In any business day, there are huge demands on your time. For almost all of us, emails, phone calls and meetings will crop up – and that’s often before we even get started on the nitty gritty of our to-do list. If you’re a business owner, you’ll find yourself in even greater demand – and for dental practice owners, the pressure can be heaviest. As business owners and highly skilled fee generators, you’re pulled in many different directions.
Many of us are already familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix (otherwise known as the urgent vs. important matrix). We’ve spoken about it before, because it’s a fantastic way to break down your upcoming tasks and assess what’s really the best use of your time. In a nutshell, the matrix teaches us that every task can be placed within one of four quadrants, according to its level of urgency and importance. High urgency demands are usually the ones that win our attention: things like phone calls, last-minute deadlines, and general firefighting. High importance tasks are those that have real significance or value for you. We tend to favour tasks that are urgent and important, followed by the urgent but not important. Most of us tackle the urgent because we can’t bear not to – like a ringing bell, it seems easiest to silence it first.
The downside to this is that we’ll often push aside the “not urgent but important” – an issue that’s particularly the case for time-pressed practice owners. This is understandable; when you’re a fee generator, you’re constantly reminded of what you could be earning by working in your business (i.e. from a day’s bookings), versus the less tangible value of working on it. Even though these higher-level activities may pay off ten-fold, the reality is that you might not see a return for two years. It’s therefore hard to prioritise this when faced with appointment slots that bring in money almost immediately.
Many of these often neglected but critically important tasks fall within the category of accountancy, tax and finance. Because these usually have longer lead times, they can seem non-urgent, and therefore “safe” to save for another day. The snag is that many do have deadlines and penalties, meaning they’ll eventually progress to the urgent stage – by which time, thousands of pounds could have been lost.
In today’s landscape, optimising your performance and/or mitigating your tax exposure needs to happen in real time. Having access to up-to-date figures allows you to make informed decisions, act, and pivot when required. If, as a business owner, you only engage with your finances on an annual basis, you’re essentially hobbling yourself before you begin. This scenario is one in which you’re far more likely to dislike your tax bill, but to lack any means of improving it past the deadline.
There’s no denying that staying on top of your data takes an investment of time (and weren’t we just talking about the lack of it?). However, not everything has to rest on your shoulders. Delegation is one of the most important ways to safeguard and prioritise your valuable time. Perhaps you can use your team, or you might feel more comfortable outsourcing. For instance, if there are queries to answer in Xero, could your Practice Manager handle this, to keep things moving forward? Could a bookkeeper be hired to stay on top of the numbers? Just because you can do it all, there’s no reason that you should. The main thing is that you don’t keep kicking the can down the road.
Another scenario is that even if you have the time to complete certain tasks, you may find that you push them aside anyway. This is another natural human behaviour – typically, we avoid those things that are unfamiliar or make us feel uncomfortable. Even if we know, deep-down, that it’s urgent and important, we can easily find a way to rationalise moving it to another day. It’s best to tackle this by being direct: think about why you don’t want to do it and ask yourself if you’re really the best person for the job. If a task has already been shunted several times, you’re unlikely to get around to it any time soon.
With all of this in mind, we’ve devised ways that Hive can help. First, you’ll find that we tend to over-communicate: if we need information that’ll benefit you, we’ll contact and remind you multiple times, to elevate the importance and urgency of the request. We also offer quarterly reporting services, which ensures that you have accurate data easily to hand. Alongside this (and more significantly), we’ll hold a regular quarterly meeting. Enshrining this in routine creates pace and focuses attention in the right areas. It’s your chance to take a break from the clinic and its many dramas, and to think about the things that are truly important.
If you’re concerned about how you’re managing your time or would like support with getting on top of your finances, do let us know – we’re always happy to help.
