3 Small Business Lessons to Learn during COVID

Hopefully you have done--or are in the process of doing--the following things to help you have a faster recovery.

You’ve Learned What Your Time Is Worth

In every business, there are things that are worth your time and things that aren’t. If you busy yourself with the things that aren’t, you will always feel underpaid and overworked. Instead, make a list of the things that you should be farming out to others.

It may seem counterintuitive to pay others to do things you could be doing but everything has a cost. For instance, if you are the primary person bringing in sales for your company but you’re also handling the landscaping and cleaning up the office, you’re losing money. The time you’re spending landscaping and cleaning is time not spent bringing in sales.

If you know that for every 5 people you try to sell to, one will buy from you and you know your average sale is $400, and you can reach 5 people in an hour, then you can expect—on

average—a sale an hour. So, every hour you’re spending doing something else is costing you a sale.

It’s a lot less expensive to hire someone to do the landscaping and cleaning so you can concentrate on bringing in sales than it is for you to do those tasks yourself.

You’ve Picked Up a New Skill

From webinars to online classes, there’s an educational pursuit for every interest and budget. Consider your interests but also think about what will improve your “employability” or your business. Think about complementary services you might offer if you improved your knowledge in a particular area. For instance, if you offer marketing content for businesses, learning more about SEO may help you command a higher hourly or project fee.

Now is an excellent time to look at educational options. There have never been so many affordable options.

You’ve Learned When You Work Best

With working from home situations, some businesspeople have had to get creative with their work hours. If you’ve done this, hopefully you’ve learned what your most productive hours are.

If you have, don’t waste them returning emails. Whatever is your “freshest” part of the day, you should use that to tackle new projects, bring on new accounts, brainstorm ways to grow your business, and other things.

Leave administrative tasks, like email, for later parts of the day. It will make you more productive.

COVID has forced us to reexamine where we work and how we do it. If you haven’t already, think about ways you might invest in making your business stronger post-COVID than it was before.