Episode 363: Reclaiming Time for Your Business
For entrepreneurs embarking on the journey of building a team from scratch, the initial step is to reclaim their time by delegating tasks to a team.
In this episode, Adam Stott and Steve discuss the crucial aspect of getting your time back as a business owner. They dive into the psychology of valuing time over money, building a team from scratch, and transitioning from a self-employed job to a thriving business.
Hiring the right people to fill essential roles within the organization, allows business owners to focus on strategic initiatives and revenue-generating endeavors.
Show Highlights:
- Valuing time over money is essential for business success.
- The first hire should focus on getting your time back.
- Sharpen your skills in sales and marketing to drive revenue growth.
- Transitioning from self-employed to team management is crucial for growth.
- Focus on high-income generating tasks to propel business success.
Links Mentioned:
Get your Business Growth Secrets SUCCESS PLANNER for FREE and profit like a pro: https://adamstottplanner.com/free-book47315172
Adam’s website: https://adamstott.com/?el=Pod
Watch the Episode on Adam’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/adamstottcoach?el=Pod
Connect with Adam on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adamstottcoach/?el=Pod
Join Adam’s network on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-stott-coach/?el=Pod
Coaches, consultants, and business owners – lower your marketing costs, increase ticket prices, and get more high-ticket clients: https://3daybrandbuilderworkshop.com/start-here?el=Pod
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
[00:00:00] Adam Stott: How on earth do you get your time back as a business owner? That is what we explore in this episode of business growth secrets. So if you’ve been feeling out of time saying to yourself, how am I going to get all this done? And just not seeing the results in your business that you want because you’re short on time, this episode is for you.
[00:00:20] Let’s jump right in.
[00:00:25] Welcome back everybody to business growth secrets. Really, really excited to have another episode. With our head of client success, Steve, how we doing, Steve? Yeah, I’m good. How are you feeling? Good.
[00:00:36] Steve: Very good.
[00:00:36] Adam Stott: Thank you. Got some good questions lined up.
[00:00:38] Steve: Some really, really good questions.
[00:00:40] Adam Stott: Yeah. Brilliant stuff.
[00:00:41] So we’re going to jump into some questions today. Uh, and of course, remember if you’ve been watching the podcast on YouTube, Or you’ve been listening along on Spotify or Apple and you have your own question that you want to pose, you can fire those questions in. We’ve had some great, great, great questions coming in and we’d love to hear yours as well.
[00:01:03] All you have to do is just go over to your choice of platform, whether that be YouTube, whether that be Instagram, go and comment. And tell us your question and we will make sure that that gets answered. Let’s take it away, Steve. What’s our question for today?
[00:01:20] Steve: So the question for today is around team building.
[00:01:23] Um, so lots of our clients are at varying levels of kind of, uh, size of teaming more specifically. Um, so the question is, where do you start when building a new team from scratch?
[00:01:35] Adam Stott: So where, where do you start when building a new team from scratch? It depends on. You know, where the, where the person is in the journey.
[00:01:42] But let’s imagine that for a moment, we’re talking about somebody that doesn’t have any team members and they’re running the business on their own. Let’s start there and let’s build up. Now, the first thing that we need to do, if we’re in that situation is we’ve got to get our time back, right? Because there comes a point where you’ve got eight hours a day to run your business, and that’s how many hours you’ve got in a day.
[00:02:06] And what most business owners do is they go, you know, what? Um, I want to make more money. So I’ll just get in earlier. So they get in two hours earlier and I’ll stay later. So they stay two hours later. Now all of a sudden they’re working 12 hours a day. They do that five days in a row. And at the end of the week, they’re burnt out.
[00:02:24] They go home in a weekend, they’re not giving their best to their family. Um, they’re tired, uh, they’re exhausted and then they start again on Monday and they do the same thing over and over and over again. Now that is not a business. That’s not a company. That is a very stressful job and you probably hate your new boss more than your old boss, right?
[00:02:50] So, you know, because you become your boss, right? And this is where a lot of people get stuck. They get into bad patterns and essentially they forget one of the most fundamental, few fundamental rules of business. And we can make it about the rules. We can make it about team building, but it’s a psychology thing.
[00:03:10] Truthfully, it’s about what we think up here. And, and there’s a few things from a psychology standpoint that are really important to understand if you want to be successful, the first point. That I would say is that you got to start valuing time more than you value money. If you want to be successful in business, most people don’t, especially small businesses, they value money more than they value time.
[00:03:42] And the problem with this is that you are going to run out of. Before you ever make enough money, if you value money over time. So we have to reframe and we have to change our mind because all business is about is investing, whether that’s investing money or investing time. That’s what business is about and it creates a return for us.
