Time is money
The phrase has become hackneyed with overuse, yet hits the nail on the head when describing a small business owner’s relationship to time. In fact, in a studyconducted earlier this year by the Electronic Transactions Association (ETA), the 592 respondents reported that they valued their time at an average of $170 per hour—making wasted time an expensive proposition for those small businesses.
Entrepreneurs understand the importance of managing time unlike just about anyone else. Creating jobs (two out of every three new jobs in the U.S.) isn’t a 9:00 to 5:00 proposition. This week OnDeck released a new survey that suggests America’s small business owners spend an average of 53 hours a week building their businesses compared to the national average workweek of 47 hours. What’s more, one-third of the business owners surveyed said they would need 69 hours a week to successfully run their businesses.
A longer-than-average day was certainly my experience as a small business owner. Like many business owners, I was motivated and felt my business required more of my time. However my wife would often call the office into the wee hours of the morning to ask if she needed to bring over a sleeping bag—my cue it was time to wrap up for the day and come home.
By the way, although 45 percent of them described work/life balance as an illusion, other surveys suggest the independence of working for themselves is worth it. That’s certainly the way I looked at it.
Why Would a Small Business Lender Be Interested in How a Business Owner Values Time?
That’s a good question with a very straightforward answer.
Speed to funding is a big deal to businesses and the time it takes to find a lender, complete the application, and hopefully obtain approval can take a business owner away from the important work of running the business. In fact, 63 percent of those in the ETA survey said speed was a primary reason for choosing the online lender they did. The ability to act quickly to take advantage of an opportunity is often critical to successfully leveraging that opportunity into increased profits.
From The Economist - written by Ty Kiisel
