Time is finite. This fact hits the small business owner hardest of all.

If you want your business to succeed and grow, your #1 responsibility is resource management. 

Two more facts:

• Time is more finite than money.
• Your time is the most valuable resource that your business has.

As a business owner these are truths that, when properly leveraged, can change your life.

All worthy business leaders campaign for time management, delegation, and focus. To sum it up: Unless the thing that you are doing, can only be done by you, someone else should probably be doing it.

This applies if you want your business to grow. If you’re cool with where you’re at and want to keep coasting, then I’m not sure that this applies.

As a business owner, I’m constantly evaluating: What are the top five most important and impactful functions I can be fulfilling right now? Big, established corporations are able to plan their resource allocation 1-3 years at a time. Smaller businesses have shorter time horizons before they need to evaluate what they’ve accomplished and identify the next most important thing to do.

Obviously, COVID-19 disrupted any sort of 90-day plan.

Due to COVID-19, the era of DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION is here five years earlier than the marketing industry expected. Every business leader and business owner is being forced to speed up the building of their online business and strengthening of their digital intelligence.

When our client revenue was slashed by 80% in March, everything shifted for us. Here are what my top priorities have been this month:

• Communicating with our beloved Strong Brand Social community. Our goal is to understand the most impactful things that we can continue to provide to them as part of their digital transformation support system.
• Honing our methodologies and creating the assets needed to teach these things to our students (with a focus on content and social media marketing).
• Q3 and Q4 strategy for KW Content (Where are we going? How are we getting there?)
• Resource allocation according to the above bullet (team management, ensure our talent resources are properly allocated, etc).
• Finance (planning, budgeting, PPP etc.).

You’re supposed to delegate things you don’t enjoy. But as the business owner, it’s your responsibility to have an understanding of all of it.

For example, my masters level accounting and finance courses almost killed me because my brain backfires inside of spreadsheets. I’m not the one bookkeeping and building the dynamic P&L. But I am the one persuading my husband to spend a full weekend building me a predictive cash flow model when COVID-19 hits. I immediately know the importance of overhauling the way we resource plan during a global pandemic. I know because I’ve invested the time in understanding the fundamentals of that part of our business. And I need this understanding because I need to be capable of leading us through this unprecedented time.

What’s my point?

I want to help you understand what you should be focused on right now to lead your business through its digital transformation: How to prioritize, and what you should keep in the back of your mind as the most important items to delegate over time.

Between now and July you should:

• Equip yourself with the knowledge to lead the digital transformation of your business. Even if you end up hiring internal or external help or “experts”. It’s  your responsibility to understand the field well enough to know the difference between someone who knows what they’re talking about and someone that’s full of it. The field of digital is no longer separated from the general field of business in any way.
• Create your content and social media strategy. There is NO ONE better suited to set the direction than the person who is MOST familiar with your customer, product, and brand. Done right, this strategy will last you until 2030 at least, across a multitude of platforms and changes in this space. Without this you can never successfully delegate and transition your focus back to other areas of your business.
• Plan your strategic communications calendar at a high level to guide you through the end of the year so that your Q3 and Q4 can be as strong as possible because you are generating new demand and increased customer lifetime values.
• Forge profitable partnerships with collaborative businesses and content creators.
• Learn how to measure success over time, evaluate, and optimize.

Here are the things you should plan to delegate in the next 6-12 months so that you are able to allocate your time and focus to the revenue-driving side of digital communication:

• Producing every last visual and every last caption.
• Scheduling content.
• Publishing.
• Community managing.
• Messing around with Facebook business manager.

Once you get yourself organized, you will be able to oversee a successful digital marketing program that’s a boon for business and a threat to your competitors.

Are you confident that you can use content and social media to grow your business? But you know that you need a solid, customized, strategic plan? If you’re invested in coming out of 2020 stronger than how you came in. And if you’re COMMITTED to building the highest-performing version of your content…sign up for the next session of the Content Strategy Accelerator.

In your corner,

Katie