This could be crucial because it is something we hear a lot and everyone thinks oh yeah, outsourcing, delegating, building up, getting people, building a team.
But remember how annoying, how frustrating it was hearing about that and I didn’t have any money and I didn’t have enough work to do to do that. And all everyone says is “Build a team, build a team. Outsource this.” So how do you do it?
So this is crucial because to try and outsource, to try and get other people to take some of the workload off you is essential.
You do not have to build a big company but I can assure you if you’re doing your admin tasks, if you’re opening the post, if you are going down the bank, if you are doing your own books, you are wasting your time my friend, it is not good.
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And you are saying, “But it only takes me five minutes.” It doesn’t, it interrupts your flow. You cannot do something and then go and stop that entirely, start to do something else and then go straight back into the flow.
You know when you are in the middle of something you’re in the flow and time flies you didn’t even realize it and you say, “Oh, hasn’t time flown.”
That is good work, you are better off doing the stuff that makes you money in that time, not something that you could hire someone to do for a few quid.
So let me cover this, you might say about dreams, and this is a quote from somebody I don’t know who said this, but if your dream does not require a team, your dream is not big enough.
That is true for a lot of us, but I am not entirely convinced, you don’t have to build a big company, let me give you permission, don’t listen to them, don’t be pressured, you don’t have to build a big one.
But it doesn’t mean that you can’t not make loads of money and have an easy working life. Back in the days I was trying to figure out how I could get by until I could afford an assistant and begin to build a team.
And this is where this comes from but also I have got to do give the nod to Michael Hyatt, there is a lot of this it from Michael Hyatt as well, he did a great podcast quite a while ago on this and there’s a lot of information from him because he puts it so well. And I am just going to say you might be thinking, “Well, who is Michael Hyatt? How do I find him?”
Now I’m going to start getting strict with this stuff; if you cannot figure out how to find a guy called Michael Hyatt online, if you need me to tell you where his website is or whatever, you’re going to fail.
I am sorry you’re going to fail you’re not going to get anywhere because you haven’t even tried. Think of the obvious place to search for anything. Start there. I’m trying to help you help yourself, I am not being cruel. Is this tough love? No, just put some effort in, please, please.
Get Stuff Off Your Plate
So first of all, the first thing is you need to get stuff off your plate. So think of, Michael in fact refers to this, think of triage, in triage you know on our battlefront and in hospitals, it’s not quite, this is more battlefront, but nurses triage patients.
They look at the people who are definitely going to die and they don’t bother with them; they look at the ones who are definitely going to survive, they don’t bother with them, they look at the ones in the middle and those are the ones they work on first because they want to keep them alive, put them into a position where they are definitely going to live.
And the same with your “To Do’s” just bear with me. In your to do list, a lot of that stuff does not need to be done right now, you have not got time.
If you worked Saturday and Sunday, at the end of Sunday with your “To do’s” you would still have stuff to do, but when you finish you would still have more to do and you say, “I will get it done tomorrow”, so your “To do’s” will never run out, no matter how good you are, so you have got to get this into your head, you had better do something about it.
So pick the stuff that is going to earn you money; I want you to think it eighty, twenty, eighty percent of your time spent doing stuff that’s going to earn you money, the other twenty percent doing other stuff, because if you earn money you can then afford to pay people to do these other bits for you. Cool, eh?
Avoid Busy Work
Avoid busy work, avoid time suckers. There are people out there, there are just jobs that will just to keep you busy, you don’t need to do it. They generally involve things you are not that good at doing. And when I say not that good at doing, you are not trained, you have to train yourself.
For instance initially setting up say auto responders and learning all that, learning MailChimp or AWeber when there are people out there; you would have to pay them but they could get it done in an hour, things that take you all day once you have learned and even when it takes you all day, you are not that good at doing it because you are still learning.
Editing videos, why edit videos? Why? You have got to learn if you’re never done it before; people tell you it’s easy just learn this, here is a course. Why? Why bother? Don’t waste your time, this is busy work this is what we call it, it is just not worth the effort, honestly.
So just do things that you call essential revenue earning only. That is what I would say, that is pretty good. So use that as the definer, essential revenue earning.
How about email? Email is a killer, obviously email is the death of all businesses. It doesn’t need to be like that, by using Gmail. Have you ever tried it? You’re thinking “No, I am not.” Try it.
Gmail has filters, it has canned responses, you can filter, I mean again Michael suggests for instance if you have got to sort through your emails and forward certain ones that are to do with your account on to your bookkeeper, you can actually set up a filter that automatically forwards those to someone who does your books. Cuts out to the middleman. There are ways of doing this.
How about answering voicemails? How about instead of listening to them all, look for a service that does voice to text or voice to email. Then how about asking people for help? Really, ask for volunteers, you will have a lot of fans a lot of who knows what? Ask them for help you’ll be shocked how many people.
Then how about part time virtual assistance? You know you have the bit where you are thinking you can’t afford all that kind of stuff, you can’t afford it.
Well, there are companies out there if you just Google, use Google, search for a “part time virtual assistance” or “part time VA”, you do not have to hire people full time, there are people who do this for a living.
There are businesses who will make people available to you three hours a week, five hours a week, ten hours a week, you can up, down and they are at a lower cost than hiring yourself because you don’t have to pay them holidays and all that stuff and easy in easy out contracts, all that kind of stuff. Ways of doing things.
Remember another trick to this, work out your true hourly earnings. Actually, work out the profit, divide it by the number of hours you work and you will find whether you’re earning say a hundred pounds an hour, fifty pounds an hour, ten pounds an hour, who knows?
Because those three, a hundred, fifty, ten pounds an hour equate to two hundred thousand pounds a year, a hundred thousand pounds a year, twenty thousand pounds a year.
If you are earning a big amount of money, there will be people that can do things for you for a lot less and then you can earn more money and just allow yourself to say, “No”.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
But anyway, that’s it for today, I’m just going to give you a toolbox tip which is called hunter.io, where you will find email addresses.
If you can’t find emails for someone this, if they’ve got a free service, just try it, it starts off it shows you how you can find people’s email addresses and then you can contact them and get leads and stuff like that. Anyway, you will figure it out.
Don’t forget tomorrow, Expert Interview Series, it’s a guy called Connor Gillivan, very very interesting I’ll be back the day after.
