Olivia Chiong

Olivia uses her personal entrepreneurial experience from over 10 years in the events industry and being part of multiple start ups, to help small business owners implement operational and productivity hacks. Her specialty is dissecting busy entrepreneurs and their businesses to show them how to eradicate their pain points, plan and execute an operations strategy, implement productivity tools and free up their time for high value activities. She has written a book titled "The Unbusy Entrepreneur"

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The interesting thing about working with other entrepreneurs is you get to observe and learn from other people’s businesses. Whether this is about operational procedures, technology and software or hiring practises, each business has its own take on the best solution. Here are  common traits I have observed in successful business owners.

  I always sit down on Sunday evenings and open Google calendar to look at how I spent my time last week and my schedule for the coming week. It gives me a good overview of how I can better improve my time management and also what to expect in terms of meetings for the week and clarity on the items on my todo list.

  I meet with a fair amount of entrepreneurs and small business owners every week and one of the common topics that comes up often is how busy they are. Generally when I dig a bit deeper, it turns out that they are busy with things I call Time Sinks.

  Do you ever feel trapped in your business? Perhaps it was all nice and rosy when you started. You loved going to work everyday because it meant exploring new territory and discovering new things. Everything was fantastic and even though it was hard work, it was worth it because you watched your business grow and blossom into a glorious enterprise that you are immensely proud of. The money is good, your staff are great and you feel like you are on top of the world.

Have you ever met someone who delivered such a perfect pitch that you felt inclined to buy the product, sign up for a service or help promote their cause almost immediately?

The other day, an entrepreneur shared with me that he recently discovered he was running the leanest company in his industry. Other companies in the same industry had 3 or 4 times his number of staff, much higher overheads and much lower profits. They also happened to have raised funding.