For most home service company owners, time management often takes a back seat to employee wants and customer needs.

But if you don’t get a handle on how to manage and delegate your time—or lack thereof—it can quickly begin to hurt your employees’ abilities to perform their jobs. And that could lead to a diminished positive experience for customers and a loss of revenue.

Time management is one of the most important business processes that home service leaders should master if they expect to optimize customer expectations and improve the quality of their work. Keeping on task also improves employee satisfaction by reducing unexpected downtimes.

Here are some practical time management strategies to help you get time back on your side.

Clarity and Direction

One of the most essential steps in learning how to take back your time is to provide yourself and your employees with clarity of thought and purposeful direction.

We’ve all heard the saying that it’s better to work on your business than in your business. This is especially true of home service owners who started as technicians. 

It’s easy to slip back into old job roles if you spent your formative years wrenching pipes or installing HVAC units. But once you become an owner, you must learn how to delegate.

At first, it may be easier to know what you’re passionate about and, more importantly, what you’re not passionate about and delegate your less pleasing tasks to others. As your business grows and you add employees, you also need to hire people who have a different skill set than you and who are more passionate about various tasks.

While it may be difficult to let things go, if you’ve made suitable hires, you know that these people have talents that complement your own and that they can get the job done as well, or even better, than you can.

This also means you must be clear about the roles necessary to round out your leadership team. This includes clearly communicating your expectations and developing a process for determining accountability.

Surrounding yourself with the right team is crucial when you start delegating tasks. You need to trust that your team knows what you expect of them, and you need to allow them the responsibility to do their jobs.

The right team is tantamount to ensuring their roles align with your business goals.

Process Documentation

Whether you’re a new business owner who started on the truck or an entrepreneur who came into the home service industry from another industry, you more than likely built a business plan when you first started your company.

Documenting your processes and procedures should not have ended there. Standardizing your company’s procedures and workflows ensures consistency, reduces errors and oversight, preserves knowledge and helps you improve your efficiency.

Without documented procedures, you will spend most of your time “firefighting” issues that flare up rather than working proactively. And, while you need to be adaptable and flexible to handle issues that arise from doing business, if you have formal processes, it helps you and your employees stay on task.

When properly documenting and defining processes,   roles and tasks, your team knows what you expect of them and how to proceed. 

Time Management Apps

If you’re constantly juggling deadlines, deliverables and dedicated resources, it may be time to consider implementing software or applications that can help you better manage your time.

In today’s fast-paced world, where half your team is out of the office working remotely or at customer sites, home service business leaders should embrace one of the many time management applications on the market.

From Trello to Asana to Monday.com,  a variety of apps can help you manage your time more wisely. Turn your smartphone or laptop into the ultimate scheduling tool for you and your team.

And if you need to manage your appointments, you can always use Calendly, Doodle or even Microsoft Outlook to help plan your day.

Taking time to understand your schedule should be an entry in your appointment book, too. Take a few minutes  Sunday night to plan your week and a few moments the night before to plan your day. This helps you prioritize your tasks and gives you time to remove nonessential activities and set a time limit to complete necessary duties.

It takes some time to manage your time, but maintaining daily rituals allows you to reflect on your priorities and adjust your appointments to optimize what you get out of your day.

Avoid Time Wasters

During the course of our work lives, most of us have gotten caught up in loops that seem to drain time like sands through an hourglass. We start tackling these issues, look up and realize the day has flown by, and you’ve not accomplished anything else. 

While you might need to address the issue, a failure to keep your tasks on track can result in inefficiencies that adversely affect your bottom line.

One of the most significant time wasters can be long meetings that accomplish nothing. It’s essential to meet with your team so you can communicate with them, but when discussions about granular topics drone on and on, you lose efficiency.

The best way to avoid this is to create and stick to an agenda. If an issue arises during the meeting that you should address, don’t attempt to solve it in a meeting that is meant for other topics. These “parking lot” items need their separate meeting and should only involve the necessary employees. Don’t waste everyone else’s time trying to fix a spur-of-the-moment issue.

Using intra-office tools to help the office team communicate with your office staff and those in the field can save you time. A quick chat to set up a meeting or ask a question can reduce impromptu meetings that waste time.

Your time as a business owner is precious and needs managing so you can work on your business.  No perfect formula works for every leader, but managing your time so that it aligns with your schedule, workflow and end goals shouldn’t be left to chance.

Take time to make time so you can focus on making your customers happy and expanding your business.

As a director of advisement for CEO Warrior, Jason Noel excels at implementing sales and turnover processes, optimizing employee motivation, and executing successful business plans. He leads day-to-day business operations, managing more than 150 employees and possessing an extensive general management background. Previously, Noel worked as the general manager of American Residential Services and One Hour Heating, Benjamin Franklin Plumbing and Mister Sparky and the director of plumbing operations at Mister Quik Home Services. For more information, contact@ceowarrior.com.