Instructor: "Handsome" Hal Huhn

Article: Time Management

Time management makes leisure a growth industry

The Globe and Mail, Monday, March 20, 2000


It is a striking fact that leisure no longer increases with income.
Those who have more income tend to work longer and harder for it. The new scarcity is time and therefore there are business opportunities in time management. To that end, we offer concepts for the new age:

1. Time architecture: A service that would help individuals reconstruct their days and weeks, set priorities, find time for important activities, and rebalance the 24-hour days from peaks of crises to longer periods when the same work can be done. The business could serve owner/operators who find themselves slaves to their businesses and have almost no personal time.

The firm might subcontract to time managers, a.k.a. personal assistants, to manage the time-consuming trivialities of life from running to the dry cleaners to getting the kids to the dentist. Call this one a personal nanny.

2. Home administrators for those who are seldom there: For road warriors who seldom get home, everything from paying bills to washing windows is a serious time challenge. Few professionals can afford full-time maids or butlers, but many could afford a combination administrator/butler who would appear at fixed intervals to do what a resident administrator/owner does.

3. Car fleet management systems for the small business: Multivehicle families are common; keeping the fleet up to warranties, tires inflated, antifreeze checked, body work done, insurance paid. The work is computer-based and administrative and could be sold as a value-added service through tire and battery dealers, auto repair shops, and automobile dealerships. The value to the repair industry is that they can sell their services, to dealers it's making appropriate offers. This is a volume business that would involve low unit cost. If successful, it could be franchised.

4. Purchasing assistants: A development in the consumer's end of the retail world made possible by the rise of firms such as priceline.com, which make it possible to bid for airline tickets through a variety of vendors.

Other auction services such as eBay, numerous vertical stores and sites on the web, and the digital catalogues maintained by Land's End and L.L. Bean expand the potential shopping region globally.

That's the shopping opportunity, but few people whose time matters will take the time to exploit the global market. That's where purchasing assistants come in. Each assistant could have a sign-up fee and a transaction-based commission based on amount saved in comparison with a local price standard. The market for the service would be buyers from busy professionals to small firms that don't have purchasing departments of their own.

5. Communications management: For the person or business with phones, fax machine, perhaps a cable modem, cell phones, pagers, call forwarding, and portable computing devices with wireline and wireless connections, potential communications costs are large, excess capacity is immense and potential for savings are huge. And while large firms can employ managers to balance capacity and cost, small firms are usually at the mercy of ads, the Yellow Pages and hunches. Into this space, the wise communications consultant can move, charging a fraction of sums saved for a period of months after a system is modified compared to what it was before. Where capacity and cost go up, a different pricing schedule for services may be applied. In the world of optical fibre networks, where capacity is increasing explosively, it will be possible for a single cable to handle every home and most small firms' communications. The problem will be buying services economically from what one can anticipate will be a host of proliferating resellers.

6. Computer recycling: The growing mountain of perfectly sound computing hardware shows that functionality now deteriorates much faster than metal rusts. The world continues to build up mountains of used computers, old servers, printers and peripherals. Of course, the value of an IBM 386 is questionable, for they tend not to be able to handle state-of-the-art applications or to run web applications. But in such functions as intelligent switches for home utilities, complex task scheduling, and small systems telecoms management, the old hardware still works. In this business, the costs of equipment are modest, but the need for ingenuity is high. The potential for whizzy results remain high. And for equipment that can't be turned into something useful, there's always demolition, for computers contain useful amounts of steel, copper and gold.

7. Risk adviser: The down-side of making money as rapidly as possible is ignoring risks of loss. Insurance companies help their larger business clients reduce employee injuries, cut fire losses and reduce lawsuit exposure. Families with substantial homes and small- and medium-sized firms can make use of the same advice, billed on an hourly rate or sold as a value-added benefit to insurance brokers for resale with commission to their clients.

8. High-end coffee bars: The extended lunch hour is going the way of the siesta. What's needed as a replacement is the quiet, restful restaurant where time briefly stands still, where executives can take guests for a chat without losing half an afternoon. The knack: lose the lunch and substitute an elegant coffee hour. To that end, elegant coffee shops would be acceptable venues for serious business. These would not be the familiar franchised coffee bars. Instead, imagine one very different where waiters would wear waist-to-floor aprons, barmen would tend huge copper espresso machines towering over marble counters, and Mozart and Handel would play softly. Behind immaculate display cases there would be chocolate Sachertortes, mocha Doboschtortes and sultry strudels. The trick is to price the product high enough to reflect the costs of turning out the very best coffees and cakes and, incidentally, to maintain a sense of exclusivity. With high margins, modest traffic should produce good returns for investors.


Copyright 2000 | The Globe and Mail

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