Episode 371: Unlocking Work-Life Balance for Business Owners
Over the years, Adam Stott has undergone a significant transformation in his approach to time management and taking time off. Initially, he fell into the trap of working round the clock, believing that relentless hustle was the key to success. However, he soon realized that this approach led to burnout, stress, and unfulfillment.
In this episode, Adam and Jamie discuss the crucial topic of achieving work-life balance as a business owner. They explore the challenges many entrepreneurs face in taking time off, the importance of setting non-negotiable boundaries, and the transformative power of time management and discipline in attaining work-life harmony.
Adam and Jamie talked about the significance of prioritizing personal well-being, adopting a strategic mindset towards time management, and learning from industry leaders like Elon Musk on effectively utilizing time.
Show Highlights:
- Establish non-negotiable boundaries for personal time to maintain a work-life balance.
- Embrace time blocking and disciplined calendar management for efficient productivity.
- Prioritize personal well-being and strategic thinking to prevent burnout and enhance effectiveness.
- Learn from successful individuals like Elon Musk on optimizing time utilization for significant impact.
- Cultivate discipline and focus on upholding boundaries and honoring personal time commitments.
Links Mentioned:
Know more about Dr. Lance Haggith’s work on his website at https://lancehaggith.com/
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 do you as a business owner start to get more time back in your life? That is a question that many, many suffer with. Many business owners end up in a dark place of just working more hours, working harder and feeling like they’re just treading water. They’re not making an impact on their business. We want to talk today on business growth secrets about how to achieve that.
[00:00:24] That work life balance that people really talked about that never seemed to be out of reach and how to structure their business in a way where they can feel energized, refreshed and make big impact. Let’s jump in to this episode of Business Grows Secrets.
[00:00:41] So today on Business Grows Secrets, I am with Jamie. So Jamie from our team. Incredible guy. Big into personal development and loves business, business growth funnels. Uh, he is one of our coaches here on CRM. So he helps our clients to get their CRMs up and running, uh, putting funnels in place and does some really, really cool stuff.
[00:01:04] And he today is making his debut on business growth secrets. So welcome, uh, Jamie, looking forward to the questions that you’ve gone and sourced from our audience, how’s things going? And you’ve been a previous podcast listener, right? Yeah.
[00:01:17] Jamie: Yep. previous podcast listener. I’ve listened from the beginning to the end of the podcast multiple times.
[00:01:23] And guys, if you haven’t already, make sure you go to the very first episode and work your way through because it is amazing. Now, Adam, as you know, more than most people that run in a business means 1000 percent commitment, and there’s a dark side to being a business owner. And we’d like to dive into some common challenges and how you’ve dealed Now, one element which comes up time and time again is the difficulty business owners have when it comes to taking that time out.
[00:01:53] Now, you’ve recently taken some time out of your business yourself. How did you feel about taking a break from the business?
[00:02:01] Adam Stott: In terms of recently, not such a problem because as your business grows, you’re trying to develop a management structure and a team structure where not everything is dependent on you.
[00:02:13] But if I were to take you back to the early stages of, of running my businesses and different businesses that I’ve had, there have been times where I’ve just felt like. If I was to take the time out, the everything would start to fall to pieces. And if I was to miss that call, my cashflow was at stake or my team was at stake or losing clients was at stake.
[00:02:37] You know, I’ve been in those places where it just feels like you are chained to the business and you are saying to yourself, I’ve got this. To be there. I’ve gotta return that call. I’ve gotta be working 24 7 where I’m feeling guilty and I’ve, I’ve been in that place where I’ve seen myself just work again and again and again and again, and work endlessly so I know what that’s like.
[00:02:59] Um, luckily enough, I don’t suffer from that now, uh, because I’m now, since I’ve been running businesses since 2008. And as you grow and you develop and, and you learn. You know, and so you can do that one or two ways. You can even learn from someone that’s already done it, or you can learn the hard way for experience.
[00:03:15] And a lot of the time I learned the hard way through experience is that actually sometimes being chained to the business is something that we’re doing as individuals. We’re doing ourselves rather than it’s actually a false belief that your business is going to fall apart. If you take a day off, it’s a false belief, but you don’t realize it.
