If you running your own business and something doesn't feel quite right…

STOP!

I've had days in the past where you just sit there at the end of the day and you just look back and wonder what the hell  have I done today and I just can't remember what I’ve done; sucked into everybody else’s problems.

One of our mentors, Dan Kennedy said “There is a conspiracy out there by everybody to steal your time” and he is so right.

A while back, we were asked a question:

“Would you take a 20% pay cut to get 80% of your time back?” and although when you stop and think about it, the answer is obviously “yes...”

The real question is, “would you do it?

Well, we did, and it made a massive positive difference to our life.

The 80/20 principle is a well-known principles from an Italian philosopher called Perato,and he observed that in his the garden  20% of the peapods produced 80% of peas and if you follow that principle then what about your carpets carpets in your home? 20% of the carpets get 80% of the wear and if you think about the clothes in your wardrobe 20% of your clothes in the wardrobe you probably wear 80% of the time.

Using that principle we then applied it to our business and quickly discovered that 80% of our profits came from 20% of what we did, so we made changes to get back the advantage.

Utilising time well, every single day, is absolutely critical to the success of a business owner and if you are running your business and you’re working more hours than you should, then you need to look carefully at what you're doing.

I used to be out on the road travelling to meetings typically 4 days a week, driving round the countryside sometimes I will probably see three or four clients a day and sometimes that would be six or seven meetings a day! It was ridiculous and so I took a long hard look at what I was doing and now using technology like the internet, videos, webinars etc it's totally transform the way we run our business to the point where we are now maybe on the road two or three days a month... that's all!

Travelling every single day seeing client after client meant that probably I was spending 15 to 20 hours a week on the road that time I've now got back where we produce more here in the office and actually the quality of what we produce goes up as well because my thought process is better, I've got time to think, I've got time to prepare, i’ve got time to do things properly and the biggest difference of all is my health and i’m  much more relaxed, I feel good about myself because actually being in a motor car chasing people down the motorway driving around the countryside is pretty stressful…

But a lot of the stuff that we deliver is information and using cameras using microphones using the internet I can communicate to those people, they get me, they get to see me on camera.

Clients say that the videos are better for delivering this information because finally they can sit and digest often complex information we are delivering, and if they want to they can watch it at 10 o'clock on Saturday morning in their pants!

If your job is to eat the frog, then eat the frog first!

Everyday we complete a self journal and self journal we have a list of the three main objectives and three main goals we want to achieve in the next 12 weeks and then each day we complete the daily assessment which lists out our  exact plans for the day it's exercises to you on track for the most important thing you should be doing.

If your job is to eat the frog, then eat the frog first.  If yo9u have two frogs to eat, eat the biggest first...

Using the 80:20 principle on whatever you are doing, then you are likely to notice that you are going to waste time.  

Take some of that wasted  time and put in the systems of the processes to stop wasting time on things that you shouldn't be doing and use the time to find more profitable ways of running your business.

Andy our cameraman identified he wastes half a day every day on emails, back and forth and believed this was necessary else he would not have any sales!  Does it have to be like this? Do they all need answering? Or, should there be a filter system to help him only focus on answering the most important emails first?

As business owners, you have to delegate some of the tasks to other people, yeah then they don't do it the same way as you do, but if you don't, you just never gonna change because you're just too busy being busy.

We outsource our phone answering, we have 6 lovely people answering our phones from 8.00 am to 6.00 pm, I've never met them, they're based in a 500 miles away and they answer the phone beautifully with our company name and put only calls through to us that are expected all very professional and we've got a great relationship with them.

We discovered that the phone ringing was quite a big interruption for us.

We work with many clients once a quarter, employing the 12 week principle, helping our clients achieve 4 times more each year than most.

The accountability is the key to making this work.

As Paul Tansey of intergage says

“The process of people knowing they are responsible and know that in three months time you are going to come in and they’ve got to present back and and they have to do it is a real incentive.

Previously we worked on annual goals and the problem with annual goals is that you can state them at the beginning of the year and half way thru the year, everyone has forgotten what they were them.

So working on a 12 Week series of goals and regularly prioritising them is changing our business faster.”

If we could show you how to take a small pay cut to get 80% of your time back, what would you then do with that 80% of your time?

Well imagine if you could then accelerate your profits if you could make an easier life for yourself those are the sort of things that Vicki and I show our clients