Do you feel overwhelmed with your ambition to grow your business? All of us only have 24 hours each day, but you still feel like you need more… what should you do?
In this video, I’m sharing my top tips on how I valued my time and grow my business.
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Transcription:
If you’re an entrepreneur and you feel overwhelmed, I can understand that there is a bit of a disconnect between your amb ition and the reality of your time constraints. And that’s what I want to cover in this video, how you can value your time to get more of your time back. And how do you deal with the whole challenge of being in business and wanting to do so much, but feeling like you just can’t get everything done. Now, if you don’t know about us, we are itGenius. We’re a small and medium sized business consultancy. And what we do is we help small and medium business owners with technology and productivity and helping you get things on the right track. Now we are based in Australia, but we serve businesses all over the world. And we help entrepreneurs like you be more productive, we help you get things on track and help your business to be more successful. Now primarily, we work with a piece of technology called Google W orkspace. And we also help with other technology and tools around the Google ecosystem to help you be more successful. And one of the frameworks that we use is called the growth roadmap. And that is that no matter what stage of business you’re at, we know that you’re going to have different challenges along the way. And we want to help you with the right technology strategy along each one of those milestones. Now, myself, I’ve grown a multimillion dollar recurring revenue business, and I’m now enjoying semi retirement and I love giving back to the small business community. And so this is my way of sharing with you what’s been successful for us so that hopefully you can build a better business. Now let’s get back to talking about time. And time is the only resource that we can’t get more of. And as business owners, we have ideas, but sometimes those ideas exceed the amount of time that we actually have. And because we can’t just magically buy more time ourselves, we have to buy time through others, we need to focus on something called leverage. And so to create more time, we need to involve others in our business, so we can get the leverage of having their labor time helping us out with getting things done. So you can check out some of our other videos on delegation and around making sure that you as a business owner, are not the one doing absolutely everything. And if you haven’t already checked out our playlists on our YouTube channel, you will be able to see different playlists for different stages of business. So no matter where you are on the growth roadmap, we’ll have some education to help you out. I remember when I was an early stage entrepreneur, and I was growing and building my business. Now I’d have 16 or 20 hour days, I’d hardly have any sleep. And it was kind of at the stage of business where I had all of the ambition and all of the will to build things. But I just didn’t have all of the pieces in place to really grow a successful business. And what I thought was, the harder I worked, the more successful I would be. And so I just spent hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours working. And it ended up being well, it was pretty detrimental to my health. And if you scroll back through some old videos on our YouTube channel, you’ll see what the old version of Pete looks like. And some people ask if that’s my brother, no, it’s actually made just me with an extra 40 kilos. One person said to me once, if you were to put five things on your hand, and they are family, growing a successful business and learning lots of money, looking after your body, looking after your social connections, and having time for holidays and travel, pick three of those things, and you get to do three, but not all five. And for me, the thing that I let go of was getting enough sleep, and also looking after my body and looking after my health. But when I was able to grow a successful business, I then kind of went through a bit of a shift where I went back and filled in some of the blanks of the things that I hadn’t looked after. But I want to try and share with you some strategies so that you don’t have to let your health or other areas of your life go to the wayside while you’re building a business. And this is my video to do just that. So time equals freedom, right? And if you can master time, then you get more freedom. Now, what can we do with more freedom? Well, you’re probably not going to be playing golf all day or sitting around on the beach, unless you want to do that. But let me tell you, it gets bored after a couple of weeks. And you you know, start to lose some of the mental capacity that you have when you’re engaged in tasks. So I would say if you’re someone who knows what you want as a goal life, you know what’s like your dream life that you’d like to live? Is it lots of time with family? Is it lots of time for travel? Is it lots of time pursuing other interests outside of your primary business, maybe the hobbies that you’ve let go by the wayside while you’ve launched this business? Well, that’s freedom to me is really be able to do what I want, when I want with who I want and not having to worry about money or income. And I’m very glad to be in that position now, where the recurring revenue, which is in the millions of dollars from our businesses, pays me an amazing income to do what I want with my life. And I get to do things that really enjoy and engage me and I don’t have to worry about working for the man and I never ever feel Monday itis. So, if time equals freedom, then discipline with time is what creates that freedom. And so when you have time discipline, then you’re able to create the freedom. And so I’m going to share some strategies