Insights into Time Management and Digital Readiness for Small Contractors
Jul 06, 2023Season 2Episode 31
Country Intelligence Group Ltd
Shatter the shackles of inadequate time management! This enlightening discussion promises to equip small government contractors with invaluable tips to amplify productivity and master their clock. As we navigate the complexities of federal work, we reveal how to harmoniously balance client priorities with back office tasks, alongside practical strategies to ready your business for growth and unexpected hurdles.
Intrigued by the art of anticipation and delegation? Wait no more. Our journey continues into the second half of the episode, where we deep-dive into the nuances of effective task allocation, astute preparation for client interactions, and the art of foreseeing client requirements. We also illuminate the future of small business and government contracting, with a special highlight on the transformative potential of automation. To cap off our enlightening discourse, we delve into the open-source software revolution and the exciting frontier of digital transformation, drawing attention to the crucial aspect of secure technology for optimized workflow. Join us, as we unearth a treasure trove of insights for small business owners and government contractors, one nugget of wisdom at a time.
Shatter the shackles of inadequate time management! This enlightening discussion promises to equip small government contractors with invaluable tips to amplify productivity and master their clock. As we navigate the complexities of federal work, we reveal how to harmoniously balance client priorities with back office tasks, alongside practical strategies to ready your business for growth and unexpected hurdles.
Intrigued by the art of anticipation and delegation? Wait no more. Our journey continues into the second half of the episode, where we deep-dive into the nuances of effective task allocation, astute preparation for client interactions, and the art of foreseeing client requirements. We also illuminate the future of small business and government contracting, with a special highlight on the transformative potential of automation. To cap off our enlightening discourse, we delve into the open-source software revolution and the exciting frontier of digital transformation, drawing attention to the crucial aspect of secure technology for optimized workflow. Join us, as we unearth a treasure trove of insights for small business owners and government contractors, one nugget of wisdom at a time.
Hello all, welcome back to the Country Intelligence Report. We are your hosts, spencer Bentley, tarol Cummings and Devon Florzak. Today we have an episode focused on time management and productivity secrets for small government contractors. This one, i think, is something that everybody can relate to, regardless of your focus. career-wise.
Speaker 1:
Time management is something that is just necessary across the board for professional development, as well as something to really focus on company-wide in order to level up the type of clientele that you're dealing with and to meet your current clientele at where they are in your production or service life cycle. Just to jump right into it, we have three questions that we'll be covering One around the unique time management challenges for small business and government contractors, how small business owners can improve productivity and time management, and what the future holds for small business owners and how they can ensure optimal time management and productivity as they scale their business. We'll start with the first question, and I'll just pose this to the group here. What do we think are some unique time management challenges that specifically that small government contractors can face when dealing with the federal government?
Speaker 2:
I'll go ahead and jump in on this one A lot of those small businesses. Usually the business consists of, i'd say, five people or less. At least that's been our experience. Coming up, what we're trying to come in, trying to find the right team partner, trying to find the contractors that are good for us, that we can jump in on and everything. The thing is this is not a lot of people, probably two to five people. If that You're trying to do your current client work, trying to do that to the best of your ability, high quality is possible.
Speaker 2:
But then you get into your back office work and you got to get done on a monthly basis or whatever that may be. Then you're looking into BD efforts, this development, because you want to try to grow your company. As far as doing that, the question is bandwidth. Obviously bandwidth, through everything, gets prioritized. What's most important I know for us we always prioritize the client work is always most important.
Speaker 2:
It goes ahead of back office stuff, goes ahead of business development effort because for us without these clients, this group of clients or this one client it could be or whatever it is then we have enough business to run. When you make sure that we take care of everything upfront and that's where it originates and you build from there depending on how many people you have, how many resources you have outside of that, it's just two or three of you, then you have to divide and conquer whoever is good at doing whatever, breaking down in that aspect or whatnot. It's just one of those things where it just depends on how many people you have and bandwidth in and what each person can contribute outside of just your regular client work.
Speaker 1:
In my opinion, Yeah, that's a huge one And I think for us, even you know, we're clearly more than five people on the team, but bandwidth is always something that's going to be a challenge, at least from you know what I've found within our own company It really comes down to the commitment of the staff to, you know, want to put in that extra time to help with the back office things. Because, even though, terrell, you're absolutely correct, you know client work gets prioritized for the simple reason that we need to keep the lights on and we need to keep the client happy. Back office work is necessary, especially in a small business where you're hyper focused on scaling, on bringing in new business. You know, obviously word of mouth works great, but you reach a certain point in your development where it's necessary to target specific aspects of the back office work. With BED or marketing or even HR, these things become necessary. There's no way around them.