[00:04:06] So when we invest money, we get a return. When we invest time, we get a return. Now, we only have, there’s unlimited amounts of money in the world, but time is in short supply.
[00:04:21] Steve: Yeah.
[00:04:21] Adam Stott: And we can only make so many time investments, but we can make a lot more money investments. So if you, if you think, you know, how in the same amount of time can Elon Musk revolutionize The car industry.
[00:04:38] This is, this is the fact, right? Most small businesses, let’s say a small business has been running in the last seven years that does 150, in revenue, and they’ve been running for seven years. They’ve worked hard, worked hard, work hard, work hard, work hard in the same period of time, Elon Musk has revolutionized the car industry, um, got rockets out into space, uh, built underway, underground pathways all over, you know, uh, revolutionized.
[00:05:06] You know, into city travel, which is what he’s looking to do. Uh, also create PayPal before that and done all those things in the same time period as somebody who’s been out to get a recruitment in a company to 150 grand a year or 200 grand a year. He’s done that in the same time. Well, what’s the difference between him and you, or what’s the difference between him and most small business owners is he, and you could say, well, he’s got a lot of money, but the reason he’s got a lot of money is he learned how to invest is that he’s investing his money.
[00:05:37] He’s investing in people. He’s investing in team and he’s building companies. Not building a to do list where most people just do time and they build a to do list. So what we’ve got to look at, and again, one of my mentors, Sarah, always says the number one rule is how do you make yourself redundant? The number one rule is how do we take everything off your plate?
[00:06:00] The number one rule is how do we do less and get the company to earn more? And if we can follow that rule, we can build a great company. But if we don’t follow that rule, we can find ourselves getting very, very busy, very, very tired, and very, very burnt out. So the psychology, first of all, is you’ve got to realize psychologically.
[00:06:20] That without a team, you are, you have a self employed job. You don’t have a business because what is the definition of a company? A group of people. That’s what the definition of a company is. And that’s what you got to do. And if you’re a one man army or one woman army, you haven’t built a group of people.
[00:06:40] And if you haven’t built a group of people, then you can’t expand and create more ROI. So what do I mean when we’re moving towards this? So the first point of psychology is make sure that you value your time more than you do money. I promise you this is where most people get stuck because they’re like, well, I don’t want to hire somebody to do it.
[00:07:02] Let’s just take a rough example. Let’s go. Let’s look at the guy. That is a let’s just try and let’s say pest control, right? So his job is that he goes out he gets the client He has to go out and he has to do pest control and when he gets the client the pest control jobs 200 quid So he goes out he he finds the business he goes out does the pest control job gets his paid his 200 quid Comes back does the same thing every day at the end of the week He’s earned the grant at the end of the month.
[00:07:33] He’s earned four grand. So he’s got four thousand pounds and he’s busy And he’s working lots and lots and lots of hours and he’s running this pest control business. And he says, how on earth can I afford to hire somebody else? Because I can’t hire somebody else because I’m only generating 4, 000 pounds in revenue.
[00:07:55] And if I hire somebody else and I have to give them 2000 or 2, 500, I’m only left with 1, 500 and I’ve got to pay for the van, and I’ve got to pay for the insurance, and I’ve got to pay for, you know, the travel, and the fuel, and the license, and, oh my god, the, like, like, it just doesn’t work, and I, I’m just stuck, and I’m just Groundhog Day again, and again, and again, and again.
[00:08:21] And the problem is that person values the money more than they value their time. So my argument back to Mr. Pest Control, and I’m trying to give you a fundamental example so you can visualize, vividly picture the pest control person in this situation. My argument would be you’re not paying Mr. Pest Control two and a half thousand to come in.
[00:08:45] You’re paying to come in and do that. You’re paying two and a half thousand to get your time back. So you can go and generate 10, 000 whilst he covers that aspect off for you. Yeah, it makes sense. All right. So this is me valuing my time more than valuing the money. And why do people do it? Fear, psychology, often belief.
[00:09:09] You go, well, I hired that person. I’m paying that money. I don’t know if I could go and generate 10, 000. I don’t know if I could go and generate. I don’t know if I could do that. And then all of a sudden they’re stuck in their beliefs and that’s where most companies get stuck. That’s where most companies struggle.
[00:09:29] So step one, value your time more than you do money. And start to look at your time as a, as a resource that was so much more valuable than money that you have to spend it in the right way and spend those time investments in the right way. And then when it comes, so, so why does that matter? Why have I gone long on that?
