Busy Isn’t a Business Strategy

[COLD OPEN]

Ask a business owner how things are going, and you’ll often hear the same answer.

“We’re busy.”

And usually, that’s supposed to be good news.

The phones are ringing.
The calendar is full.
Everybody has plenty to do.

But busy doing what?

Work that pays well?
Work that keeps good customers coming back?
Work that makes the business stronger?

Or work that fills the week and leaves very little behind?

Because being worn out on Friday doesn’t tell you whether it was a good week for the business.

Sometimes, it just tells you it was a long one.

[BRANDED INTRO]

Welcome to Things Entrepreneurs Should Know — a podcast about the decisions, tradeoffs, and occasional hard lessons that come with building a business of lasting value. I’m Chip Schweiger. And, I’ve spent more than thirty years working with businesses and the people who run them.

In that time, I’ve seen how easily a full calendar can become a substitute for asking whether the work is paying off. So today on the show, we’re talking about how to tell the difference.

[BUMPER MUSIC]

I understand why busy feels good.

Especially when you remember what it felt like to be slow.

You remember waiting for the phone to ring.

Wondering whether a proposal would turn into a job.

Looking at payroll and hoping enough money would come in before Friday.

After you’ve been through that, a full schedule feels like relief.

It feels like security.

And to be clear, having work matters.

But somewhere along the way, we can start using “busy” as our answer to a much bigger question.

How is the business doing?

That’s where we need to slow down for a minute.

Because a business can be busy and still struggle to make money.

It can be busy and lose good employees.

It can be busy serving customers who take more out of it than they put in.

And it can be busy enough that nobody has time to notice.

[PAUSE]

Picture a small service business.

This is a hypothetical example. But the situation will sound familiar to plenty of owners.

The crews are booked.
The owner is working evenings.
The office manager spends most of the day moving appointments around.

From the outside, things look pretty good.

Then the owner looks at the month’s results.

There’s very little profit.

His first thought is that they need more work.

More jobs.
More customers.
More revenue.

But when he looks closer, he finds something else.

One customer regularly changes the scope after the work starts.

Another expects an immediate response, regardless of what’s already scheduled.

Some jobs require a second trip because the information wasn’t right the first time.

And a few prices haven’t been updated, even though the cost of doing the work has gone up.

Everybody is working hard.

But some of that effort is fixing problems the business keeps creating.

Some is providing service nobody priced.

And some is devoted to jobs that were never especially attractive in the first place.

Adding more of that work would fill the calendar.

It wouldn’t necessarily improve the business.

[PAUSE]

That’s the first thing worth asking.

What is creating all this activity?

Sometimes, demand is creating it.

You have a good offering.
Customers value it.
They’re willing to pay a price that makes sense.

That’s encouraging.

Other times, friction is creating it.

Unclear instructions.
Poor scheduling.
Repeated mistakes.
Decisions that keep getting revisited.

Both can make a team look busy.

But they call for very different responses.

If you have more profitable demand than you can handle, you may need more capacity.

If your people spend half their time chasing information and correcting errors, hiring another person might just give you one more person to chase information and correct errors.

You need to understand what’s consuming the time before you decide how to get more of it.

[PAUSE]

The same problem shows up inside the office.

A meeting every Monday.

A report every Thursday.

A spreadsheet someone updates because somebody asked for it three years ago.

Every one of those things may have started for a good reason.

But does the reason still exist?

Who uses the report?

What decision does it help them make?

What comes out of the meeting?

And if we stopped doing it, what would actually happen?

Those questions can make people uncomfortable.

Because once a task becomes familiar, it starts to feel necessary.

We know how to do it.
We know when it’s due.
We can point to it when someone asks what we accomplished.

Changing it requires more thought than continuing it.

So it stays.

And over time, the business accumulates obligations that nobody has recently examined.

[PAUSE]

Now, there’s a trap on the other side of this.

You can take the idea too far.

You can start demanding that every hour produce an immediate financial return.