with you on how you can have more time discipline, and that’s going to help you know filter and echo into the different areas of your business. So if you’re the kind of person who wants to Spend your time with a lot more leisure time, then you really need to have your business have a system for creating money that doesn’t involve you. Now we created a video recently, and I’ll link that down below on why if you’re selling time, that’s the biggest mistake that you can make in your business. But really, once you’re out of that trap of selling time, you need to create a business that is one day going to work without you. And it doesn’t have to work without you 24 seven, I still do a couple of days a week in our business, but I can disappear for weeks or even months if I want, and the business will still run, still generate income still grow and still service our customers. And so how do I do that? Well, it’s because I’ve created a business system, it’s a business that will actually work with the right people on the right seats on the bus, so that it will keep going even without me there. And we all know that if a business is completely reliant on the founder of the business, well, then it’s not really a business at all. It’s really just kind of like a job. And maybe you’ve got a lot of assistants around you if you’ve got lots of stuff, right. And so a real business is a business with a team, you do need to build a team. And that doesn’t mean you have to hire full time employees, it might be a matter of hiring. I don’t like the term virtual assistants. But let’s say international team members who can help you from anywhere in the world who may have more advantageous labor rates, who you can use to build a faster growing team, we happen to hire a lot of people in the Philippines, which is a popular choice for people in the Asia Pacific region. Now, when you grow a team around you, that’s the kind of business where other people can take on the roles like marketing and finance in sales and delivery. And then bit by bit, you’re taking hats off, and you’re giving these things to other people. And we’ve got other videos on how to delegate and how to create systems in the business. Now, if you’re operational in the business in some way, that means you have a job. Now I have a job, there’s nothing wrong with having a job. My job is the CEO and the founder. Now one day, I’m not going to be the CEO, they’ll be another CEO. And I get to kind of step back and let that person do that. And I’ll just be the founder or just be the chairman of the board at that point. But right now, I’m the CEO, and I’ve got the responsibilities. But I would say right now for you, you probably don’t just have one job, you probably got about 10 jobs you’re delivering you’re doing the customer service, you’re doing the management, you’re doing the leadership of the team, you’re doing the sales, you’re doing the marketing, you’re doing the finance. And so what we want to do is bit by bit, start taking those hats off. And when we start taking those hats off to a process of delegation, and creating systems, so the business runs without us, that’s when we start to have more and more freedom. Remember that every task that you delegate, if it’s a one hour a week task, and it takes you an hour to delegate it to someone else, you’re going to get compounding interest on that time, because you’ve delegated the task not only this week, but every week moving forward. And so you’ve just one back an hour per week, each week moving forward, how do we know which tasks to delegate? Well, I’m going to take you through a very simple method to get your juices flowing, what kind of tasks you can maybe move on to someone else to help you out with, so you’re not taking them all on yourself. And this is called the 2018 method. Now, this is similar to the 8020 method, it’s got a nice little ring to it. But 2018 is roughly equivalent to 52 weeks, times 40 hours. Now, I’m not saying we all should be working 52 weeks of the year. I don’t believe that. And I know that entrepreneurs are definitely working more than 40 hours if you’re an early stage starter in the business. And so we want to try and find a bit of an equilibrium, right? I know that for most people, you’re not going to take extended holidays in the early years of business. And you’re probably going to be working more hours that but let’s set that as a goal to try and work for 40 hours now 40 hours times 52 weeks is 2080. And that number is a special number because that basically gives you the total number of hours that you have each year for productive work in your business. And so that’s not that many 2000 is not a big number. And what that means is for every hour that you are working in the business, you need to generate a certain number of dollars for that hour. So here’s how we’re going to calculate it. Take your yearly revenue, your yearly total sales, and this is your projected total sales for the business. And this includes everyone, if you’ve got multiple employees, you take the total projected 12 months revenue for your business now you should have some financial goals, write that number down. And from there, we are going to divide it by 2080. So what we’re doing is we’re dividing our revenue by the number of hours that we have available in the business. And so each year you now know how many dollars you need to generate for each hour that you’re involved in a business. Now, yes, you may not be the only person selling your time in the business, you may have other people working for you and other people working, you know generating income and that’s fine. You as the CEO is the founder of this business. You are the person responsible for generating a commercial result equivalent to that many dollars for each hour that you are a part of the business. So this is your new hourly rate. And once you have your new hourly rate, well now you know what jobs are not worth Doing on your new