4 Ways to Find More Time

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Transcript:

We all know that everyone has the same number of hours in the day. However, whenever I hear somebody saying, man, I just do not have enough time to do this, that or the other thing, it really shows me that. They haven't made the leap to a bright entrepreneur yet because bright entrepreneurs understand that it's not that we don't have enough time it's that we don't have enough leverage in our business.
[00:00:29] We can absolutely buy back our time in a variety of different ways. And I'm going to share that with you today in this bright entrepreneur podcast when we're first starting out in the online entrepreneur space, we basically have to do everything ourselves. Right. We have to learn how to build the website and figure out what we're going to sell. And. Most people start by learning how to do it themselves and then implementing it themselves. And they're both the marketer and the sales person and the tech person and the customer service person and all of the people in one single place.
[00:01:34] Now that's wonderful that you can learn all these things and do all these things, and you can hit a certain level of success by doing everything on your own. But at some point. You're going to run out of time. And the idea of growing even more is actually really terrifying because you don't have more time to put into it.
[00:01:57] And you're still operating under this idea that more time in your business and more time working is going to equate to more income. Now. That's fine when you're first starting. And for many people, that's the case because they have more time than they have money. But when you hit that point, generally speaking, you have more money than you have time and you can start reinvesting back into your business.
[00:02:24] And so. When you do this, you can actually be high back, back your time by doing one of four different things that I want to share with you today, so that you can leverage your time better and not get stuck. Feeling like all you're doing is working. All of the time. Now I have found as I've been starting this new business, and I'm not even quite two months into doing it yet, that I'm committed to only working 20 to 30 hours per week.
[00:02:54] And I'd like to do that all of the time, even when I'm launching or doing some sort of larger promotion. And so in order to do that, I have four different things that I can leverage and I'm not using them all right away because we're starting at the beginning. But I have no doubts that as I move forward, if I choose to do it this way, I can work less and less and still have more and more results and better results.
[00:03:23] So what are those four things let's talk about them. So, number one, this is where most people start is that they start hiring a team. So most people may start with a customer service person. Or maybe they start with a virtual assistant of some sort for me. I hired somebody to edit the photos that I was taking of my clients.
[00:03:45] And as she was doing that, she's like, well, I can help you with other things as well, if you like. Great. And so I had her start managing my emails and she did such a good job of going through my inbox when she needed, like when something was, come in and there'll be a support question. And there needed to be a reply she'd search through my inbox.
[00:04:04] She'd see how I replied in the past. She'd copy and paste that in and then she'd make a template. So the next time somebody else asked that same question, she could just grab this canned response, pop it in there and go, and she'd know how to answer it. And she literally created this entire system for my inbox.
[00:04:23] Back in 2013, that has gone from several different people managing it because she's since moved on to do something else. And I have not done email personally since 2013. That's what? Six years. Oh, seven years. Gosh, I'm a math major. I should be able to do math. We're in 2020, and clearly it has messed with my mind.
[00:04:47] Oh my goodness. But you get the picture long time. I haven't even had email on my phone. Do you know how freeing that is? Do you know how much time I got back from that? And it only costs me in the beginning, like five to $10 a day, which might seem like a lot, but. I was spending a solid two hours a day, answering emails sometimes more.
[00:05:10] She was able to do it so fast and efficient cause she didn't get distracted by all the little rabbit holes that you can get down in your inbox. And I had so much freedom. And to this day I hate communicating via email. If you send me an email, you're going to get my team first and really. I maybe answer one or two emails a month.
[00:05:29] Uh, I'll probably do a few more when I'm reaching out to podcasters and trying to get on their platforms more personally that way. But even then I'm going to have my team helping it, let me know when those emails have come in and everything. So it's just one way that I've bought back a ton of time. I mean, two hours a day is 14 hours a week.
[00:05:47] And I would say absolutely checking them over the weekend because it was on my phone. And so that's a massive amount of time. That I ended up saving for like 75 bucks a week. So you can absolutely build a team and there's more and more that you can do. You can hire for a content repurposer, you can hire copywriters and marketing help and, you know, tech people, and all sorts of different roles.
[00:06:11] This isn't really a full episode about building a team. Although I'm happy to talk about building a team. If you'd like to hear about that at some point, let me know over in our telegram channel, if you are one of my insiders on telegram. But I, um, that is one way that you can leverage your time back and it can be incredibly freeing if you do it.
[00:06:32] Well, there's some really big things you need to watch out for, with team building. And I know this because when I first tried to fill it, build a team, I did it totally wrong and it was incredibly expensive and it ended up adding a lot of stress and I didn't do it well, and it didn't add to the bottom line.
