Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: If you want more time, money, freedom, and have a business that's not reliant on you, then you're in the right place. Each week, Mark Creedon, along with some of the very best business minds in the world, will take you through simple, practical steps you can take to create the business you always wanted. From his own practical experience, Mark will show you how to work less, make more, and get the business you always wanted, the one that you deserve.
Now, here's your host, one of Australia's most sought after business coaches, Mark Creedney.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Hello. Welcome to the latest edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. I'm Mark Creedon, your host. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about how you get more freedom from your business. And we're going to focus on three things. It's the three t's, it's time, team and targets. And I'm going to talk to you about the highest and best use of your time. How to get your team on board and how to set targets that matches those two. So if you are in a service business and you're thinking to yourself, I wish I had more time. I wish I had better people and I wish I could actually kick some goals and achieve my targets and make it all work for me. As we always say, congratulations, you're in the right place because that's what we're going to be exploring in today's episode. Let's get that underway right now.
So I think we've spoken in previous episodes about the concept of time management. And my view is that time management is really a bit of nonsense because you can't really manage time, right. We've all only got 24 hours in the day. So it's not about managing time.
It's about understanding time as priority and understanding the highest and best use of your time. When I used to go into businesses and do one on one consulting, one of the first things I used to do is I'd go to the senior team, whether it was the CEO or the GM or the MD, whoever it might be, and I'd say, oh, look, do you know where the photocopier is? Yeah, and look, it's jammed. Do you know how to unjam it? And almost to a person, they jump up from behind their desk and go, yeah, I can do that for you. And I go, stop.
Why do you know how to unjam the photocopier and why are you helping me to do that? And I get it because you're just a really nice person and you're trying to help me, but honestly, why are you doing that? Why are you working on something that you would undoubtedly have within your office, somebody who you pay a lot less than you to be able to help unjam the photocopy? And I want to be really clear about this. I'm not for a moment suggesting that it's beneath them.
The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. And certainly in my office, I'm happy to empty the bins. I'm happy to pick up the rubbish. I'm happy to do what needs to be done. I'm happy to water the plants, happy to make the coffee, empty the dishwasher, all that stuff. So it's not about that. This is not an elitist podcast. It's not about that at all. This is actually about understanding the highest and best use of your look at, when you look at the concept of the photocopier concept, it's not that the GM or the business owner shouldn't know how the photocopier works. That's fine. You can do that because nothing more frustrating than if you're in the office after hours and you can't get your photocopier to work. But when it comes to unjamming it, man, that should be being done by somebody else. And if it's not somebody in your business, then you ring the photocopier company and they'll charge you whatever they charge you, $40, $50 now to come and fix it. That should still be cheaper than your worth. You have to work out what your worth is. Dan Martel, in his book, buy back your time, talks about an exercise you can go through to actually calculate your hourly rate, what your hourly rate is. And I always look at it this way. I look at what is the amount of money that I want to make in a year, what is the number of hours that I want to work in a year, and I do a simple calculation to break it back, and it tells me what my hourly rate is. And then what I say is, anything that I can get done that is reasonably and or substantially less than that hourly rate, then why would I do it? And I can give you a real example. I remember a number of years ago, Caroline, you've heard Caroline on the podcast before.
We bought a sort of a dog kennel for our german shepherd, and we needed to put a concrete pad down. And she said to me, well, why don't we do that? And I went, okay, let's just have a look at that for a second. Why don't we do that? I'm going to have to go and buy bags of cement, some sand. I'm going to hire a cement mixer. I'm going to have to hire a screed. I'm going to have to get hire a level. I'm going to have to go and buy some timber. I have to nail together. Boxing. And then after all of that, and really, that's a day gone for me. After all of that, I've then got to make sure I get the levels right, or Harry's going to be sleeping in a big puddle of water because I've got the levels so horribly wrong.
Or we could get a hold of a local concrete, give them the brief, and they'll do it for. And I think they did it for like $1,000, and they had it done in a half a day.
That job would have taken me a couple of days to do. If you're listening this now, going, a couple of days? You're kidding me. Okay, I'm not the handiest bloke on the face of the earth, but the point is, it probably would have taken me a couple of days. And the question that I had to ask myself is not so much can I do it? Because one of the things that Caroline always says, and I think it's quite true, is that you can turn your hand to most things if you have the time and the tools. So if you've got the right time, the amount of time and the tools to be able to do it, most things, I'm not suggesting open heart surgery or something, but most things around the house I can do if I've got the right tools. But in that case, if that was going to take me two days and also driving around and hiring a cement mixer and hiring a trailer first to go and pick up a cement mixer, or I pay somebody $1,000, the question I have to ask myself is, what can I do in those two days? And can I earn more than $1,000?
