Business and Financial News

Think you’re busy? The consummate multitasker? Well, meet Brenda Grigsby. Grigsby owns five businesses, and 6 a.m. finds her happily in bed, typing e-mail with one hand and working a cup of coffee with the other. “It’s my way of finding out what my day is going to look like and what I need to prioritize,” says Grigsby. “For me, it’s actually relaxing.”

If only we could all conquer the madness as serenely as Grigsby. Basex, a New York-based business research firm, estimates information overload costs the U.S. economy $900 billion a year in lost productivity and stifled innovation. “It’s not just e-mail overload, it’s too much content, not being able to find things when you search, and interruptions, which is one of the largest culprits,” says Jonathan Spira, chief analyst for Basex. “You can lose more than 25% of the day from interruptions alone.” While a simple 30-second interruption may seem trivial, the real time-waster comes when you try to retrain your attention on the task at hand. Research from Basex shows that recovery time from a seemingly minor interruption is 10 to 20 times longer than the interruption itself. Even if you’re only dealing with a half-dozen interruptions in your day—well, there goes an hour.

Yet some entrepreneurs excel at finding the calm at the center of the storm. Or storms. We found a number of business owners, each of whom owns at least two businesses, who have developed a methodology to wring order out of chaos. If they can do it, we figured, so can the rest of us.

There is some evidence, however, that entrepreneurs who thrive while running two or more businesses are hardwired to handle multiple information streams in a way that others may not be. Entrepreneurs who own more than one company “need more stimulation, more brain food, more challenges that will allow them to really stretch their imagination,” says Debra Condren, a business psychologist. “It keeps them feeling passionate about their work as opposed to feeling sated, like eating the same food every day. They want variety.” In other words, one man’s hopeless confusion is another man’s smorgasbord.

But even if they’re naturally more comfortable being bombarded with information than their peers, these entrepreneurs consciously delegate, structure their day, and leverage technology to keep the work flowing smoothly. In the following pages, we’ll show you how they do it. Finding a method that works for you can help your business reclaim hours you never even knew were gone.

CHOREOGRAPH THE DAY

Grigsby manages her five companies as if she were born to juggle. Her largest venture is Moonlight Mailing & Printing—a $4.3 million, 22-employee firm—followed by Northwest Design Group, a four-employee, $1.3 million commercial interior design firm. Grigsby also owns a pet boarding facility, a drive-through coffee shop, and a residential construction company. All are within 20 miles of her home in Bend, Ore. “I love having a lot going on,” she says. “It’s fun, mentally stimulating, and challenging.”

Grigsby carefully structures her days to manage the streams of information coming at her from five different directions. By sunrise, she’s already digging into scores of e-mails—likening the morning habit to perusing the newspaper. “I can see if there were any crises overnight that I need to address before getting to work in the morning,” she says.

By 9 a.m. Grigsby is at the desk in her office, surrounded by tall bookcases stacked with binders of financial reports for her various companies. She runs daily meetings with each department head at Moonlight Mailing & Printing. Her bookkeeper, who manages all five companies, provides a daily cash report. Grigsby holds weekly huddles with managers of the other four companies to stay abreast of finances, marketing ideas, and any other pressing issues. By 4 p.m., she’s reviewing the next day’s production schedules for Moonlight.

All five companies use the same lawyer and accountant. Grigsby tries to let her managers handle most of the day-to-day operations so she can focus on keeping the companies growing.

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