[00:09:48] Because actually I’ve gone long on that. The reason I’ve gone long on it is because I know that there’ll be people watching and they struggle to get it right. They, they, people struggle with this topic. I’ve seen it so many times. People that could be so much more successful than they are. But he just can’t get past this face.
[00:10:05] Do you remember I was saying we’ve got eight hours? We don’t want to hire someone, come in earlier, stay later, get burnt out in a week, do the same thing over and over and over and over again. Instead of doing that, work the eight hours, buy in another eight hours from somebody else. What have you got now?
[00:10:26] Steve: Much more time.
[00:10:29] Adam Stott: Put a number to that. 16 hours, right? You’ve got double the amount of time. Now you’ve got double the amount of productivity, arguably, that you can do in one day. Which means you should be able to double your revenue. And then they’ll say, alright, well, we’ve got two of us. Now it’s been another eight hours.
[00:10:45] Now we get 24 hours worth of work. Done in an eight hour period which is what increases our revenues and allows to build our team So the first move back to your question because your team question is like what’s the first hire? The first hire is the one that gets your time back.
[00:11:01] Steve: Okay,
[00:11:03] Adam Stott: and that could be a va It could be a pa could be a salesperson could be someone marketing what you have to do Mr.
[00:11:12] Business owner, Mrs. Business owner that’s watching right now is you have to figure out where does all your time go and what is swallowing your time up so you can get your time back so you can invest it to create a higher return. That would be the first part. The other arguable part. Is your first hire should be the thing that you suck at where you bring somebody in that can like say you suck at sales You you bring in somebody that can sell and they can go out and they can generate you some revenue Now this is my problem with this.
[00:11:48] This is where my problem would be My problem would be is you suck at sales. So you want to go and hire somebody into sell for your company? Guess what? That means that means you suck at sales forever because you never tackled it
[00:11:59] Steve: Yeah,
[00:12:00] Adam Stott: and if you suck at sales forever It is going to creep up and is going to bite you because ignorance is not bliss.
[00:12:07] You know, sales can be not be ignored. If you suck at sales, it’s your responsibility to get good air. At some point you have to because you can’t succeed if you can’t sell. If you suck at marketing, You have to understand it. You’re gonna have to get good at it at some point. Now you can see stuff on YouTube where people are gonna go and go, all right, well look, you don’t have to be good at everything.
[00:12:26] You just hire everybody else and then everybody else is good and you just get to, you know, like they will do the stuff that you’re crap at and it’s all good. Problem is, you can’t afford those people because you’re only making four thousand a month in your pest control business. So initially, you have to sharpen your axe.
[00:12:46] You have to learn how to sell, you have to learn how to market, you have to learn the basics of operations of running your business, you have to create the product, you have to create the pricing, and then you build. Until you build a revenue base where you can actually go and hire quality people that can add value to you, but that’s only going to come when your business starts to grow.
[00:13:04] Steve: And this is where obviously getting your time back and investing that back in yourself to change these bits comes into play. Right?
[00:13:10] Adam Stott: Absolutely. Right. You know, you go, well, I can’t learn to sell because I’m catching, I’m pest controlling every day. Right. I haven’t got time to go after new business. And this is what I will say to any business owner watching three hours a day going after new business.
[00:13:26] Or you will go out of business. You know, I can’t do that because I’m out catching the pets and I’m doing that pest control thing. Well, that’s why you need to get somebody else doing that. So you can go after business three hours a day, every single day. And that’s how you will succeed. Fact is, it’s a terrible stats for businesses, terrible statistics, um, on businesses that the percentage of them that fail.
[00:13:48] Something like 96. 8 percent fail in the first five years. That’s potentially an old stat now, you know, maybe someone can chat GPT and go, go and look at what that stat is. But I think that one of the other stats is that less than 1 percent make a 10 million pound business. And this is the thing, right? So we look at six figure businesses, first hundred thousand, seven figure businesses, first million, eight figure businesses, 10 million.
[00:14:14] Okay. What’s the difference? Six figure businesses. You can do that on your own. You can get your first hundred grand as a business owner on your own. What do you need to do? Grind, grind, grind, create a good product, go and sell it and do it again and again and again and again and again. Build good relationships, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell before you know it, you’re a six figure business.
[00:14:37] If you hate selling, it’s going to be hard. If you hate putting yourself out there, it’s going to be hard. If you don’t want to put yourself out there and you don’t want to sell. You may as well go and get a job. That’s a fact. All right. So some of you might not want to hear it, but it’s the truth. Cause you’ve got to tackle that, right?
