Turning expenses into investments

Distinguishing investments from expenses can make the difference between hitting your goals and running out of resources.

Here's what I mean:

A good investment helps you build momentum.
A good expense just helps you survive.

Naturally, I assume you'd rather thrive than merely survive.

But some expenses are unavoidable. Some examples my clients have faced recently:

• Duplicate contacts in your CRM need to be cleaned out.

• Financial data needs to be replicated and reconciled with your bookkeeping software.

• If a staff member is out sick, someone needs to do extra work to cover for them.

You can’t avoid that stuff when it comes up.

But, what if you could turn an expense into an investment?

What if you could use all the time and effort you spend staying afloat to help you accelerate forward?

Often, you can.

The trick is to look for the opportunity to build momentum, at times when you could get away with just surviving.

Look again at those examples, with actual steps I've seen people take to turn a problem into an improvement:

• Have a big problem with duplicate contacts? Don't just spend time slogging through the deduping process. Use it as a chance to improve your deduping systems.

• Struggling to keep up with accounting integration? Don't just throw more tedious hours at it. Grab the opportunity to analyze the problem (and the business requirements) so you can automate the integration.

• Staff member out sick? You could just scramble to cover for them, or you could take the chance to start documenting their workflows and cross-training your team members.

"But Allen, all of that is more work!"

Sure it is.

It's also a lot more rewarding, and in the end, a lot less work.

All the best,
A.