Are you keeping your contacts (family and friends, business, investments and passion interests) sufficiently up to date on your value today to others? My strong anecdotal evidence suggests less than 10% of the “contacts” in most entrepreneurs and investors databases could recite in two or three sentences their contemporary value. Perhaps 2% to 3% in language that might trigger someone with a need for that value to ask them for an introduction. That is a dynamic problem in that the 27 year old might have 750 to 1500 contacts of obvious interest after a 5-year career and prior education but the 52 year old might have 3,000 to 5,000 names, most collecting dust in their databases. If you are not triaging your folders and lists at a minimum every 6 months (ideal, unknown, no value) and prompting updates, can you be said to be really maximising your potential?

There are a great many highly successful entrepreneurs who might be described as “cash rich, time poor”. By that I mean they routinely lose sight of what drives their business wealth and what is intellectually interesting but does not meaningfully impact it. When prompted to examine the “return on time invested” in key profitable growth initiatives not the return on capital, it pretty soon comes clear that there is an awful lot of time in any given week or month (meetings, calls, events etc) devoted to moderate or low business wealth creation activities. Just as looking at a monthly bank statement tells an uncomfortable but intellectually honest assessment of cash collection, so the same rigour when done weekly or monthly challenges the entrepreneur to be honest with themselves about the productive use of their time. None of us are getting younger, maximise the effectiveness of the time we have on the most important items.