Speaker 1:
And trying to find the extra hours in the day when you already have client work you have to deliver on. You want to keep some sort of work-life balance if possible. It becomes a challenge, an ongoing challenge. I think it largely depends on an individual's sort of working structure. You know how they organize their day, i think plays a large role in how effectively the overall company can be with time management. But there are ways to institutionalize, you know, larger time management structures that can help alleviate some of those pain points. But it is definitely a struggle finding that balance in bandwidth.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, agreed, and I don't know if we want to get into specifics here. But something that definitely helps me, especially on a day like today, is, you know, for people that are working from home, you know, typically I usually have lunch set aside, whether that be salad or, you know, some fruit or something specific that's just there and ready. Because, as we all know, our days working as a contractor are, you know, we pretty much need to stay flexible, depending on, you know, any pop-up meetings that might come up, any taskers that you know might get pushed up and, you know, hurry up on and push the suspense date up and things like that. So you know, something that I probably didn't do too well today, just because you know I didn't have something prepared, but you know that's something that I usually do to stay on track during the day is, you know the things that I can control. You know, and make sure I'm at least on top of that. So if anything comes over control, you know, during the day, you know we're ready to go on that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, i 100% agree with that And I try to leverage time blocking as much as possible.
Speaker 1:
You know I try to live off of my calendar as much as I can but you know, during the course of an eight-hour day something's going to give. There are plenty of times where I will forget to eat for hours and hours and wonder why I'm starting to feel so fatigued, or run down at the end of the day and realize that I haven't set up for my chair for the last four or five hours. But you know, in terms of taskers, you know getting things done for the client and organizing my day in terms of what I have to do with back office work and client work, i really try to use time blocking. That's kind of the default for me. I put everything on my calendar from, you know, responding to emails, to, obviously, meetings and calls that I have with shareholders, and even, you know, putting time on the calendar to read or to, you know, do some market research for a particular product or service that I'm interested in promoting or launching. If it's on the calendar, i can justify it. That's kind of my go-to.
Speaker 3:
As someone who's just curious, spencer, do you usually set aside like a specific point in the week that you set your calendar? Because that's something that I personally don't do too well, especially when trying to sync up. You know my calendar on the company side versus calendar on the client side. So I'm just curious in general, i guess.
Speaker 1:
For me. I have basically put it on repeat. So my calendar. Unless there is some anomalous or ad hoc meeting that pops up, i have certain times during the day, every day that I do the same thing And it just repeats over and over again. If I had to rely on setting my calendar every week, i would not do it, it wouldn't get done. I have too many things that draw my attention away. So I found Monday, wednesday, thursdays, i do XYZ, tuesday, fridays, i do whatever, and it just keeps going on repeat, and I found that that's a way for me to also help with prioritization of my work. It can become difficult when you have so many projects constantly up in the air to realize where your mind should be at any given point in time. So to mitigate that, for my own mental health, i just make it as regimented as possible and as regular as possible and just go from there.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it totally makes sense I'm probably slightly different as far as that. I have my set meetings through the week that typically they stay as they are, you know, go back office and client wise, so pretty much on a schedule as far as that. Now leave other blocks open for flexibility. Then I'll usually write down tasks I need to do and rank those as far as importance, and then I kind of know I know which days I have more flexibility than others as far as that. So I probably have quite as many pop up stuff as you guys do. That's right now for the client work, but that's going to probably change within the next couple months as far as that. So I don't block off time. But I know the time frame is kind of in my head like we're having more flexibility to do whatever I need to do And, like I said, i do rank my task in order, kind of write them down each day, what I need to do and everything, try to knock those tasks out And then look at it then the next day see what I didn't knock out, see if it's still high, if it still needs to be higher priority versus what I do, you know.
Speaker 2:
The next day then I re rank the task, then I go through and try to knock those out and what didn't go from there.
Speaker 2:
So I don't necessarily block out times where I have to do like I'm checking my emails this time of the day or whatever, like sometimes I do that.