[00:03:36] When you’re in it and it’s often very, very difficult. So how I deal with it now is very, very different because I’ve built a good management team. I’ve got good people around me, which is really, really helpful. But I think, you know, I know that you’ve got a lot of questions around this. Um, there have been times where it’s not been so easy for sure.
[00:03:52] Jamie: Yeah. Yeah. So how would you find a work life balance? Does it even exist for entrepreneurs? We, as you said, building a strong team around you, but is there any other ways?
[00:04:03] Adam Stott: I think, I think the work life balance, first of all, everything starts up here, starts with, with the mindset. And one of my mentors, uh, Sarah has always said to me is, it’s good not to just always run on adrenaline.
[00:04:17] You have to be able to remove yourself, uh, from situations and actually calm down and let the adrenaline go down because then you can actually see things clearly. Cause I think what happens with a lot of business owners, Is they run on adrenaline, which means they’re go, go, go, go, go, go, go. They’re in that mindset where they just go, go, go.
[00:04:36] And because of that, they’re constantly on the go. They’re constantly on the move. They’re constantly hooked on the business. And then they don’t ever take any time to breathe. They don’t take any time to be strategic and actually look at things in a positive way. So how do you achieve a work life balance?
[00:04:51] Yeah, absolutely. The first thing that you can do is make it a non negotiable. So decide. In advance, because whatever we decide is what we end up seeing in our lives. Decide in advance that I’m not going to be that business owner that doesn’t have any work life balance. I’ll give you a few examples. Like right now, every Tuesday I have my little boy.
[00:05:14] Um, I pick him up from school every Wednesday. I drop him off to school. So I’m always doing that every single week. It’s a decision. Do things come up? Well, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Of course they do, but it’s non negotiable. That’s what I do. It’s in my diaries. One of the biggest things that there’s, there’s two, I’m going to get into some more practical tips.
[00:05:33] I’ll give you some more examples at the weekend. I have my little boy. Could I work weekends? Yes, but I decided not to. So I make it an absolute non negotiable in my life that I will have. Some time for myself. And that’s the first thing that people should do is they should make that decision. And you really need to look at what is important in your life to you.
[00:05:55] And I think people respect it. I think people would respect me more for saying, you know what? If you call me on a Tuesday afternoon, I ain’t going to answer the phone. And you’d be like, well, actually I desperately need to talk to you. Well, then it can wait till Wednesday where it can be one of my team members that, that deals with it.
[00:06:12] And when I didn’t have a team member. I just, as long as you’re communicating, you’re saying, Hey, I’m not available. And Tuesday afternoons, people will do it. So the first tip is make it a non negotiable, absolutely non negotiable. Um, that you are going to have that time and there’s protected time. Uh, the tip number two, every successful person I’ve ever met in my life, and I’ve met a And I know a lot of very, very successful people.
[00:06:36] Every single one of them that are super successful run their life via a calendar. If it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t get done. If it is in the calendar, it does get done. Now don’t get me wrong. I run a very strict calendar. Sometimes things overrun, sometimes other things come up, but I almost look at it like failure.
[00:06:56] If the stuff in my calendar. that I was there to do doesn’t get done. So I have that discipline. So you get your calendar and then you, whatever you put in the calendar gets done and you have discipline around that. And that is a really big thing. If you don’t do that and you don’t plan your life on a calendar, you’re not going to be a top 1 percent success.
[00:07:15] All right. Because that’s what every top 1 percent I mean, like the 1 percent as this is, what I’m talking about is very, very successful or millionaires are going to run for office. by their calendar with ultimate discipline around if it’s in the calendar it gets done and that’s what all successful people do people that are not successful don’t do that people that are successful do that so like literally take that from me having interviewed 300 millionaires Billionaires, A list stars, superstars, super successful people, executives, CEOs, every single one of them runs a strict calendar that’s successful.
[00:07:50] So it’s something that you can do. And you might be sitting there and you go, well, I’m, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a small business and I’m, I’m looking after two children at home. Why do I need to run my life by a calendar? Well, you’d be a lot more efficient if you did, because you would start to, even if you’re.
[00:08:05] You’re in that place where you’re, you know, you’re a part time mom, part time business owner. For example, you’re running your business at home and you’re like, well, I don’t need a calendar. Well, if you did, and you started opening up your calendar and you’re like, Hey, I’m going to leave at this time to pick the kids up.
