I hate working for free. You should too. But we do it just the same.
Small business owners – especially local, service based businesses – do an awful lot of work for free. Maybe I’m just projecting based on what I do…but I don’t think so.
When a client asks for a small revision on their web design, I just do it. When a newsletter needs to be added to a client’s blog, I just do it.
I don’t resent doing these things, I do them because I want to make sure my clients get the best service they can. I think most small businesses do similar things.
But there is another type of “work” that we do all the time that doesn’t yield any payment.
I call this work the “time grind.”
This is when you spend all morning doing a bunch of “stuff” that is not going to grow your business and is not going to get you paid.
It goes something like this:
- Sit down at computer
- Open email, browser, salesforce.com, Twitter and Facebook
- Check mail – deleting, answering and reading a few. Mental notes about “getting to it later” on a few of them
- Click on Facebook – 10 minutes wasted reading the “Top 10 Reasons It’s Great to Be A Child Of The 80′s”
- Open salesforce.com and spend 30 minutes reading old task updates
- Start a newsletter for a client, but stop to grab a new picture from istockphoto – spend 20 minutes looking through icon sets that might look good on my own website
- Text comes through from business partner wondering about a lunch meeting the next week – 30 minutes of intermittent texting ensues
Now it’s 11:00 and your morning is gone and you have near no work done, no new prospects for business and nothing done that will help you grow.
Makes me want to scream!
So… I guess this is a New Years Resolution. I resolve not to work for free. That is, if I am going to sit down at my computer and do what I call “work” I am darned well going to be doing things that are going to help me grow or help me get paid.
How much time do you spend “working” for nothing?
