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Lessons From “The Four Hour Work Week” For Small Businesses

Frank Gothmann

March 17, 2014

Tim Ferris’ ‘The Four Hour Work Week’ has become one of the most read business productivity books in recent times. In the book, Ferris provides excellent suggestions on how to free up time and control in exchange for passive income generation and freedom. Unlike what is popularly perceived, the Four Hour Work Week is not a ‘Get rick quick’ book and instead provides business owners with excellent ideas on things that they could be doing to bring greater sanity to their lives. As someone who has largely benefitted from the book, here are some takeaways that you should be applying to your business.

Maximize Output With Minimum Input

One of the key recommendations made by Ferris in his book is that people must minimize their work while ensuring maximum output. Why check emails fifty times a day when you can surf through all of them at one go? Why allocate an hour for status update meetings every day when an email could suffice? Ferris says that by minimizing your input, you are freeing up your time to do things that you may have not been able to do otherwise. In doing so, you will be able to invest this free time on to other activities of business that could potentially make you more money than what you do currently.

Outsource Everything

This is one advice that small business owners are most wary about. That’s because as business owners, we are too uneasy about letting an employee or a third party contractor do the work that we can do ourselves. Ferris points out that by outsourcing all our non-core tasks, we are freeing up our time to do tasks that bring better value. To give you an example, I was in charge of handling the technology back-end of a mid-sized firm recently. One of the tasks involved upgrading their system to SharePoint 2013. Typically, I get these things done myself. However, I figured that by outsourcing this part to a third party, I could save myself several hours of the month which I could use to work on new projects. It worked and by my estimate, I increased my revenue by close to 15% although I had to spend money in outsourcing the project.

Make Income Generation Passive

Another important lesson from the book is that your income generation does not have to be tied to the number of hours you work. Ferris tells us that by creating a process that can help you make money without intervention, you are going to free up lots of time that can be better spent at vacationing or better, working on other similar product ideas. This is one of the ideas that has come under extreme criticism from critics. However, it is not entirely unrealistic. If small business owners can execute the other two ideas mentioned earlier (minimizing input and outsourcing everything), they are likely to have mastered the art of automating their income generation process. As a matter of fact, most businesses that graduate from being small businesses to medium or large businesses have been able to do so primarily because the owner found a way to automate the income generation (through the work of other employees)

The Four Hour Work Week may be a misleading title. However, small businesses have a lot of lessons to learn from this book that can in turn help the owners get better at executing their operations through outsourcing and minimizing their own hours at work. Have you read this book? What are your views? Tell us in the comments.

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