Business books are full of advice about what to measure about your business in order to track its success or drive it towards specific initiatives. One of the most precious assets of business that is often not tracked nearly closely enough is time. I own a consulting company so the tracking of time is our core business—it’s the only thing we sell. Once I moved from being an employee to being a consultant, I had a greater appreciation of how time is spent. I am also very conscious about how I spend my time, right down to the minute.

Consultants must justify how they spend their time because the customers paying for their time expect to understand the value they are getting for their money. Imagine if your employees tracked their time daily and were asked to justify how they deployed their most precious resource. I think there would be a lot fewer meetings!

The business of print has a set of unique challenges. There is the urgency of the daily orders that need to be manufactured and shipped that keeps much of the company operating in the here and now. The challenge this presents is when the entire company is sucked into the here and now—with not enough leadership looking at how to create a better tomorrow. Every print manufacturing business needs the operational resources who are tasked with processing jobs on a day-to-day basis. Every print business also needs strategic resources that are measuring how time is being deployed by all the human resources in the business.