Or can I do something which celebrates my freedom that I would gladly pay $1,000 for? I'm going to say that again. Can I do something that's going to earn more than $1,000, or can I do something that's a part of my freedom that I would gladly pay $1,000 if I could get someone to do that. So for me, if I could get somebody to take that job on, spend two days, and instead I could spend some time with the grandkids or spend time with the kids or my wife, or spend some time playing music, things that I really love to do. I gladly pay $1,000 to do it because the truth is, I know that I can spend, if it's a two day job, I can spend one day doing that and I can spend the other day and I can make the grand. So it is about understanding the highest and best use of your time.
How you do that, I think, is super simple. You can come up with all the different sort of complex methodologies and calculations, work out how much money do you want to make out of your business? How many hours do you want to work in it, divide it out and that's the hourly rate. Anything less than that, you should be paying somebody to do. And that's how you're going to get freedom. Most of the clients that we work with come to us and say, yeah, do you know what? I don't so much want more money out of the business. In fact, because I always ask this question, right? If you were walking down the beach and you kicked your toe, stubbed your toe on a lamp and rubbed the lamp, and the genie popped out and said, I can give you whatever it is that you want to achieve in the next twelve months in your business. Most people don't really want more money.
Don't get me wrong, if it comes their way, they're not going to give it back, but they don't really want more money. What they want is more time, more freedom to feel like they're not shackled to the business.
Sound familiar?
Cool. If that sounds like you, then you are 100% listening to the right podcast right now because we're going to work through those three t's. Remember, it's time team and targets. And what I want you to think about now is what is the highest and best use of your time? Please, if you're driving listening to this, don't try and do that calculation. Don't touch your phone. But when you get the opportunity, do that calculation and work out what your worth is. What's your hourly rate? Guys, what are you worth? And then to ask yourself this question, in the last week or month, how many tasks have you done that are substantially lower than your hourly rate? So we'll just pluck a figure, right? And say your hourly rate is $100 an hour and you've worked out you've done a whole bunch of tasks that you could have paid somebody 25, $30 an hour. You could have employed a junior person in the office and paid them $30 an hour. Maybe you could have employed some offshore team and paid them five to $10 an hour. You've got to stop and think about, what could I have done instead? So that's my challenge to you. It's a two step challenge. Number one, work out your alley rate. Number two, have a serious look at whether or not you've done some things that would fall into that category of things that you shouldn't have done. One of the ways that you can do that, by the way, is to use the traffic lights. Yeah, here they are. Traffic lights again. You guys know how much I love traffic lights, right? But to have a look at all the tasks that you do and traffic light, what you've done over the last few weeks, red is, man, that is so far below. There's no way in the world I should have done that. I should have sent that to someone else. I should have delegated it or outsourced it. By the way, if you're sitting there going, yeah, mark, that's fine for you because you've got a team of people. I don't have anybody. I'm a one person band. I'm a one person show. It's okay. You can outsource things. You can get people to come in and do things for you. I remember having a conversation with Louise Bedford from the trading game. And Louise Bedford always says one of the best things she ever did was to get a wife. Apologies to all the wives listening, but was to get someone who could come in and do the things that she felt that she should have been doing as a. Know the domestic things that she felt that, as a wife, she should have been doing. So she hired someone to do that. Best decision she ever made, because she could pay somebody 30, 35, 40, whatever it might be. We get somebody to clean our house, and honestly, I don't know. I think we pay them $40 an hour. But I get home on a Friday. The house is lovely. It all looks beautiful.
It's amazing. It's nice for the weekend. And I can earn more than $40 an hour by spending my time doing what I'm doing right now, talking to you guys, recording a podcast. I can make more money doing that than I'm going to by cleaning my home.
So use the traffic light system and have a look. Red is the things you absolutely shouldn't have done. The really sort of low brow things or the low money things. Amber, are the things that look. Probably needed to start that, but didn't need to finish it. And then green is the things that. Yeah, absolutely. I had to deal with that, it would be really interesting to make out a list and then put a little traffic light beside each of them and just see how many reds and ambers you have. Be a fascinating exercise, please. When you don't do it now, listen to the rest of the podcast first because there's some really good stuff coming up, but I'd love you to then do that exercise. Work out your alley rate and then go back and traffic light what you've done over the last few weeks. Once you've done that, the green is due, the orange you need to start and delegate, and then the red, other things that you dump and get someone else to do.