hourly rate. If right now you’re charging out to customers for your time for less than an hourly rate, well, then it’s time for you to potentially delegate that to someone else. If you’re doing any other tasks inside your business, or any tasks in your home that are worth less than that hourly rate, well, then it’s maybe it’s time to delegate those as well. Now, I like to recommend the first time you do this exercise to write down three things you’re doing at work. And three things you’re doing at home that are worth less than that hourly rate. And what I mean by that is, you could get someone else to do it for less than that hourly rate. Now, are you currently the person who’s vacuuming your house, maybe you could hire a cleaner, or you the person who’s cooking meals, maybe you could hire a cook. If you’re doing something in the business like bookkeeping, and you could hire a bookkeeper to do that. Maybe it’s time to outsource that, if you’re doing things in your Google workspace account that you could pass them off to somebody else like it genius, well, maybe it’s time to Palm that off to someone else there as well. So write down three things in the business and three things that you’re doing at home, which don’t meet your new hourly rate. And with each one of those, we’re going to take a little tip from Tim Ferriss there, we’re going to either automate, delegate, or delete, remember, you can just say no to some tasks. And so can you find a way to automate these? Can you create a system? Can you create or make use of a piece of technology which will automate this? Or can you delegate it, so it’s someone else’s job, that’s the easiest one, or Thirdly, can you potentially just stop doing it, that’s the way to work out the value of your time and then immediately start pushing things down to other people. Now, I want to give you a little bonus tip here. And this is another way for you to find out tasks that you may be doing, which are not good use of your time. Now, there’s a free app that you can install on your computer. And you may choose to upgrade to the pro version if you see benefits in that, but the free one is absolutely fine. And that free app is called rescue time. And if you go to rescue time.com, and install this little app on each one of your computers, that’s going to allow you to see exactly where you’re spending your time during the work day. Now it’s going to count every app that you’re using. And it’s going to count up the number of seconds that you’re using each app for. And at the end of the week, it’s going to give you a productivity report. Now Apple and Android have recently built in these kind of tools into their mobile operating systems to help people who are having trouble with how much time they spend on their phones. But I’ve been using rescuetime on my computer for 10 years now. And what this app does is it tells me exactly where my time is going. And so I know if I’m spending my time being productive, or if I’m goofing off, it also highlights to me that you know, sometimes when I log into my online accounting platform, and I think I’ve just spent five minutes in there, maybe I’ve actually spent a couple of hours. And that’s a task that should instead be delegated to someone else, instead of me doing it. And so if you use these methods to highlight what you’re actually doing, and you know where your time is going, then you’re going to be equipped with the ability to prioritize your time and start focusing on more high value tasks and move away from those low value tasks. Remember that time is the only resource that we cannot get more of. And so the reality is, is that we need to build leverage by having other people help us out with their time. And the key discipline here for you is to stop doing low value tasks. And instead, focus on your high value tasks. So I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. If you’re a small and medium sized business owner, and you’re interested in an audit of your technology systems, then jump onto the link below and you can chat to our team to get in touch. If you’re just starting out if you’re a solo operator, or you don’t yet have a team and maybe you’re interested in learning more from us, but you’re not quite ready to engage us for our services, that’s totally fine, we’ve got an amazing offer for you. It’s completely free doesn’t cost you anything. And that is to transfer your Google workspace account into us. And you get access to a Google Classroom. Now inside our Google Classroom. We have free videos, we’ve got certifications, we’ve got amazing deep dives on business content, as well as videos to help you get the most out of your investment inside of Google workspace. And so if you want to learn how to be a Google Docs whiz if you want to learn how to get your inbox down to zero every day, all of the tips that we used to charge 1000s of dollars for our customers to access and now available for free in our classroom just for you transferring your billing into us. Now, it doesn’t cost you any extra because you pay the same price to us as you would to Google. We’re a reseller, so we get to buy it a little bit cheaper, and you get access to amazing tools as well as our support team on hand if you need any additional support. Now that offer is available exclusively to workspace members. And that is available on the link below that says transfer in if you’re interested in that our team will be very happy to help you out. And I look forward to seeing you in our training portal on the other side with all the goodies that are in there. If you’re interested in more videos like this, please head along to our channel, hit the playlist section and if you’re not already, hit subscribe and hit like on this video. If you love this content. I look forward to catching you in the next one and let me know any questions and comments below and I’ll do my best to answer them. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
