Hire to buy back time

I recently read Dan Martell’s ‘Buy Back Your Time’ and just love his approach to building a business that you don’t grow to hate.

I have experienced this first hand where I was starting to lose motivation and even growing hate towards my own company.

The same company that I started because I had a big dream, wanted freedom and do great things but at some point it felt like I had created a monster that was controlling me and I couldn’t get out.

He explains this phenomenon in great detail and apparently I am not alone. I will dedicated a few more newsletters on this topic as it’s too much to cover today but the first thing I needed to understand and change is how I see hiring.

I used to hire because I wanted to grow so I figured what position would yield me the most, almost always a sales position in my case, and went looking for a person to do the job.

Dan says this is wrong and I agree, in fact I wished I realised this much sooner.

He says you should audit, transfer and fill when you are hitting a pain line in your business.

The pain line usually sits at 12 direct reports and just over a million in revenue. But can occur much sooner of course.

I now use that buyback loop (audit-transfer-fill), regardless of my company size, when I’m experiencing ‘pain’.

Here’s how he explains the steps.

Audit: What tasks do I hate doing that are easy and inexpensive to offer someone else?

Transfer: Who do I have on my team, or who can I hire, even part-time, to take these over?

Fill: What tasks should I focus on that I love doing that can immediately bring more money to my company?

In his book he gives more specific methods for implementation but this is meant to give you a quick insight.

The reason for me was that I recently caught myself once again losing motivation and actually wanting to stop, this time running our Business Club Côte d’Azur and couldn’t figure out why.

After doing a review of my weeks, I noticed that I’m spending too much time on answering customer support emails, messages on social media, admin tasks, website updates, booking meetings etc.

All tasks that can easily be done by someone else who enjoys this much more than me.

I love working on strategy, building our team, marketing, etc. - basically bigger picture stuff for me. I know that I can easily get lost in the earlier mentioned tasks because I don’t have someone specifically for this or it’s not taking that long, just answer it myself.

However when I added it all up, I realised that I just lost my entire week to this and felt like I got nothing done which lead to my huge frustration and loss of motivation.

So, it’s time for me to delegate (transfer) and get some things of my plate. Not to grow, but to buy back time that I can then spend (fill) on the things I love and bring in revenue!

I’ll let you know how that goes.

✅ 5/100

PS what are some low value tasks that are slowing you down?