Time? What is it good for?
My time is all I have. As an occasional sanity check I’ve found it useful to go back through the diary and work out how that time was invested (or splurged…).
Here’s how I spent my time in November:
- Client relationship management – 23.5 hours
- Marketing Nixon McInnes – 21 hrs
- Training clients – 20 hrs
- Developing Nixon McInnes as a business – 10.5 hrs
- NM people, one-on-one time – 6.5 hrs
- Sales – 6.5 hrs
Errr….OK!
So the sanity check is that as MD of Nixon McInnes, my role is to set the agenda through vision and strategy, to improve and develop the business, primarily through working on the business rather than in it across the various functional areas (people, finance, sales, marketing) and to supplement bigger stuff that with the day-to-day realities of important, carefully selected dollops of working with our people (who all in one way shape or form look after our clients) and bringing in strategically important sales.
In November those three responsibilities are getting the least of my time!
The good news is that we have Anna helping more and more with the client relationship side of things. Looking at this though, I think we need more support here, which confirms wider discussions about the next round of team growth. And Ruth is starting in one week to take responsibility for the marketing of Nixon McInnes. So those two chunks of time spent should reduce and I’ll be able to swap time on the activities to time supporting them, which will boost my time spent with our people.
The remaining conundrum is training, which I do because it’s for some great clients, it’s potentially a strong door-opener but with a long, soft sales cycle, and is an important part of our difference and our overall proposition to clients (the ‘Translated’ part of social media gooodness) and because I absolutely love it. I train marketing people in the very latest in online marketing, and I do that for O2 and for the Oxford College of Marketing.
All well and good, but this analysis suggests I may be spending too much time here… Hmmm!
Will McInnes wrote this on 27.11.07 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Business, NixonMcInnes box
