THE FOUR WAYS TO LEVERAGE TIME

No one can make a business all alone. You need the help, energy, efforts, creative ideas, support and time of a team of people to build a substantial business with reliable income and growth. The growth requires leverage.

The history of business is the chronicle of people finding better ways to leverage time. All business owners want residual income-money that keeps coming in even when they are not there physically working, running the business.

Entrepreneurs have always found creative ways to organize people that continue to produce sales volume and income, even when the business owner was not physically present. The history of business is the story of the pursuit of residual income, and that’s why it is also the history of leveraging time.

The beginning of free enterprise was the self-sufficient farmer bartering with his neighbor. If you had rice and your neighbor had wheat, you would trade with each other by exchanging the products.

Soon, money became more valuable, because you could use it buy things from people who didn’t want your rice. So, you sold your rice for cash instead of trading them.

You were in the rice business.

You found out very quickly that you could produce only so much of rice.

You realized the limit of your own time and effort.

Your income from your rice business peaked.

But that wasn’t so bad. You had a successful rice business, even though it was not growing. You were serving people by providing products they needed. You had created a certain amount of sales volume. You didn’t have any competition. Most of your neighbors and family thought you were doing very well.

The problem was that you were ambitious and wanted more income, but your business had no leverage. The question was how to increase the production of rice you could make in a year, since you had to stop to eat and sleep, and you were already working as many hours as it was possible to work.

You had no more time to put into the business.

You needed a better way to serve more people and create more volume.

One solution is to bring in a partner, but a partner will want to own part of the business. You don’t want to give away part of the business that you have built with your own sweat, courage and all those sleepless nights. You don’t want to give up any creative control. You don’t want to share the responsibility or the profits.

Solution: You need to leverage your time.

There are four ways to leverage time in a business.