That would be a mistake.

Training takes time.

Maintenance takes time.

Building a relationship with a good customer takes time.

So does developing an employee who can eventually take on more responsibility.

The benefit may arrive months later.

Some necessary work prevents a problem you’ll never see.

The point is to understand the purpose.

If we’re spending time training someone, what do we want them to be able to do?

If we’re meeting with a customer, what are we trying to understand or resolve?

If we’re preparing a report, who needs it and what will they do with it?

You don’t need to attach a dollar amount to every task.

But you should be able to explain why it belongs in the business.

[PAUSE]

There’s also a personal reason we cling to busy.

Busy gives us something concrete to feel good about.

You answered forty emails.

You handled six problems.

You worked through lunch.

Nobody can accuse you of sitting around.

But effort is easier to measure than judgment.

It’s easy to count the calls you made.

It’s harder to assess whether you spent the afternoon pursuing the wrong customer.

It’s easy to count the proposals you sent.

It’s harder to admit that you keep bidding on work your business isn’t particularly good at delivering.

And it’s easy to say you didn’t have time to review pricing.

Especially when you spent the week dealing with the consequences of pricing that no longer works.

I’m not suggesting owners are lazy or careless.

Most owners I know work hard.

The concern is that hard work can keep a weak approach going for a surprisingly long time.

You compensate.

You stay later.
You handle it yourself.
You ask the team to push a little harder.

And because you manage to get through the week, the underlying problem survives into the next one.

[PAUSE]

So what do you do with this?

Start with a small review.

At the end of the week, look at three things.

What moved the business forward?

What kept it functioning?

And what consumed time because something wasn’t working properly?

Keep it simple.

Maybe winning a well-priced job moved the business forward.

Processing payroll kept it functioning.

Sending a crew back to correct incomplete work consumed time because something went wrong.

All three took effort.

But that third item deserves a different conversation.

What happened?

Was the scope unclear?
Was the handoff incomplete?
Did we promise a deadline we couldn’t reasonably meet?

You’re looking for a cause you can address.

And over a few weeks, you may start seeing a pattern.

The same customer.
The same approval.
The same missing information.
The same kind of job.

That pattern gives you somewhere useful to begin.

[PAUSE]

Then choose one change.

Maybe a price needs updating.

Maybe a recurring meeting needs a clear purpose and a shorter agenda.

Maybe a customer needs a conversation about what’s included.

Maybe your team needs a better handoff before work starts.

Make the change.

Then look at what happens.

Did it reduce repeat work?

Did it improve the margin on those jobs?

Did people get time back?

Did the customer receive better service?

The goal is to make the work more worthwhile and easier to do well.

That may create room for more business.

It may also create room to finish the work you already have without exhausting everybody.

Both can be valuable.

[PAUSE]

And if you lead a team, pay attention to what you praise.

People notice.

If the person who works late always gets the recognition, late nights can become the standard.

Meanwhile, someone who quietly prevents problems may receive very little attention.

Ask about that work, too.

Who made a process simpler?

Who caught an issue before it reached the customer?

Who eliminated a task the team no longer needed?

Those contributions can be easy to miss precisely because they make the day less dramatic.

But they help the business run better.

[PAUSE]

A full calendar can be good news.

It just needs a second question.

What is all this work producing?

Because you can spend years getting better at handling more activity.

And still avoid deciding which activity deserves your time.

So here’s one question worth asking this week.

What kept us busy—and what did it actually accomplish?

Ask it without blaming anyone.

Include your own calendar.

And be willing to change something based on the answer.

You’ve worked too hard to build a business whose main achievement is keeping everybody occupied. And that’s something entreprenerurs should know.

[PAUSE]

[OUTRO]

That's all for this episode. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me.

If this episode made you think about your own business a little differently, send it to another owner or business leader who might appreciate it.

You can find the show notes and more episodes at TESKPod.com.

This is Chip Schweiger, reminding you that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.

I look forward to seeing ya next time.