After recently winning the 42 under 42 award which is for pioneering business owners and entrepreneurs, our CEO wanted to share what his average day is like as a business owner - because running a business takes a lot of work. There are plenty of tasks to be done, and never enough time to do them all! That’s why it’s important to prioritise your tasks. We’ll take you on a journey of the average working day for Eye Lounge’s CEO, Scott Woodhead.
When Scott arrives at the office, after greeting the team members, the first thing to be done is catch up with emails, messages, and urgent calls for the day. This might sound like a menial task, but when you have a business to run – it can take hours! To be honest, he’s admitted that this isn’t his favourite part of the job, so to make it just a little more exciting, he does it while sitting in a hammock. Not only does he get to enjoy the comfy hammock, but the gentle swing engages the vestibular system – so it helps him focus on the task at hand.
After this is done and everyone in the team is a little more lively having caught up with their own tasks for the morning. Scott catches up with the team, what this involves may vary day to day but consists of tasks such as checking in with the marketing team to approve materials such as newsletters, promotional ideas, or brochure designs. This is also a chance for anyone in the team to raise any issues they might have come across in their respective departments, such as tracking stock levels or website maintenance. One of these tasks might include checking that the product photography is up to date on our online store, or checking over email reports to see if our new product ranges are generating interest with our customers. For example, our customers showed a lot of interest in our dry AMD bundle email – this helps us to know what kinds of things you’d like to see us offer next.
Next, it’s time for a quick tea break. Before lunch is the perfect time to do tasks that you don’t really enjoy doing – that way you can look forward to a more productive afternoon. So, after catching up with the team, Scott might investigate the more analytical data by working with numbers and updating spreadsheets etc. We won’t bore you with this detail, though this stage sets us up for the next task after lunch. Businesses don’t want to remain static and dwindle in the market, to grow the business you’ll need to be more dynamic and open to changes. So, this is the time to strategize and think of new ideas and research the market. This might involve looking at new products, distributing the products and retailing options.
Of course, there’s a lot more to running the business than what’s mentioned here – but this was just to give you a generalised idea of what it might involve. One person can’t run a business on their own, so it’s essential for Scott to do some planning for the days ahead, by delegating tasks to others where needed and preparing for the next day. Lastly, what’s a business without customers? Scott is always keen to hear how our products have helped transform the lives of our customers and helped them with their vision problems. He can check this by liaising with the customer service team who take the calls, or by investigating our Trustpilot. Hearing these stories keeps us going, and pushes us to continually improve our services.