Being a successful business owner requires ingenuity, hard work and confidence, and that’s just for starters. In today’s shifting landscape, even having all of those things won’t guarantee success, as you know, and it’s becoming more challenging every day.
One thing that a business owner does have control over, however, is the ability to practice agile time-management of their own hours, as well as those of their employees.
A good practice for anyone who is concerned with their profit margins is to calculate exactly how much each hour of their time is worth.
A basic version of that equation would look something like this:
Annual net income / 365 / 12 hours = Hourly Earnings.
Using that equation, one hour of a business owner’s time who brings home $125,000 net profit per year, is worth $28.53 per hour. With that number being considered as real, then wasting two hours a day for a year, would eventually cost them $20,833. That’s enough money to put a down payment on a mortgage!
There are many avenues in which a business owner can find themselves inadvertently wasting time, but one of the largest among them can be the process of creating employee schedules. In the past, there were really only two options:
- Get a spreadsheet and a phone and start making calls or sending emails.
- Post it on a wall and force your employees to come in and look at it (or call and distract you from the task at hand).
Depending on the size of your business, handling employee scheduling the old fashioned way can require up to forty hours a week of time. But just to be conservative, let’s say that the example business only requires ten hours a week to schedule its employees.
Let’s do the math:
$28.53 x 10h = $285.30
$285.30 x 4w = $1,141.12
$1,141.12 x 12m = $13,694.40
That’s almost $14,000 dollars a year, an amount of money that could easily break a small business. With the added dollar amount of time and attention it robs from other tasks, there’s almost no way to quantify the number of ill-effects it could have.
Because of this glaring issue, one technology company has stepped up to the plate and created a web-based free employee scheduling app to automate the process of worker scheduling. They are “Schedulehead” and have approached the problem in a pretty unique way.
Unlike some of the other employee scheduling apps out there, Schedulehead requires almost no effort on the part of the administrative team. They simply have to tell it how many employees they need and at what time they need them and Schedulehead does the rest using patent-pending intelligent technology.
It selectively “shows” the schedule to the workers, starting with the highest rated and most senior, and moving down the list to the lowest rated and newest workers. Because not every worker can, or wants to sign up for every shift, the business ends up with naturally balanced and effective schedules.
Considering the time and money saving possibilities that Schedulehead, or another employee scheduling app could provide your business, it seems like it’s a good time to start doing some research. There’s a wealth of options available, and it’s guaranteed that one of them will prove to be the right fit for your business.
About the Author: This article is written by Will Lange, Schedulehead Welcome Team. Schedulehead owns a patented, free, intelligent staff scheduling app.