[00:08:17] And that leaves me with this time here to do these different activities. And then I’m going to go here and I’m going to do these activities then. And then I’m going to pick the kids up and then I’m gonna make dinner. And you started planning out. You would find that you would become much more productive, much more efficient, much, much more time aware.
[00:08:34] Okay. Because in order for you to have a work life balance, you have to become time aware. So that which really brings me to the next part, which is discipline. Go have some discipline. If you want to have work life balance, you’ve got that non negotiable, but you’ve got some discipline about following through.
[00:08:50] You go, Oh yeah, but it’s Sally from work. Sally needs to talk to me. It doesn’t matter who’s Sally. No one talks to you on the time that you blocked out and that’s it. So you have no, I did just, uh, as you mentioned, I just took a two week holiday in that entire two weeks, um, and I was away. Um, there was one business phone call in 14 days, I can tell you, odd text messages, but only one phone call.
[00:09:13] And that was because something came up that I was concerned about and it was me that initiated the phone call. No one else called me and I was like, okay, I looked at that and I was like, right, okay. But I can also tell you I did no work. But what I did do, I did do some work, but I’ll tell you what I did.
[00:09:27] Um, which is important work, is I deeply read Many, many different business books and philosophy books around, uh, building, growing, and scaling businesses. And that in my mind was the work that I was doing. I was doing a peaceful, undistracted way that allowed me time to think and, and time to be able to take action.
[00:09:47] And look, some people, it’s funny enough. Cause my girlfriend who also runs a business would never dream of reading a business book while she’s on holiday. She’d read one while she was at work, but she wouldn’t read one while she’s on holiday, but she’s like. But that’s what I enjoy doing. So for me, that is relaxing to read something around.
[00:10:02] That’s what I enjoy doing. Um, so that, that’s what I would say in terms of a holiday. I don’t know if I answered the question there. I think, but okay. So yeah, when we go work life balance, how do you achieve work life balance? First of all, non negotiables. These are my non negotiables. And actually this is why people have no work life balance is because you’re not taking the time to do what I tell you to do now.
[00:10:23] Which is stop what you’re doing, stop running around, pull the car over, take an interrupt in your life for just one second, and be strategic. Which is stop right now and say, okay, what are my non negotiables? What am I not willing to sacrifice? And if you, if you don’t pull over or you don’t stop, or you don’t go and sit down in the gym or wherever you are, whatever you’re listening, you know, it’s because that means maybe you’re too on the go to even have your pattern interrupted to allow you to just be strategic for a minute.
[00:10:55] Cause that one thing, writing down your non, non negotiables, Is the first building block of you being able to build a work life balance in your life. That’s the first building block. Yeah. And the second building block is right now, I’m going to plan that into my calendar. I’m going to plan those non negotiables into my calendar.
[00:11:13] So under no circumstances, I’m going to get what I want for my business. I’m going to get what I want for my life. And then the third building block will be the discipline and the focus to follow through on them. And before you know, guess what? You’ll have the work life balance.
[00:11:26] Jamie: Yeah, that’s brilliant.
[00:11:26] That’s brilliant. And something that’s great that you do provide is inside of one of your success planners is that you’ve broken down that time management into 30 minute increments. And when I first started to come along the journey with you, that’s something that I took on board. And when you get disciplined with that, it really, really does make a difference.
[00:11:44] And Adam, you know, you’ve started grown and scale multiple successful businesses over the years, but how’s your perspective on the importance of timeout changed over those years?
[00:11:55] Adam Stott: Yeah. So I’m going to address what you said then. And then I’m going to go to this question. Um, one of the things that I have in my calendar is what we call time blocking.
[00:12:03] So one of my mentors many, many years ago, Marco, great guy says to me, Adam, I want you to document in your eight hour day, what you do every 15 minutes. I want you to write it down at the end of every 15 minutes. And, and, and after you asked me to do that, he said, what you’ll find is that you have a lot more time than you think you have.
