Professional Coaches, Are You Spending Your Time — Or Investing It?

As an independent coaching professional, you (better than anyone) know the profound wisdom contained in that old chestnut, “Time is money.”

Like most clichés, it has been around forever, and because of that, it’s easy to take it at face value, blindly accepting it as being the absolute, gospel truth.

But there’s another side to this coin.

I recall a wonderful blog post a while back from Internet product developer, Marc Quarles.

Marc believes that time is more valuable than money.

Here’s the essence of his position.

The phrase (”time is money”) implies that time is equal to money — and nothing could be further from the truth.

You have a finite amount of time. If you waste an hour, that’s an hour you can never get back. However, if you “waste” $100, you can easily earn another $100 to replace it.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Yet, many of us (including yours truly) struggle with this daily.

We create numerous excuses as to why we should be doing all the stuff that fills up our day, instead of hiring or outsourcing it to others.

We offer such rationalizations as …

- “It takes too much time to train someone else.”
- “It cost too much to hire someone else.”
- “No one does this better than I do.”
- “This is too important for anyone else to do.”
- “It’s so easy, I’ll just do it myself.”
- “I’ll handle this because I enjoy doing it.”

While each of these rationals may or may not be accurate, they overlook the most critical point, and that’s the answer to this question …

“At this moment, what’s the most important thing I can be doing for my business?”

Most of us would be better served following the advice of Michael E. Gerber, best selling author of The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It. His counsel to small business owners is: “Spend your time working on your business, not in your business.” *

Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, never worked a day at the grill or even managed one of his restaurants. It was never a consideration. His total focus was on building his business.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why McDonald’s became the biggest restaurant chain in the world.

So, when you think about your coaching practice, are you spending your time — or are you investing it?

What Do You Think?

E. Alvin Davis
“The Coach’s Online Marketing Coach” ™

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