[00:06:50] It was just a mess actually. Ended up getting rid of my entire team saying that I would never hire a team again. And that lasted a few months and I realized my folly. And then I learned what it took to build a good team. And it started building the team slowly in the right way. I'm starting with more contractors and then, then it was wonderful.
[00:07:11] Absolutely fantastic. So I'm down to a smaller team, again, as I'm restarting my business, but as I grow, I definitely will leverage this too. So right now I have a customer service person. Her name is Angie. She is my rock and my foundation. She makes sure that anybody who emails me is helped and she's does it with the sweetest, kindest thing ever.
[00:07:33] She's amazing. And then I have a full time nanny and house manager cause we need childcare. And with six kids, it's cheaper to have a live in nanny, which means she also does like meals and laundry. It's pretty amazing. So those are the two that I still have by my team, along with like accountants and lawyers and you know, all the things you have to have, but they don't work with me regularly.
[00:07:56] So, um, so it's small right now, but it will grow as I go. That's a whole nother topic. So that's one area of leverage and it's definitely a great place to start. And honestly, one of the people that is teaching, like how to leverage a team, it's James Wedmore, he has this thing called business by design, highly recommend it.
[00:08:16] If you are looking to build a team, I don't know when he's going to open it next, but, uh, I've been in that and it's fantastic. It's really wonderful. And that kind of leads me into the second way that you can. Leverage your leverage things to get more time in your business. And that is through processes, repeatable processes.
[00:08:36] And this is actually another thing that's really great from business by design is you get a ton of processes that you can take and run with from James Wedmore in that he gives you all of his processes, but basically a process or a standard operating procedure SOP, depending on who you talk to is a documented way of doing something in your business.
[00:08:56] Think of it as the user manual for your business. Now, the easy this way to make this is not some big, fancy thing. You can use something called process street, and I will drop a link to that in the show notes, if you would like to have that. But also the easiest way is to use Sirchie and their amazing Chrome extension, which basically lets you click record and record your screen and then stop and save it right into your Sirchie account.
[00:09:28] if you haven't used Sirchie before, basically it's a replacement for something like Vimeo, because it hosts your videos and you can embed them into your courses and memberships and all of that.
[00:09:40] But here's where it's so different. And so amazing. Is that you can actually search your videos and the contents inside them. And so if you talk about masterminds in one of the videos, but it's named something completely different and you want to go back and say, where did I talk about masterminds? You can actually search in Sirchie for masterminds, and it'll pull it up to the exact spot in the video where you say it, and you can watch from there.
[00:10:08] You can use this in your courses. You can use this in your membership sites and it's even better than that. , I know that there's some really incredible features that they're going to be adding soon, that I cannot share with you at the moment, but just know that Sirchie is a company that is going to be on your radar soon. If it isn't already, and this makes it super easy because you can make your process.
[00:10:27] You can just basically record what you're doing. Talk about what you're doing as you're doing it and then hit stop, and then it'll go into Sirchie. So if somebody needs to figure out how to do something in Ontraport, for example, which is the CRM that I use, you could type in Ontraport, and it would show you all of the videos where somebody has said anything about Ontraport and you can see what each of them are about so that it would be very easy for somebody to go in and figure out how to do whatever it is you want them to do.
[00:10:54] So when you have repeatable processes like that, And you, aren't the only one responsible for creating them? My customer service gal. She creates all of her own processes. I don't even know what she does to run my inbox anymore because it's been so many years and for each person who's in their role, I allow them to own their processes.
[00:11:13] So if they want to change it, as long as they outcome is happening, that we want to have happen. That's fine. They just need to update the process. And then we have them. All categorized. So they're easy to find. So she needs to step out for a while and somebody else is going to manage the inbox. Anyone can go in and they can watch a process for how to do refunds or how to answer a certain question or whatever it is.
[00:11:35] You can see her entire workflow for how she manages the inbox. And it's just right there. Very easy to follow doesn't even need to be fancy documentation, but when you, you have all that ready to go, here's where I find it most valuable. Even if you do not have a team yet, whenever you launch, whenever you do some sort of promotion.
[00:11:54] Even if you're doing something small. So for me, when I did my beta course of the right future method, I would do the video live on Facebook. And then I would go over into Sirchie, which pulls it in automatically. Isn't that awesome. And I would put it in the, uh, I would make sure it had the right title and I would put it in a playlist and then I would.
