Nearly every business wants to scale up—more is better, right? But growing a business can take more than just a good market and a lot of hours at the office. Growing a business involves understanding how to leverage your position in your particular market.

But you can’t do this unless you know how to leverage your own business.

Remember that Physics class you took back in high school Chances are you learned a little bit about levers.

A lever is a simple machine that MAGNIFIES force. They are made of a rigid bar(lever arm) a pivot point (fulcrum), a load force, and an effort force.

What aspects of your business would you define as being the bar, the fulcrum, the load force, and the effort force?

The “bar” would be your business design… how you conceive and organize your business. The “load force” is your actual business—what you’re trying to get to move! And the “effort force” is you and all those hours spent at the office.

But what about the fulcrum?

In Physics, you should have learned that the distance of the fulcrum from the load force determines how much effort needs to be exerted (effort force). In other words, it comes down to the placement of the fulcrum in the overall process that determines the ease with which to move the heavy object at the other end.

Got it?

If your business isn’t moving, you need to take a look at the fulcrum; it’s time to re-evaluate the system.

Again, any system you use should do the following: help to delegate and automate tasks and responsibilities. But far too often, people in our business don’t understand what this is, or what shape it should take. It’s the running your business like a business, instead of a hobby thing that we discussed earlier.

A useful approach in thinking about a system, and determining what kind to use, is to consider your time on task. I don’t mean, time working your business in general. What I am getting at here is time that you are focused on revenue producing activities.

Think about your day as being made up of non-productive time vs. productive time. Earlier I mentioned how as owners of a real estate investing company, we can easily fall into the trap of thinking that we need to do or oversee EVERYTHING. So much of our business appears to be outside of our control, that it is only natural that we want direct involvement in all aspects of the business. But such micromanaging is ultimately wasteful and non-productive.

At some point, we’ve probably all thought about losing weight. But before you can lose it, you have to understand what it is you are eating. A way to do this is to record what you eat during the week. I know that when I did this, I assumed I was keeping my caloric intake down by going easy on breakfast and lunch. I never suspected how I was blasting my caloric intake out to space by the types of food I’d eat for dinner!

You can follow a similar process in examining how efficiently you work in your business.

During my first job out of college, I was working for a prominent company involved in providing a broad range of financial services to clients. As part of my training that first year, there was plenty of talk about how much of the day was focused on revenue producing activities. Our trainer asked us to keep a daily journal broken down into 15-minute increments. It was our goal for three days to keep track of everything we did during the workday, and I mean everything. Stops at the snack machine, bathroom breaks, calls from home, etc.

Did it drive all of us a little crazy? You bet. But when we got back together the following week, it was surprising how much time we spent each day not doing the things we needed to do to make money. Most of us were taking our vacations 10 minutes at a time and then complaining about our lack of time off!

Consider trying the same activity. Get a small pad of paper that you can keep with you and record each 20-minute segment throughout the workday. I think that you’ll be surprised and alarmed by what you find.

As you learn to identify those tasks that are not revenue producing, you’ll begin to understand those parts of your day that are. This is where you need to begin rethinking your business design and the system you need to create to earn what you want to earn.

Think back to the previous section about the automotive industry. How many money-making producing steps are there in our real estate business… Nine? Do you think that since these steps are relatively the same for each deal that perhaps a system could be developed to expedite each?

This is how you begin to leverage your business so that it performs they way you desire in the market.

To increase the leverage of your business, you need to clearly understand what business activities generate more money than what they cost. Likewise, you need to find a way to make your money producing activities more profitable without adding significant expenses.

It’s not just delegating, or automating that leads to leveraging your business to produce and grow, it’s being able to see what areas of your business are non-productive as well as productive. You need to address these areas by developing a framework to serve your needs, making it complete by adding the tools and people needed to run the system.

Remember the fulcrum.