying client appointment, because this appointment will yield significant long-term revenue results, not to mention peace of mind. So schedule it, don’t cancel it unless you would cancel a client appointment for a similar reason.
During this time each week, you’re not catching up on administrative tasks. You’re not doing your bookkeeping. You’re not posting on social media.
Rather, you’re working on systems, workflows, processes. You’re creating a workflow checklist for managing your social media marketing, and choosing social media management software, or hiring a social media manager or outside marketing agency to handle it for you. This is time dedicated to automating, delegating, streamlining, or even eliminating work.
Think of this time like routine hull maintenance. Every boat gets barnacles, anemones, and an assortment of other critters growing on it over time. These create drag in the water, which slows you down and wastes fuel. We’re hauling the boat out of the water for a thorough hull cleaning so that we can operate more efficiently when we put the boat back in the water.
This isn’t about doing more. It’s about creating leverage. One protected time slot for working on systems creates intentional direction.
If this feels supportive, you’re invited to join other small business owners in the Bizorca Pod to build sustainable systems together, at a pace that respects your energy.