[00:12:14] Grab the captions. And I would make a transcript that was downloadable for my people. I had this whole little process that I did. It didn't take me long. It took me like five to 10 minutes, but there were several steps in it that I Oh, the captions. That's what I brought over, not the transcript, the captions, so that the Facebook video had captions.
[00:12:31] Anyway, it doesn't matter. Sorry. And all the tangents today and my friends anyways, I had this process, I don't know, eight to 10 steps long, and I documented that. And then every day that I did a video, I would pull up the process, even though I created it and knew how to do it. It reminded me what I needed to do step by step.
[00:12:51] So I never missed a step because no, if your mind is like mine, but it is full. I cannot carry a mental load around anymore. I've got six kids. I can barely keep track of their names, let alone all the steps on a process that's, you know, pretty fast and easy to do. And so when I have a process there. I don't need to remember anything when you can let go of the things that you need to remember and let them live somewhere else outside of your mind.
[00:13:19] And, you know, they're there for easy reference. It lifts that mental load and your work becomes a lighter. You have more internal. Peace. And so that's another way that you can leverage your time is that you don't have to sit there and remember, Oh yeah, crap. I forgot this step. And I got to do this. I am way faster when I can just follow a checklist and go down the list and make sure it's done close out that process.
[00:13:41] And really the only time it takes you to make these processes is the time it takes you to click record. Then you do the process like you would normally do it. And even if you mess up, it's okay.
[00:13:52] You know, just have it all there, have it in one place and then click stop when you're done and then make sure it's in something like Sirchie, where you can find it in the future easily, and that's it, like you can have a VA make step by step checklists out of it.
[00:14:06] If it's something that's repeated often, but you might not need to, it might just be there. So I have a whole process for setting up a website on a dune domain because I had to do it once. And I knew that I might need to do dig in, in the future. So I just documented it as I went so that the next time I wouldn't have to go and research how to do it.
[00:14:23] I could just watch my own little process, super easy, saves a ton of time in the future. Especially for big things like launches and it really helps you avoid dropping the ball on stuff that you might forget to do. And with launches, especially there's a ton of moving parts. So it's a really great way to make sure that none of the balls are dropped, whether you're doing it or somebody else is doing it third way, that you can leverage more time.
[00:14:47] And this is where I really get excited is by clarifying your. Strategy, if you know exactly what you need to be doing and when, and in what order, and you know, for sure that this is going to help you get the results that you want to have, that you just need to show up and be consistent and keep moving forward.
[00:15:08] And following the plan, you waste so much less time than if you really aren't sure what's going to work. And you're just trying one tactic after another and hoping that something sticks and taking one course and then taking another.
[00:15:21] We talked about this a couple episodes ago, so you know what I'm talking about, right? Having that strategy will buy you back so much time. Super clear example. If you want to go out to eat. Okay. If you just get in your car and start driving around in circles until you see something that looks good appeals to you, it's going to take way longer than if you get near car and you know exactly what restaurant you want to go to and you plan the shortest possible route to get there.
[00:15:50] That's what we're doing with the big picture strategy. when you have a clear strategy and you know exactly where you want to go and how to get there, Everything is faster. It's the greatest way to buy your time back.
[00:16:05] Now the fourth thing that you can do, and this is one that most people, people totally ignore it, that you can intentionally leverage your customers and community to help you move your business forward and buy back some of your time. So one of the ways, and actually it's not even buying it back, you can do this for free.
[00:16:24] You can. Earn a back some of your time. And this is a huge, huge leverage point that so many people ignore. So in my old business, when I would run my one K weekend challenge, we would have sometimes five, 6,000 people going through the challenge at the same time. And our Facebook group would go crazy. And when, I mean, when I say crazy, I mean, like 30 to 40.
[00:16:47] Thousand comments within just a few days. Now, my goal is to interact personally with as many people as I possibly can, because I want them to connect to me and to the business. Now there's just no way that in a one week period, I could read and respond to all of those comments. Like there is just. Not statistically possible.
[00:17:07] There's not enough hours in the day. And so what I would do is I had a group of alumni who had been so transformed by my course, which is what this challenge promoted. And many of them had done the one K weekend challenge themselves that they offered to volunteer and help engage in the group during the challenge.
[00:17:30] Now I didn't pay them. I did usually send them a coffee gift card before the challenge started, but that was a surprise to them. It was more a little something because I knew how nuts it was going to be. And so many of them gave many, many, yeah, ours simply to give back to other photographers because they really wanted to see their lives changed.
