Books Unwound

This is part of an in depth review of  The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies, by Chet Holmes.  We will focus on 1 section at at time and distill the best information to help your business now.  

Chapter One: Time Management Secrets of Billionaires: How to Maximize Your Productivity and Help Your People do the Same

Part One: Doing Away With Got-A-Minute Meetings.

You wouldn’t think that a book titled The Ultimate Sales Machine would start out with a chapter on time management.  The fact that it does sets the tone for this book.  

First of all, this is not a sales book.  It is a business book, with tips on how to make your business run like a fine tuned Ferrari.  Chet Holmes starts out with time management because its important.  If you can’t master the ideas in this first chapter, you might as well not read the rest of the book.  Until you can properly mangage your time, you will not be able to properly manage your business. 

The first dragon to slay, according to Holmes, is to move from a reactive mode of business to a proactive mode.  Many business owners don’t spend as much time as they need to planning and strategizing for the simple reason that their time is consumed by reacting to where they are already at in the business.  Time spent reacting equals time not spent building.  

To make the switch to proactive mode, you need good time management.  

The first step to good time management is to do away with what Holmes calls the “got-a-minute” meetings.  These are the meetings that pop up instantaneously throughout the day whenever a person has an issue or question or idea (or even just a thought!).  With enough employees, these meetings can start to really eat up your time.  Chet Holmes found that he was spending most of his day in reactive mode dealing with this “got-a-minute” issues, and was being forced to spend after hours time on creative and long term planning.  

All of that ended with a memo (well, almost).  Holmes established two things in order to make the jump from reactive to pro-active.  First of all, he ended “got-a-minute” meetings.  He set up two times each day when a person could hit him with one of these meetings, but they had to sign up ahead of time.  Secondly, he established weekly impact meetings.  These meetings would happen every week.  For one hour, there would be a meeting about a specific area of the business.  Everyone involved in that area would meet.  People were asked to hold their thoughts, ideas, and questions for those weekly meetings, rather than interrupt the day with “got-a-minute” meetings.  This worked well, but took determination and discipline to enforce and keep going.

They key here is to develop an outlet for communication.  Find your business’s impact areas, or those areas that directly effect the bottom line.  Pull together the team of people who are involved in this area with a weekly one hour meeting.  The purpose of this meeting is specifically to improve and perfect that one area of your business.  

The number of these meetings you have depends on your business.  You may have 1 or 5 or 17.  While it may seem like a lot to have several one-hour meetings every week, remember that they are actually replacing all of the informal reacto-meetings and helping you focus on growing the business.  Your job is to facilitate the meetings and help guide your people to amazing solutions.  

When you have the meetings, don’t try to bite off too much.  The point is to have achievable, well paced improvement throughout the year.  If you make little steps at each meeting, think of where you will end up after just one year. Holmes cautions that when you make assignments from the meeting, try not to make them too big.  They should be achievable by the next meeting.  In other words, do the work in one week bites.  Holmes also recommends that you assign some action out of every meeting.  Remember here, you are just the facilitator.  The action should be taken by the people who attend the meeting.  

What will this change mean for your company?  Well, your people won’t have to chase you down or cajole you for a decision.  Your people will feel more engaged and satisfied, because they have weekly input into their area of expertise. More, much more, will be accomplished.

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Next: Chapter One, Part Two – Six Step to Great Time Management

Buy or Not: This book is a buy.  It can be used as a manual for reshaping your business which you will refer to time and again.  Buy this book at Amazon.

Bradford Shimp helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build successful businesses.  Read his blog atwww.allbizanswers.com.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.