I currently own one online retail business selling certain lines of hard goods through Amazon.
I have a full-time contractor doing most of the work for this business, but there is still a healthy amount of work for me.
I am, additionally, financially backing and providing some advertising and logistics assistance to a partner in another endeavor.
In the first case, my contractor is paid a healthy wage for his hard work.
In the second case, I’m providing a living wage to my business partner until we can generate cash flow. Once the business is off the ground, I am to receive 1/3rds of the profits of the second enterprise.
So… the first business requires my attention or it will flounder and eventually fail in the off-season.
I am guessing that 10-20 hours a week will keep it growing, although I can get away with 4 hours per week for a week or two if everything is in order before I give myself a break.
The second business is still in the marketing/advertising/customer-acquiring phase. It is currently a slight cash drain, costing around $1500 per month.
I don’t have a boss. There are no ‘time of day’ constraints related to 99% of my duties for either business.
I’m having trouble figuring out how to decide whether I do ‘business 1’ every even day and ‘business 2’ every odd day, or whether I should do ‘4 hours here, 4 hours there’.
I’ve been doing things kind of haphazardly so far, and while I’m making progress, I’m wondering if anyone else has a system that would work for this kind of thing.
Any input from the peanut gallery?
Thanks in advance!
Spend your time on the enterprise which makes money. Stop spending time and money on the one that is losing money. There’s either some details missing from your OP, or it’s a no-brainer.
A fireman doesn’t say that he’s fight fires on one side of the street one day and the other the next. Same goes with 4 hours here and 4 hours there.
You, as a business owner, will be fighting ‘fires’. I doubt that you can do any division of hours that will actually work. You’ll need to adjust as necessary.
I may not have properly expressed that the second business is a start-up, and a young one at that.
Launch was maybe 60 days ago, and the initial advertising/promo push isn’t even over.
I agree with JerrySTL.
Since there are not time-of-day constraints, sometimes one will take more time than the other.
If the startup takes off, then you will not need to spend any more time on it and just collect money? I would put extra time there to get it off the ground so you only have one company to worry about. Just check in once a day with the other business to make sure things are still going well.
The standard answer is concentrate on both. I know that doesn’t help much, but it’s what you have to do. Shifting your focus off of one business to benefit the other has the potential to be a recipe for disaster. I’d discuss the issues openly with both partners, keep the lines of communication open, give up everything else in my life until I had this settled down. I say that from experience. So day by day, week by week, whatever is needed, set yourself a schedule of things to do for each business, and find a way to do those things.
Seems to be a pretty simple algebra problem to me.
t[sub]a[/sub] = weekly time needed for business A
t[sub]b[/sub] = weekly time needed for business B
T = total time available for working
If t[sub]a[/sub] + t[sub]b[/sub] ≤ T , you are golden.
If t[sub]a[/sub] + t[sub]b[/sub] > T , You have a problem.
So, t[sub]a[/sub] seems to be somewhere between 4 and 20. How about you nail that down as a first step. If you put in 20 hours a week on average, do you make 33% more profit than if you only work 15 hours? Crunch the numbers, and figure out what makes your time the most efficient.
Pick a value for T that allows you sufficient personal time away from work. 40 would be sustainable for the long term, but 60 might be possible for a few months.
Now that you only have one unknown variable, “solve for X” just like 7th grade algebra. ( or in this case, Solve for t[sub]b[/sub].)