[00:14:54] So that’s number one. That’s the first six figures to get to seven figures to go from 100, 000 pounds to 1 million pounds. It becomes less about you. And it becomes more about the team. Yes, you’re still going to be intrinsically involved in the business. You’re still going to be, there’s still going to be parts of you that are intricately involved in the business, but you’re going to have to build a team, which means you’re going to have to get your time back to be able to remove yourself from parts of the process in order for you to be able to build.
[00:15:24] It’s a must. Do you find
[00:15:26] Steve: that mindset shift is quite difficult for some people stepping backwards?
[00:15:30] Adam Stott: Yeah, people, people really, really struggle, really struggle with it because, well, because they got through the six figure stage. So they’re the hero in their own story. And then all of a sudden they’ve got to say, I don’t want to be the hero.
[00:15:45] I want somebody else to be the hero. And I’ve got to remove myself, you know, and people just can’t do it. And the other thing is they get addicted.
[00:15:52] Steve: Yeah.
[00:15:52] Adam Stott: So they’re chained to the ups and downs of business. They’re chained to the pain. They’re, they’re driving their business based on emotion and the feeling.
[00:16:01] Yeah. And a business is not emotional. It’s logical. So if you’re emotionally connected to your business and you’re living the ups and downs and you’re on the roller coaster and you’re feeling tough and then it’s feeling good and, and you’re absolutely hooked on all those different chemicals and emotions that happen in your body, it’s quite hard to do things differently.
[00:16:22] Most people. Can’t do it. Most people need a coach to help them to do it. That’s the fact. All right. So unless they just grind it out and that’s when you lose all your hair, you know, that’s, that’s when you go, right, this is when you get all stressed out. Right. Um, You know, and that’s when you’re the stressor, which is quite difficult, but you really, you need good people around you to help mentor you, guide you, coach you through those phases.
[00:16:51] And then going from a million to 10, it’s all about the team. It’s pretty much nothing to do with you. You step back, the team comes in, you’re managing through people. And most of the people are doing most of the work and you’re only doing part of it. So, you know, there’s a lot in this episode and a lot of different things in there.
[00:17:10] Try to talk about the psychology, understand time versus money, understand where you need a team, why you need a team, and then understand what type of team you need. First thing you need is to get your time back and then you need to deploy your time into high income generating activities.
[00:17:30] Steve: Awesome. Yeah. I think that answers the question.
[00:17:32] So yeah, circling back to it, it was, where do we start? And it is effectively the best places where you’re going to get your time back the most, right?
[00:17:38] Adam Stott: Absolutely. So last thought on this subject, uh, because many people watch him and of the people watching, whether you’re listening on Apple, whether you’re watching on YouTube, however you’re doing it, however you’re consuming it is, you’ve always got to look at.
[00:17:54] Imagine for a moment that you went and got your time back. This is where it’s actually becomes a pivotal moment in your business because when you get your time back, cause you’ve got the person, the people, you starting to build the team, you’re doing the stuff. What we now need to do is you need to move you into high income generating activities.
[00:18:16] That means the only things you do in the business. Make big money. The problem that most people do is they get their time back and they move themselves into low income generating activities. Go, I’ll do a bit of the bookkeeping and I’ll do some of the invoicing and you know, I’ll send the paperwork out and I’ll do this.
[00:18:37] And what you’ve done basically is you’ve then stopped your business from generating revenue. So it’s very important that you go into high income generating activities and every time you relinquish control, so you build your team, more high gen. Every time you relinquish control, more high gen. Every time more hygiene.
[00:18:55] So how are you constantly trying to put yourself in a position where you’re bringing in bigger revenues into the business with your time investment in the business? So hopefully you, you like that answer, Steve. Yeah, perfect.
[00:19:07] Steve: Thank you.
[00:19:08] Adam Stott: You get it right. And hopefully everybody else is getting that. Um, there’s listening to the podcast and look, if you’ve been listening for a while and you’ve been with us and you’ve been enjoying these episodes, I’ve got a small ask of you.
[00:19:22] It’s going to take 15 to 20 seconds of your time. We’re going to keep producing the very best and answering your questions, but I’m going to ask you for a 15, 20 second time investment back from you. And that is to take your finger, go and click the three dots. Do it right now. And go and give this a five star review.
[00:19:42] If you’re enjoying it, we will be picking reviews to read out on the podcast, and we would very much appreciate your support and we’re doing this to help business owners everywhere to grow their businesses. And it will take you a very small amount of time to go and help us out and share this and give us a review.
[00:19:59] So do that for us right now. And then tell us in the comments, you’ve done that and we super appreciate it. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of business growth seekers. Thank you in advance for your amazing review.