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Have you ever got to the end of a week and struggled to remember where your time went, or do you sometimes feel like you are a slave to your business? You will find it is often because of constant interruptions, firefighting, crisis management and other people imposing their problems on you. What can you do about this?

Well, I am about to do something that chartered accountants do not normally do . . . I want to share with you a formula for how you can Expand Time. You may be thinking, Mark, are you really an accountant; you can’t expand time, there are only 24 hours in a day, and you would be 100% correct. Without trying to get down to too much detail, there are in fact 86,400 seconds in a day.

Expanding time is not about increasing the number of hours, minutes or seconds in a day, it’s how you spend, or more importantly, how YOU invest YOUR precious hours minutes and seconds.

As a business owner, a number that is never recorded in your financial accounts, but is critically important, is to know the number of hours you have personally worked in the business, to calculate your effective hourly rate of pay. For many business owners, if they are brutally honest, this could be a very scary number.

For example i,f you are earning a profit of $100,000 and working 2000 hours, giving you a Return on Time Invested (ROTI) or average hourly rate of $50 per hour. I like to use the term Return on Time Invested, with the focus being on the word Invested.

We have a mantra at our firm, Bishop Toomey & Pfeifer ‘Know thy Numbers to Grow Thy Numbers’.

If your ROTI is $50 per hour, ask yourself, what would you like it to be? If you could double it, I’m sure you would be happy. If you set a goal to increase it from $50 to a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) of $500 per hour, a 10 times multiplier, how would you need to think and act to achieve this massive result?

Answer – You would need to think and act differently, massively differently, which leads me to my Expanding Time Formula.

To make it easy to remember, I have created an acronym using the action word REACH. It is important that you first start with the Result you are wanting to achieve to give you the motivation to think and act differently. The formula, then leads you through ways to free up time, to then invest in areas that will help you multiply the growth of your business.

The formula relies on each team member working in your business to also play their part.

If you want to multiply the profitability, cash flow and value of your business, you need a plan of action and an accountability partner, to keep you on track.

You now know how to Expand Time to Invest in activities that will help you REACH your goals, so go out there and make it happen. Until next time – tick tock, tick tock.