That's how you understand the highest and best use of your time. And that is the secret to time management, right? It's not these matrixes of urgent, important, important and urgent and not urgent. And I mean, I just get confused. All due respect to those who have designed those Stephen Covey amazing stuff, I just get really confused with those matrix. So I really just look at a time management process for me is what is the highest and best use of my time? And that's where I want to be. I mean, that's my genius. Now, I think there's a couple of components to that and we touched on it before. Highest and best use of your time doesn't always have to be money making because highest and best use of your time might be freedom. It might be spending time with the kids, it might be daddy daughter days or daddy Sundays or mummy daughter whatever, right? It might be going to the kids piano recitals. It might be. I went to my grandson's piano recital recently, had to sit through 43 other kids, just listen to his. But it was good fun and so proud of him that for me, if I can pay someone to do some tasks so that it gives me that freedom, the time to be able to do those things, then it's absolutely worthwhile. So when we talk about highest and best use of time, I think there's three components to it. One, it's simply a simple calculation. What is the highest value of my time? The second one is what are the things that I could get rid of? Or what price would I pay to have freedom? What price would I pay to have freedom so that I can go to the piano recital or knock off early or play some music or hang out with friends or whatever it might be. So it's about unseen the highest and best use and then freedom. And the third one is just working in what we call your genius. So your genius is a zone, which is something that you love doing, right, that you absolutely love to do and that you're really good at and that you just can't think of anything else that you'd rather be doing that addresses the issue of the highest and best use of your time. Let's look at teams. Now, the thing that I really want you to keep in mind when we talk about in the mastermind for business podcast and in our mastermind program for that matter, when we talk about team, it's a really extended version because you might be sitting there, you know, I'm a solopreneur. I don't really have a team, but you can. Your team might be outsourcers, it might be offshore people, but the team extends beyond that. I always think that the team really goes into all the people who are around you, your team, your employees, outsources, contractors, offshore people, suppliers, all the people around you, because there are ways that you can speak with extended team, for example, like suppliers, and have them do some of the work for you. So supply generated invoicing or just something that's going to take some of the pressure off you and give you some time back. I really want you to keep that in mind when we're talking about teams so that you don't get caught up in the, oh, mark, we don't have a team. Everybody has a team. It just looks different.
If you get that right, then what I'm about to tell you about is going to be really important. And we've spoken before about this concept of delegation. Right. What you've got to do is, what are the things that you can get off your plate so that you get time back, whether it's time to go and spend it on money, making exercises, whether it's time to get freedom, whether it's time to go work in your genius, have fun, develop new things, whatever it might be for you.
The way that you offload those things and get the team around you to take responsibility for that is going to be so valuable for you in this time team target trilogy. There you go. We just created the trilogy. How cool is that? And Nick's not even here to congratulate me. So you look at this time team target trilogy and you go, right, I've got my time right now. I want to get my team around me. And what I really want for my team is I want them to take the pressure off me. I want them to do the things that are not the highest and best use of my time, the things that fall into that. Amber and red traffic light process that we spoke about before. Now, I've spoken to you about the skills of delegation in a previous podcast. I really want to revisit those because in this case it's super important and I've already sort of hinted at it. What you want to do as you start to take things off your plate and give them out to your team. What you're doing is not giving the task, but you are assigning responsibility. We spoke about supplier generated invoices before. That's about giving them the responsibility for generating an invoice so that you can pay them. So it's a way of making sure that you're actually giving over the responsibility and not just the task. And I just think that's the cornerstone of any kind of delegation, by the way, is to make sure that what you're giving over is not just the task, but the actual responsibility for it. Get that right. I think you're well on your way. We're going to have a look in just a second at how targets fit into all of that's all right. So we've looked at time, we've looked at team. Now let's have a look at targets.
