Coaches, it’s inevitable. As a small business owner, you will wear many, many hats.

Marketing manager.

Bookkeeper.

Content developer.

Coach.

Technical support staff.

But while this type of task juggling is expected, you must be aware that not all of your hats are created equal. Marketing outweighs bookkeeping, for example, because without marketing, there will be no cash to manage.

Not only that, but you have to consider how much time you’re spending in each area as well. If you spend all day tweaking the design of your website and put off sending an email to your list, what have you gained?

You might have a prettier website, but you lost an opportunity to drive traffic to your offer.

In an ideal world, you’d put on your CEO hat and delegate the rest, but we don’t always have that option here in the real world. Instead, we have to work smarter and take care of how we spend our time.

Prioritize Your Daily Tasks

We all have different skills and sweet spots regarding the tasks we want and need to do. You might love customer support and hate bookkeeping, while someone else enjoys the numbers game and doesn’t like dealing with the help desk. But regardless of your personal preferences, one thing is sure: money-making tasks should be at the top of your to-do list.

That might mean product creation, email marketing, client outreach, webinar development, or something entirely different. Identify those money-making tasks in your business and be sure to prioritize them every single day.

I realized that sometimes we don’t want to think about money constantly. We want to provide a service to athletes who trust in us. I GET IT! But you must also eat and pay some bills to run a business. So, I am ALL about having your job as a passion, but I also want us to be realistic. (Off Soap Box!)

Know the Difference Between Important and Urgent

In his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends prioritizing tasks based on a time-management grid. Every task is assigned to a grid quadrant based on whether it is urgent, important, or neither.

Once you know where a task falls on the grid, you’ll immediately understand what you should be working on. For example, marketing and planning are important but not urgent. A ringing phone is urgent but not necessary. The sales page for your new program, which is launching tomorrow, is both urgent AND important.

So before you prioritize your daily to-do list, think about where each task falls in the quadrant, and schedule them accordingly.

Will you always be working on the best task right now? Probably not. Nor will you ever use your time as wisely as you could. But by consciously organizing and prioritizing your days, you’ll find it much less stressful and overwhelming to manage your small business.

Interested in more info about making your coaching business work? I teamed up with Training Peaks for a course. Grab the link HERE!