Creating Order Among Chaos

I think I've found the antibiotic to entrepreneurship pain...

Hey friends,

About a week ago I purchased “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell. I had heard about this book and it kept on coming up as a recommended read on podcasts and other YouTube videos. When a friend mentioned it during a conversation I decided it was time to add it to my Kindle library.

I’ve read many business books over the years but “Buy Back Your Time” is easily in my top 5 “must read” books for entrepreneurs. To say the book has blown me away would be an understatement. I’m only 30% of the way through the book and I’m already implementing lessons from the book in my business and seeing results.

Running a business is constant pain

I consider myself a “miserable entrepreneur”. The day-to-day grind of building my businesses is full of pain with limited experiences of elation. I’m at the point when a large payment from a client hitting my bank account does little for me.

This feeling is driven by a combination of feeling stuck for years trying to scale my agency, paying down a lot of “ignorance debt” AKA making a lot of expensive and time consuming mistakes, and my own psychology.

I’ve always been curious how certain entrepreneurs I respect seem to be enjoying the journey and have a lot more enthusiasm for the climb that I do. “What do they know that I don’t” is a question I ask myself often.

Of course there will always be pain when it comes to running a business, I’m not delusional. But at a certain point the scales need to shift so that the day-to-day adds more energy than it takes and I start looking forward to the climb instead of dreading it.

Understanding that there are different types of pain is a good starting point

As I grow as an entrepreur I’m starting to understand that there are different categories of “pain”. For example, having to handle tedious admin tasks like recording my personal expenses in a Google Sheet for my accountant for the thousandth time is very different to the pain involved in generating enough leads for my agency. Both sets of work need to be accomplished but they aren’t the same.

Thanks to “Buy Back Your Time”, I’m starting to understand that there is a path towards eliminating some of the pain involved in building a business.

The book talks a lot about organizing the work into different quadrants and where the founder should focus his energy.

It’s an amazing model that has helped me understand how exactly a business should leverage human resources to create freedom for the founder.

I now understand how I can systematically eliminate tasks that drain me and bring me “pain” thus allowing me to focus more time and energy on work that energizes me.

A new mental model: The more time the founder has, the more the business grows

One of the most facinating concepts in the book is the Buyback Principle.

The concept in a nutshell is: You don’t hire people to grow your business, you hire people to buy back your time.

At first it’s hard to wrap your head around this concept but once you do, it’s incredibly powerful.

For me it was like shining a light in a dark forest illuminating a path through the thick brush.

So how have I taken this lesson and implemented it at my agency, projectBI?

$10 dollar tasks vs. $500 dollar tasks

The same day I started reading “Buy Back Your Time” I went onto Upwork and hired an administrative assistant.

I found an amazing operator with at ton of experience who is based in Mexico (where I’m currently based) for $10 an hour.

“Buy Back Your Time” talks about low leverage “$10” tasks which should be delegated ASAP. I can now delegate the “$10” tasks I would spend my limited time on each week to my new administrative assistant.

It’s a great feeling to have someone competent I can send over all the boring, draining tasks so I have more time and mental bandwidth to focus on the work that matters most.

Now that I have an assistant in place, I’ll be able to be more selective with the work I take on myself, and delegate more and more to the assistant.

So what’s next?

I’ve come to realize that I have to spend more time creating more order among all the chaos in the business. For whatever reason, I seem to operate well among all the chaos, but it’s not fair on my team, and I’m honestly craving a less stressful, more focused and organized work experience.

I’ve set up a recurring meeting with a clear agenda between myself and my account manager 3 times a week to discuss the task backlog and priorities for the week. This meeting has been a game changer for the team and I’m seeing a big improvement in output and quality in service delivery. I hate having to do recurring calls but this one was needed.

Once I’m in a position to hire a VP of Customer Success, I can remove this call from my calendar.

Now that there is a lot less chaos in the business I can shift my focus to our biggest challenge, generating new business. I need to add 2 additional clients to our roster before I can start building a second “pod” of account manager and analyst. With 2 pods at full capacity, we’ll be doing between $500k - $600k a year which is more than double our current annual revenue. That’s my main goal, getting the business over >$500k a year in revenue.

That’s it for now friends, thanks for reading and be well.

Regards,

Justin