[00:17:51] Just the way that theirs had been changed by the one K weekend. And my course, it was a beautiful thing and it was a volunteer thing and I. Took them behind the scenes of my launch a little bit more. So they got insider access to me and my team and some of the strategies we were doing. So it wasn't that they didn't have any benefit from doing it, but overall it was intrinsically motivated and it helped me to make the challenge a better experience for everyone. But here's the beauty of it. It also one lifted up the alumni who volunteered as people of a higher status in the community. It recognize them for being exemplary examples. That's kind of redundant, but you know what I mean, in the community.
[00:18:37] And also too, it allowed people to connect with each other in a deeper way. Now a group is when, you know, maybe they connect with you and your content, and it's more kind of like a Facebook page. You don't truly have a community though until your people connect with each other in a deep way. And that's when true community happens.
[00:18:59] Lots of people run Facebook groups. Very few people have true community within a Facebook group, and that's where the magic happens. And so by empowering my alumni to help me with this and to be part of this greater movement of saving the photography industry that I was leading, they not only were getting status and recognition and some behind the scenes access to me and my team.
[00:19:26] But they were helping build the community by connecting people to each other and connecting people to them as well as me. And so they would point things out that they thought maybe I personally should respond to, but mostly they were able to respond just as much as me. And again, because we had processes, we'd say, Hey, if somebody asks this, here's how you should respond.
[00:19:48] And if they have this question, here's the answer. And we had this whole little database that they could come in and copy and paste the answers out to make sure that. All the communication was consistent, but also to make it really easy for the alumni to help, we really wanted to empower them to do this in is easier way as possible so that they could feel like they were making the biggest impact possible, but also so that they enjoy it experience.
[00:20:12] And it was really, really amazing. That's just one example of how you can empower your people and how they're going to want to help if they've truly experienced the transformation. That your product can bring. And that's why we are transformation driven entrepreneurs when we're bright entrepreneurs, because we know that when people are transformed, there's something in them that wants to see other people have that same transformation and wants to help others too.
[00:20:39] If we are intentional in setting it up, make it easy for them to do that. And if we encourage them to do that and show them that that's what bright entrepreneurs do. So anyways, that's what I go into that more in the bright future method workshop that I'm going to be teaching starting on September 28th.
[00:20:56] We'll be launching that September 21st. And so if you want to learn how to build a community around your business, that turns into a full on movement. Where people are happy to help you grow your business and your movement, your impact, and your profit. Then sign up for the waitlist right now, a bright future method.com.
[00:21:18] You can sign up there. We'd love to have you. And if you really feel like you love this podcast, you've already subscribed to it. If you haven't do that first, obviously. But if you want to kind of hear a little bit more about the behind the scenes of what I'm doing and connect with me more personally, and you're just really feel like we would be great friends and you just love all the topics we're talking about here, and you kind of geek out about it.
[00:21:43] I'd love to have you on my telegram channel and this is just for insider. So if you're new around here, you're not really sure. Don't sign up for it yet. This is really only for people who would self select themselves. It's like big fans. Yeah. Or whatever it is, you, you can call it yourself, advocates of what I'm doing or just, I really love it.
[00:22:00]It's part of why I'm doing it. I don't want everyone there, but I want them dedicated people there. And here's why you need to be dedicated. One it's a free app. You have to download. And so I know that there may be a learning curve if you're not already using it. So you're going to need to be dedicated, do it.
[00:22:15] Otherwise you're going to download it and you're not going to use it. And it's going to be worthless anyways. Right. But two, it also gives you notifications when I post and I don't want you annoyed, like yes, you can turn them off, but then what's the point of being on there. I'm not on there all the time, so you don't have to worry.
[00:22:30] But it also allows me to have conversations with you so I can post something. And there's a place for you to leave comments. So I can actually get feedback on like, on this podcast where right now you can't directly click a button and let me see it as I'm recording it because you won't listen to it too later.
[00:22:46] I think I said that, right? You won't listen to it until later. Yep. There we go. And so, um, it's, it's a little, a bit more delayed in the feedback and that just helps me really connect with the people who really want to be most connected with me. So. All right. So that stuff is coming up. Just wanted to let you know.
[00:23:04] But just know if you feel like your time is swamped, you are stuck in your, to do list and you want a clearer strategy, or you want to learn how to build a true movement around your business so that you can leverage that to help you grow faster. I would love to just teach you that and the bright future method workshop, eight weeks long.
[00:23:22] It's coming up again. Sign up for the wait we'll [email protected]. And with that, my friend, just remember. That we are brighter together. I mean, really that's what the whole bright future method's all about. And the world really needs us. So let's make it brighter.

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