Speaker 2:
Maybe I do like early in the morning because get with kids sometimes I've taken the babysitter and all that stuff And you know between seven and eight 30s busy doing stuff, family stuff. So it's like okay, i might wake up at five, 30 or six and start going through emails I may have missed from the previous day or whatever, or emails I see that came through like that night from certain customers or certain clients or whatnot there. Try to knock them out during that timeframe or whatever, and then do whatever we do with family and then come back and then do a track, see if any new emails will come through and see what my day is like as far as like meetings and everything like that. So I know it's probably a little bit different for me than we'll be for Devin, as far as you know thinking about those things. But we all have our own kind of ways of prioritizing. You know what we try to get done.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, i think it's definitely an individual venture And you, i think your, your zen like disposition allows for that, that freedom, you know, you just have a much more calming, i think, mindset than then. it's certainly myself in that regard, because too much freedom for me equals like literal chaos in my head. So, but, devin, what about you, man? How do you, how do you find yourself organizing the day?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, i mean, probably the first thing that I do is look at emails, and that's usually, you know where. I'll maybe try to start a prioritization list where I'll take a look at. If there's something that you know I need to get to right away, i'll just start doing it. But if not, then I'll start to work on, you know, other tests that might be outlying out there and you know I'll get to the emails later, and that's something that you know. Some of our stuff is obviously time sensitive And you know, obviously our tasks are time sensitive too. But I think it's a little bit different. When you got a person on the other end of an email, you know who might give you a call or something or something that's more so ad hoc that you might have to deal with. So you know that's probably the first thing that I look to at least, and then sort of go by my day after that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, i'm probably certainly the ally here, but I think you touched on a Great point where, you know, even in my case, where I try to stay as regimented as possible There is a necessity for a certain amount of flexibility, especially when you're dealing with a client that You know has time-sensitive requests, things like that.
Speaker 1:
You know you have to be willing to Reprioritize at a moment's notice any given tasks, so that is something that certainly should not be lost in the conversation as well. So, but you know, kind of Zooming out here In terms of the business level, you know how do we think small business owners can improve productivity and time management, specifically when working with the federal government, given that, you know, the federal government is a very specific beast. It has a lot of rules and regulations that need to be followed. Things don't happen nearly as quickly as the private sector, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of work to be done. That doesn't mean that, you know, we don't have to be very sensitive to the client's time and Adhere to certain time frames as well as, like I said, maintaining that flexibility. So you know, just broadly, you know how do we think about small businesses improving productivity and time management with the government.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, i think what I mentioned before about being ready and Something that's obviously super specific you know, just have something ready for lunch, oh, that's quick and accessible, but some that can sort of be parlayed into that is just. It's something that I do is regarding anticipation about The certain meetings are on your schedule for the day. If you know a certain topic is going to be discussed at a meeting later than day, usually I'll do some pre-work on. You know whether it might be needed or not. But just to have it ready for that meeting I think is important and also shows that To the client especially, that you know you have your stuff together. I mean, you're pretty much ready to discuss any topic that might come about in that meeting. So I think just having that factor of anticipation is important And it also helps you sort of stay ahead in your work as well.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, i'll go Devon there. As far as like having that preparedness ready for you know you can kind of foresee, hopefully, the questions that are coming your way So you're not overly surprised by anything. Ideally You can answer those things quickly. Have your team, have the team that you're working with, be ready to answer those questions quickly. Also, i said we have a different team so you know Everybody kind of splits the work or delegates The work or activities, you know, based on their strengths or also based on bandwidth as well. As far as that, you know gotta gotta work smartly together as a team to reach the common goals. So that that's another thing to kind of think about whenever prioritizing certain things, especially work with the client.
Speaker 2:
Overall, as far as like trying to get business, you kind of know, you know Devon has spoken about previously about what he's doing to kind of look at, you know, samgov and try to prioritize like what to go after, what to go after how you're going after it does the fit. You know For us our P win value, you know doesn't match up the points of our You know of our strengths as a company. You know, do we have a right team partner for it? It's gonna be worth the time to go through it, how long is it gonna take to do it I was gonna take to ride it how much new riding we have to do to it.
Speaker 2:
So it's like you can you kind of kind of kind of plan ahead How many, just how much effort, how many resource you get to exhibit towards it and you can probably Time up or you can probably schedule out, i guess, the timing of it.
Speaker 2:
Based on that, based on what you've already done previously before, once you're gonna have to Bring new to the table whenever kind trying to win the particular bid or win particular business From a client as far as doing that. So you can kind of, based on previous experience, kind of know what you have to do going forward as far as writing, writing those proposals, which is probably something that a newer small business or some that's news getting to Federal government contracting they might have a little more issues with as far as that because they don't have that, that experience. There's really just trying air for a period of time till they get their process down. But once they get their processes down, then they can kind of judge and see how long it's gonna take to put out proposal, you know, based on like that's allowed or went out there.
Speaker 1:
So Yeah, and I think you two touched on two really important points there, which is anticipation as a tool and delegation as a tool.
