By Phil Harwood

Do you want to work less and earn more next year? If so, let’s create your strategy right now.

Some of you are business owners or people in positions of significant authority. Your best strategy may be to provide greater opportunities for your people, which will drive more business and more profit. Instead of YOU working harder, you will be creating a compelling situation for your people to work harder or smarter or both. This is a win for them but also a win for you.

Some of you are in positions in your company where there’s not much opportunity to delegate or elevate the people reporting to you. Your best strategy may be to increase your value by adding something tangible to your skill set. This may be further education, a certificate, a license or credential that increases your worth. You may not work less but you will probably earn more.

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Businesses may apply this logic as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to dial back your services or overtime hours and be more profitable? This also requires a strategy and good execution. Some of your customers are not profitable at all while others are barely profitable. Perhaps even entire customer segments are low profit. Bottom line profits will increase simply by eliminating these customers from your list, even if you don’t replace them with higher profit customers.

To promote good execution, introduce dashboards and scorecards for each of your teams. We know that whatever is measured improves. By bringing numbers into your team meetings, you will see a steady improvement In efficiency, productivity, and profits.

For those organizations with a clearly defined mission and values, the “work less, earn more” mindset may not be as obvious, but who doesn’t want to spend more time with family and friends, or devote more time to personal interests outside of work without sacrificing earnings? I believe this to be a universal desire.

What about you? What does next year look like? Do you want to earn more? Do you want to work less? Both? What is your strategy and how will you execute it?

Now go forth.