All Hands On Deck

Over the years, I’ve learnt to delegate and free up my time. Basically half my week is spent on critical tasks and the rest is flexible. Mostly, the clear space in my diary is used to help promote DrivenByQ. Sometimes I attend networking events or engage in social media for example. The reason I work this way is so I am approachable if something unexpected crops up. Additional demand on my time or the business doesn’t cause a crisis and I’m available to lend a hand if need be.

Last week, this strategy paid dividends because the level of work we had increased dramatically and I was required to contribute some long hours as a driver. Really we should have seen it coming but being so close to Easter we thought things would be fairly quiet. On reflection the Chancellor delivered his budget and the 5 April year-end was approaching so maybe we should have anticipated a blip in the level of corporate travel required at short notice?

In our booking system we have a button labelled ‘stats’ that brings up a snapshot of our business for the previous and upcoming seven, fourteen and thirty days, it also compares how the company was operating at the same time a year previous. On one hand it delivers our Key Performance Indicators so we can see if anything is off track but on the other hand it also helps us anticipate or plan for seasonal changes.

This time last year our figures included two of our biggest customers hosting conferences and one other major customer had an unusual peak in their demand for travel. The turnover was encouraging and we didn’t expect to be up on those figures this year. In fact we are up by around 20% and to top the week off we had a three car booking from a potential new customer. So it looks as though the time I leave as disposable might well be used on ‘new driver training’ and keeping the ‘team dynamic’ that can be felt as we continue to grow.