The Secretary of the British Treasury Wants to Help Your Business

As a business owner, you are probably tempted to do administrative work, especially when the business is young and you don’t think you have the budget to pay someone to do it. I get it. Someone has to take care of things like accounting, marketing, IT, HR, and on and on and on. So you, as the owner, take on those responsibilities. In addition to everything else you’re doing.

But you need to stop doing those things as quickly as possible. If you don’t, they will consume you. You will lose sight of the most important parts of your business, the things only an owner is capable of doing. You may lose passion because you will be devoting yourself to things you’re not passionate about and probably not qualified to do. Most important, doing them will actually end up costing you more money than you think you’re saving. Eventually you will be stuck in a cycle of doing more work for less return.

When I was in the corporate world, I coached teams to develop what I referred to as the BAHU Mindset. This meant that everyone had to determine what was the best and highest use (BAHU) of his/her time and then devote their time to those tasks. Productivity and revenue increased significantly when people focused on the right things. People were happier. It was better for the company financially and culturally to hire lower-paid administrative staff to deal with administrative work (“administrivia” is the term we used for it) so producers could focus on things that moved the company forward and generated revenue.

What is BAHU for you? I can guarantee that it’s not generating invoices or entering expenses into your accounting software. It’s not writing your employee manual. It’s not trying to figure out marketing. It’s not developing your operations manual. It’s not any of the million things that need to be done that could and should be done by someone else.