Your Dashboard Is Not Your Accounting System

Here’s a question: Why are you doing so much? Early in your company’s life you, as the owner, had to do everything. You didn’t have the team or the money to pay someone else, so you had to do it all.

At some point you need to ask yourself, “Why do I do what someone else should be doing?” I refer to this as BAHU (Best And Highest Use) thinking. You should identify the things that represent the best and highest use of your time (your BAHU) and focus on them. In turn, determine what makes up the best and highest use of other people’s time, and have them focus on those things.

As the owner, there are things you are uniquely qualified to do. Accounting is not one of them. You should focus on sales growth, strategic planning, culture, product / service development, and other strategically important things. Bookkeeping is not strategically important, so find someone else to do it.

Maybe you already agree that you should not be spending your time on accounting, but you feel trapped. Maybe you don’t have the ability to turn it over to someone else. Why? Why haven’t you grown or become profitable enough to give non-strategic work to others so you can focus on BAHU?

As an owner, you may be tempted to do everything yourself to save money. But time is more valuable than money. You can make more money, but you can never recover lost time. Be careful about spending money. Be more careful about spending time. Successful, growing companies understand this. They spend money to save time. Companies that struggle spend time to save money. This is one of the reasons they don’t thrive.