Juggling is a great business skill to have!

Do you find you have commercial, operational and technical debt left in your wake?

In this article, we’re going to look at one of those key things that people don’t realise. And that is what happens when you’re juggling your time.

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Now, juggling your time is one of those excellent business skills to have because let’s face it, we don’t have all the time in the world. Time is probably the most precious thing we have at our disposal. But here’s the thing, you got to be careful about how you juggle your time. Otherwise, what you might be finding is wrongly juggling. That snippet of time here and a snippet of time there inevitably leaves crucial elements on the table that you need to be dealing with now. And this is where you can find an organisation that has high commercial, operational or technical debt.

Now what we mean by these levels of debt? Well, commercial liability is simple, and most people know about this already. It is where you’re leaving money on the table, to fund business expenses, asset acquisition and improvements. It is common for businesses to accumulate commercial debt when first starting out. Now, when you have this commercial debt, there are many people around to help you deal with managing that. And there’s probably also a good focus on its reporting on this debt. Because usually, this sort of financial reporting is one of the critical things you should already have in your organisation.

What about the other two? What about operational debt or technical debt, are these things that you’re currently tracking inside your organisation? When it comes down to operational debt or technical debt? These are the things that you didn’t quite get to finish the things that don’t quite work well. The workarounds you put in place, it’s like the Beer matt under the wonky table effectively, because you’ve got your organisation running, you’ve gone through some change to make it even better, but you still haven’t got it right. There are still things that that is causing you problems and causing your organisation pain, and this is the technical and operation debts.

Now, with some business owners and entrepreneurs I work with, they have this way of being able to look at their business. And they will, they will go from one great idea to the other great idea. From one shiny object to another shiny object, and behind them, they are leaving this trail of devastation in their business. Then wake up one day to find out that is costing them lots of money, because they haven’t fixed these problems. And when they try to fix these problems after the event to inevitably requires even more money and time.

“So what!” you might be thinking. Well, one of the critical things is actually to make decisions about what debt you are carrying. What debt you are not caring, and also to make sure that you have this all logged down somewhere so you can go back and review regularly. And then when you’ve got the opportunity to clear out some of that debt, do so. So that you’re no longer paying the interest and overcharges. Because, this type of debt will cripple your organisation by reducing your velocity, reducing your flexibility and ultimately cost you a lot more money. And, I’m sure that’s something you don’t want for your organisation.

Therefore, you’re going to make sure you’re clear out your commercial, operational and technical debt. Are you going to be tracking these things going forward? Are you going to log and report on these types of debts so at least you know what debt you’re carrying? Are you just going to continue to ignore it and only worry about it when you get out final demand letter?