Young entrepreneurs face challenges their experienced competition does not. For instance, they have spent less time in their industry and have fewer skills and fewer areas of expertise to draw upon as they start their business. Worse, the average workday and workweek for entrepreneurs leave little time to gain those skills or get the training they need.
But many young entrepreneurs are eager to learn and willing to try training ideas and strategies that might be outside the box and outside of a traditional classroom setting. Here are five tips to make your training faster, easier, and more effective to drive your venture to maximum success:
1. Learn to Love Audiobooks
In his landmark book on personal productivity, “The 4-Hour Work Week,” entrepreneur Tim Ferriss coined the term “time famine.” Entrepreneurs suffer from this condition more than any other professional. Finding the time to learn skills, gather information, or even keep up with the trends and news of your industry is difficult.
But every person in the world finds themselves performing activities where their hands are busy but their minds are idle. Some examples from your life might include driving to and from the office, running on the treadmill, and performing household chores. Any time you have an hour, use it to sharpen your mind with audiobooks, podcasts, master class recordings, Webinars, and other training media.
It’s not the same thing as sitting front row in an actual training course, with classmates and an interactive instructor. But it’s better than nothing at all.
The Upgrade: Blinkist is an app that delivers bullet-point summaries of classic and trending books on business and other topics, giving you all the important information in a fraction of the time you would spend reading these books cover to cover. You can use it while waiting in line at the bank, for your Uber, or at the airport on your way to your next big meeting.
2. Schedule Your Sessions Early
Does this situation sound familiar? You scheduled two hours from 1 to 3 p.m. to focus on personal development through a combination of reading and an online course. At 10 a.m., something goes wrong that requires a few hours of your attention, pushing your 10 a.m. meeting to noon. The noon meeting gets pushed 1 p.m., and it goes extra-long because it started late. By the time you have an extra moment, it’s past 3 p.m. and you’ve lost your time for personal development.
This is a common situation for entrepreneurs, executives, and other busy people. The good news is there’s a simple solution: Do your personal development work first thing in the morning. In a variation on the “pay yourself first” idea, get your training done in the hours before the day can get away from you. That way, the demands of your business, staff, and the chaos of entrepreneurship don’t get the chance to interfere with your learning.
The Upgrade: Come into work and do those early scheduled training sessions before anyone is in the office. That way, nobody can interrupt you. These hours are yours and yours alone.
3. Set Timelines with Your Training in Mind
When setting project deadlines and timelines for your business, don’t forget to include time for training and skills you’ll develop in the demands of that timeline. If a project needs 80 hours of your time, and you want to spend five hours a week developing your skills, don’t set a two-week timeline for that project. Instead, set the timeline to include time for your own training.
You also can set this up to incorporate the skills you hope to gain in your own training endeavors, giving you an extra push of encouragement to take the time for yourself and get the training done. For example, if a new product requires you to receive a certification, set the benchmarks for that product’s rollout based on when you receive the certification.
In either case, the core concept is to make your training an integral part of planning the operations of your business.
The Upgrade: The next time you feel a strong desire to learn a specific skill or become an expert in a specific knowledge set, investigate how you can shift the direction of your company to incorporate those skills and knowledge. Build your quarterly plans accordingly, and grow yourself and your venture together.
4. Find a Training Partner
Find a peer and buddy to go through the training with you. There are many advantages of having an accountability buddy. For instance, they can:
- Encourage you to show up by being there waiting
- Help with parts they understand that you find challenging
- Cement the parts you understand by asking for your help
- Keep things in perspective by providing a second opinion
- Keep you accountable for homework and other efforts
- Make the whole process more fun
Even if you can’t find a partner to participate in the same training as you do, you can find a buddy who trains in something else. You can meet for study and accountability sessions on a regular basis, getting most of the benefits of training together while maintaining greater flexibility.
The Upgrade: Create a small business mastermind group in your area, where six to 10 entrepreneurs like yourself help and encourage each other in business and training efforts. This combines the benefits of a single training partner with the larger networking and improved brainstorming of a bigger group.
5. Integrate Metrics Into Your Plan
As a successful entrepreneur, you already understand the importance of metrics and reviewing results to ongoing success. You already do this with the numbers that determine the health of your business. Applying the same concept to your training can help you prioritize and derive the best benefits from what you’ve learned.
Start with metrics based on your training performance. Identify what challenges you in your training endeavors, and put numbers to those factors. If you’re having trouble finding the motivation or time to complete training, track the number of hours you spend per week. If you’re working to master skills with measurable results, track those results. Find the numbers that motivate you, and attach real-time goals to those numbers.
Second, consider what metrics might measure how your newfound skills and knowledge might directly impact your business. For example, if you took a course on content marketing, you could review the metrics of your content funnel related to the changes you made based on what you learned.
The Upgrade: When deciding what kind of training to get, make that decision based on the metrics you want to improve within your business. Leadership authority Stephen Covey advocated to begin with the end in mind: If you begin your training knowing what metrics you want to boost and what improvements you want to make, it informs the entire training experience, and you get more from every minute you spend.
Final Thought
Delegation is another powerful solution. Because this venture was your idea, you have an important role to play and a unique contribution to make. If you truly lack the time to get yourself trained, you can delegate the task either by hiring people who already have the skills your company needs or by sending one of your loyal staff members to get training for themselves.
Maine-based Walter Kennedy started his business mowing lawns in college. He had a successful lawn care business for more than a decade and now has moved onto other industries.