[00:12:21] But time is eluding you because you’re not managing time. He made me do that for 14 days. And I basically printed off my Outlook calendar, 14 days, 15 minute increments. He said, I want you to write down the good stuff. I want you to write down the bad stuff. I want you to write down the ugly stuff. So I don’t care if you sat and looked at a wall for 15 minutes, you write down a sat and look to the wall for 15 minutes.
[00:12:41] What matters is that we’re honest with ourselves and then we can look at what do we do with our eight hours? Now he made me do that. And I remember having lots of like. Sky Sports, 15 minutes, you know, whatever, like, like little things that were wasting time. And then quite frequently I realized after 14 days that actually if I were to remove these, I actually have plenty of time.
[00:13:01] Yeah. So I’m telling them I don’t have any time. And this is the funny thing, because sometimes one of the books I did read while I was on holiday was the Eno Must book. And, um, nobody can say I don’t have the time if you read that book.
[00:13:15] Jamie: Yeah.
[00:13:15] Adam Stott: Because. Uh, and you can say I don’t have the time to read the book cause it’s 653 pages, but it’s very worthwhile.
[00:13:22] But this guy is somebody that’s reinvented the payment system of the internet with PayPal. Um, he created the first, first version of Google maps with zip two. All right. So zip two is first, then it was PayPal next. He then. Took the money he received from PayPal, uh, built a rocket company from scratch called SpaceX, revolutionized the car industry as well.
[00:13:45] And the SpaceX company now NASA give them the contracts to launch rockets into space. All right. So he did the, uh, he managed to launch two companies at once. He then started a board, the boring company, which drills underground tunnels through cities. In addition to that, he founded, which most people don’t know, uh, Open AI, which is the creator of Jack GPT as well.
[00:14:04] On top of that, he’s making robots. He’s sending people to Mars as to Mars. And, and he’s the richest man in the world. Solar things, all these different things. And he’s done that in the past 20 years. What are you done? Do you know what I mean? Exactly. How can you say it again at the same time? Cause you had the same 20 years he’s had.
[00:14:21] The difference is he’s changed the world, but you haven’t. Well, do we think Elon Musk probably uses his time better than us? Undoubtedly. Right. So that’s what we have to consider. I don’t ever subscribe to the, you haven’t got the time. Now you can, I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent, but hopefully there was a point to it.
[00:14:36] Now, now you have a question. So over the
[00:14:38] Jamie: years, how’s your perspective of actually taking time out change from when you first started on your entrepreneurial journey?
[00:14:45] Adam Stott: Yeah, definitely. So the first year of my entrepreneurial journey, I did everything wrong. Um, and I basically worked 24 seven and, uh, you know, I was there late at night.
[00:14:55] I was there early in the morning. I just, I was in grind mode, um, because I’d read too many or listened to too many silly people saying, Oh, you got to get up at 5 00 AM and you’ve got to leave at 10 PM. I was exhausted, burnt out and I made no money and I was stressed out and I hated life. So that’s how I started, uh, where I’m at now.
[00:15:12] Is I want to take six holidays a year. I want to spend time with my son and I still want to make money. And you can, right. And, and, you know, with my girlfriend as well, I’m going, you can go and do what you want. The difference is, is how you use your time. So what would I say? I think I’m completely in over the course of whatever it is, 2008 was my first business to, to where we are today.
[00:15:35] You know, a fair bit of time is completely transformed. I think you need time out. I think everyone needs to take time out. I think everybody needs to recharge, reset, and re go. I think it’s very, very empowering for people to do so. Uh, it doesn’t matter if you’re a one man army, you’re a hundred person, whatever, you’re a CEO, everybody needs to take that time out of their business.
[00:16:00] to allow the adrenaline to leave their body for them to be able to recharge themselves and to become more successful.
[00:16:06] Jamie: Yeah. It gives them a chance to read some books as well.
[00:16:08] Adam Stott: Yeah, totally. Big. Thank you, Jamie. Great questions today, mate. Thanks for having me. It’s been amazing. Everyone. If you like Jamie being on it, tell us in the comments.
[00:16:16] If not, we’ll get Chris back, you know, and, uh, Uh, hopefully we can, we can help you very, very soon in growing your business and hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you have go and give us a nice review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you can manage it, uh, because that’s the way that this podcast grows.
[00:16:34] Thanks everybody. See you on the next episode.