Speaker 1:
And to the first point, anticipation, i think, regardless of who your client is, being able to anticipate the needs and pain points and requests is something that any contractor worth their salt has to become very, very proficient at, and that boils down to learning your client, learning the systems in which you operate and becoming experts in that domain.
Speaker 1:
Being ahead of what the client needs is crucial to long-term success, as well as just overall company-wide discipline in terms of adding value to that client, so that one's huge and especially in the federal government being able to anticipate their needs, staying on top of everything from agency-wide changes to government-wide changes to different in our case, different things that may be happening in the news, international realm, things like that.
Speaker 1:
Just staying abreast of as much of the client's needs and interests as possible so that you can look three, four, five steps down the road and anticipate what they may need, because that then helps you prioritize and, overall, just manage your time better and allocate your resources in the most efficient way. And then to delegation being able to break up the tasks so that not so much falls on any individual or any team and that people are able to achieve some sort of balance within their overall bandwidth in terms of the work they're doing and the work-life balance, because that's also important And that can't be forgotten about in the whole scheme of finding the most efficient way to get work done. So those are excellent, excellent points to point out there. And you know Just looking ahead, and this is going to involve us to put on our kind of thinking caps and speculate here but what future trends should small business owners look to or prepare for to ensure time management and productivity is being optimized in a way that's both sustainable and can work as a value add to their clients?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, i think I can definitely speak on this. Regarding automation, i think it's best to sort of pile it with your own company automating your own functions as we start getting into working with some of our own data on the BD side. I think it's a good thing that we're obviously looking to automate some of that. But the next step could be how do we do that on the client side? I know that some challenges that we have, on the client side at least, is that there's obviously a lot of rules and restrictions about the type of technology you can use, especially around open source software.
Speaker 3:
I think it's important to sort of communicate with your client what you're trying to do and the sort of modes that you're trying to do it with.
Speaker 3:
At least for myself, i definitely use a lot of open source software. My personal opinion I don't think that's a bad thing. A lot of the world is sort of trending that way, especially in the tech world. I think that's something that the government is definitely lacking right now is that accessibility to open source code, which obviously there can be some downfalls there. You don't really want to introduce some malicious code that is just grabbed off the internet from who knows where. But again, i think it's important to sort of communicate with your client what you're trying to do, why you're trying to do it and why it's important for them to sort of implement that, because there are definitely things that at least that we see that can be automated, that do take up a lot of time right now, where, if we can figure out how to sort of shorten that time period that we're working on certain things, we can be better use elsewhere for sure.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, i think the overall digital transformation that the world, the commercial and the government sector is coming to grips with is something that is inevitable at this point. The tide of progress is pushing everything forward, whether you like it or not. Obviously, the government just inherently is an institution that is resistant to sudden changes, and especially sudden changes in operational structure and especially sudden changes in any sort of potential security concerns that may be introduced from something like AI or these open language models and different automation AI that are being developed now. But I think this is where the private sector is going to kind of lead the charge. There is, in my mind, there's no realistic way that the government will not be able to adopt some of these technologies. It's just a matter of, you know, simple competition with our international peers. You know, when you have large rival countries deeply integrating AI into their governmental systems as a way to optimize and make more efficient. You know, critical structures within the government. There's no way to make up that delta with. You know, manual manpower. You have to go, the government's going to have to.
Speaker 1:
You know, take seriously a lot of these really commercially available software options that are out there right now that can just completely streamline so many lines of business, and it's really just about being sensitive to the, like you said, devin, being sensitive to the fact that change will happen, you know, at the government's pace, being transparent with the client around the tools that you know you are using if you're interacting with them. But I think, also for small businesses, it's important to not shy away from, you know, being experimental where you can in terms of optimization and creating more efficiencies in your workflow. You know, for us, we utilize some of these large language models with some of the marketing material that we develop, and it's created a world of difference And, you know, just being open to that option has allowed us to sort of punch above our weight in a lot of ways, and I think that a lot of small businesses feel the same. They feel like these tools are something that is going to be kind of revolutionary in terms of how they're able to position themselves in the market and help deliver more value to their clients. So, you know, i think it's definitely something that can't be ignored, even if you're dealing with a larger institution like the government that may be resistant to some of these new developments.
Speaker 1:
Well, this one's short and sweet. We covered a lot of ground here. I think time management is something that we can all relate to and we will all definitely be speaking to in multiple different ways. But we can go ahead and end it there And thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to the Country Intelligence Report. Please like and subscribe to stay on top of the latest developments with the show. For more information on the Country Intelligence Group, please visit our website at wwwcountryintelcom. You can also be found across multiple social media platforms at Country Intel.