“I don’t have the time and money to start my own business.” People tell me that all the time to explain why they are not following their dreams and starting their own business. However, a more accurate answer is that they don’t believe that they have enough time or money to start their business. Instead of viewing your constraints as an impediment, view them as opportunities.

In the $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau presents tons of examples of people who started businesses with almost no capital investment. This makes sense since many businesses don’t really require capital to get up and running, generally only the cost of registering a domain name, hosting it, creating a website using WordPress.org, and setting up a business email account. Have a look at this post for more information: Build and Set Up a Website (the Easy Way). But essentially, I use Namecheap for domain registration, Hostpapa.ca for hosting and Zoho Mail for business email.

Ian Pribyl in From Nothing describes some of the steps to get your website up and running, but my suggestion is to use Divi which is a WordPress.org plugin which includes tons website templates which will greatly accelerate the process to make a winning website for your business. The time savings more than offset its cost.

As a general rule, service businesses are generally significantly less capital intensive than retail or manufacturing ones as you don’t need to purchase inventory in advance hoping to make a profit reselling it. $150 or less is likely enough to get your service business off the ground. And even for that amount, it is possible that some of it can be paid over time.

Parkinson’s Rule establishes that tasks take the time allocated to them to be completed. So to say, if you give yourself a short deadline to get something done, you will likely be able to do it in that amount of time. As an aside, this also applies to monetary constraints. Just think of the difference in cost to complete a construction project for a business where money really matters to when it is done for the government when it unfortunately matters much less.

You will be amazed by how much you can do to with just a couple of hours a week of high quality, distraction-free time. You might think that tasks completed in two hours would be of a significantly lower calibre than those completed in six, but the big surprise is that it’s often not the case. There might be a slight difference in the quality of the work product, but the difference may not be meaningful enough to justify the substantial difference in allotted time. This is due to the Theory of Diminishing Marginal Returns which establishes that once a certain threshold is met, the benefit derived for each additional input is less than that derived from the previously added input.

Let’s take a simple example of raking a yard full leaves. During the first hour, each time you rake, there is a meaningful and important impact as the area goes from being full leaves to not having just about any left at all. Once you have completed this first pass of the yard, the next pass will still remove some leaves but much less. This is not because you aren’t working as hard, but rather because there just aren’t as many leaves left to rake (as compared to at the start.) This is all the more true for the third pass in which there are even less leaves to rake. Taking a step back, the lion’s share of the work was completed on the first pass with the following passes bettering the outcome, but each having an incrementally smaller impact.

In a pinch, the outcome after one pass would likely have been acceptable had you simply stopped then.

Applying this same principle to working on tasks for your business, try to figure out how long it would take you to do the equivalent of that first pass for a given task. This amount of time is really all that you need to have it completed at an acceptable level. Had you had more time available, you may very well try to do the additional passes, but because you lack it, you will just have to be content with the equivalent of a single pass.

From a time management perspective, your goal needs to be to determine what level of work product is required for a given task and then to allocate only the time to bring you to that level of quality. It is only a very select few tasks which require your highest quality output, the great majority really don’t benefit from that small marginal increase in quality. For the majority then, work to the acceptable quality level and then focus your attention on the next most pressing task.

This also gives you another way to approach the need for capital investment and whether it will provide you with sufficient return to justify its cost.

Returning to our raking example, would renting (or buying) a leaf blower justify its cost in terms of time saved. Let’s say that each pass raking normally takes one hour, so to say three hours to complete the entire yard. Now, let’s imagine that the leaf blower allows you to do the entire job in 30 minutes at a cost of $30 to rent the tool.

Without a time constraint, you may not really consider this option since why not just do the job in three hours. But with a time constraint of, let’s say, one hour, suddenly expending some capital to save time to complete the job becomes more attractive. Moreover, you see the low hourly rate which you be otherwise paying yourself ($10/h) which is the constraint forced you to explore.

Naturally, another option is also to hire people to do the work. This is an alternative means of deploying capital through the hiring of labour. Once again, if lower quality output is acceptable, this is all the more reason to focus your time on other tasks, leaving the tasks which don’t require the absolute best product to other people. This isn’t because other people necessarily do lower quality work than you, but rather because they don’t know the business as well as you do, so there is more time needed to supervise and review their work to make it be exactly as you would have do it in the first place.

Both of these examples demonstrate how constraints provide alternative solutions to addressing problems. So, put your thinking cap on and try to see the best way to get your business up and running with the constraints that you have.