Do you know what? I'm going to go back a little bit. I'm going to go back a little bit. I'm going to talk to you about the other thing that I see when it comes to getting freedom for you as the business owner is making sure that you've got the right people in your team and that you're retaining them. And I reckon one of the big questions that I hear is people say to me, oh, Mark, I can't get my team to think like me. They just don't think like me. Well, guess what? They're probably not going to. That's why you're the entrepreneur and they're not. That's why you've got entrepreneurial blood. They don't, because if they did, they'd probably be doing it for themselves. So sometimes you've just got to kind of lower your expectations to a degree to remember that the reason why people are working for you and not doing it for themselves is because they don't have that entrepreneurial think. But you can get them to think like business owners. But there's two things I think you absolutely have to do. Well, there's three things. I always change that, don't I? There's three things. One, you have to take them along for the journey. I've used this so many times. If I pull up outside your house, in a car and said, jump in. One of the first questions you'd ask me, I hope, is, where are we going? And yet every day we get people into our business, whether it's a brick and mortar business or an online business, whatever it might be, we have them work for us without actually telling them where we are going, what is the journey that we are going on. So that's number one. Number two, they don't feel valued. Number three, they don't understand the purpose of the business and therefore the role that they play in that purpose. They don't understand the purpose of the business and the role they play in that purpose. So what I would encourage you to do is to make sure that you are sharing with your team.
You want to share with them where the business is going. What's the journey? This is like a card. They're jumping in your car. Well, where are we going? It's not just the journey, but where's the destination as well. So we want to make sure that we've got a really clear destination. The second thing is you want to show them that they're valued. What you want is high value and clear purpose. Say that again. What you want is high value and clear purpose. They need to have crystal clarity on what the purpose of the business is and what their purpose is and how those two interlink, if you get that right now, you've got a really good team around you. So now you've got the highest use of your time sorted out. Step number one. Now you've got a really good team and you can now safely hand over responsibility for a whole bunch of those red and amber things, knowing that they're going to get done and that it is going to give you the freedom that you're looking for because you're handing the responsibility for it over. So the next thing is, how do we now look at targets and find targets that fit into that process?
When you're setting targets for your business, these are the things that you really want your business to achieve in the next twelve months, or two years or three years, or whatever it might be. And the best way of achieving those targets is for you not to be the sole person that's working toward it. And I think there's two things that we need to do there.
Number one, it gets exhausting if, as the leader of the business, you feel like you're always out front with a big rope over your shoulder, leaning into the rope, dragging everybody along like a great big concrete block. If you really want to achieve the targets that you're setting for your business without you busting your guts doing it.
Being the richest person in the cemetery, what you want to do is change from being a leader from the front and start being a leader from the back. What I mean by that is, the way that I push the businesses that I run toward their targets is by pushing the people behind people from behind to uplift them, to get them to upskill their skills, to up their levels of confidence, to up their levels of proficiency, of trust, of reliability, of commitment and loyalty, and really build that, invest in that. It's so much easier to push people up so that they're achieving what you want them to achieve and what they want to achieve than it is to grab the rope and feel like you got to keep pulling them along and try and drag them along for the journey. So step number one is to make sure that you are starting to work on leading from behind. If you really want to achieve those targets, you have to get your team on board so that everybody has responsibility for it. And then we spoke before about the concept of purpose. I think the second point on this with your targets is everybody has to know the piece they play in that puzzle. If you imagine that your business is a jigsaw puzzle, and what we often do is we give everybody a role, right, people in the business. And again, keep in mind, we've got this extended definition of team, and we may not share with them what the destination is, where the business is going, and we might not share the purpose, and we might give them value, all those things that we've already spoken about.
But imagine we give them a role, but they don't understand that that role is actually a piece in the jigsaw puzzle. And the two things you have to do is you have to show them where their piece fits in and through that, where it touches the other pieces, because that's how they get to see the impact that they have. They get to see the impact they have and then flip the lid of the box over so they can see how important their piece is in the entire picture. Take one piece out of picture in a jigsaw puzzle, and it's a rubbish picture, right? It's incomplete. Put that one little piece back. They get to see exactly where it fits, how it touches the other pieces, the impact that it has, and they get to see the whole picture.
All right. Wow. Been a heavy episode. Hey, time, team and targets. Understand what is your value and the highest, best use of your time, and then look at applying a traffic light to it to make sure that you're doing the things that are in the green and you're delegating, passing on the things that are in the amber and red team. How do you get your team along? You've got to tell them what the destination is. You've got to share the destination and the journey. You've got to show them that they're valued and they've got to understand the purpose of the business and their purpose and how those two are inextricably linked targets. How do you get to achieve your targets? By not being the only person that's working toward them. Right. You get the whole team working toward them, not by dragging them along, by getting behind them and pushing them up and helping them to achieve more. And then finally, is to get them to understand the piece that they play in that puzzle, get them to understand the impact they have, how it all fits together. If you get those three things right, you've got your time, your team, and your targets. You are well on your way not just to achieving the success that you want in your business, but more importantly, you're well on your way to achieving the freedom that you want from your business. And at the end of the day, that's what we're here to help you to achieve. If you would like to talk to us about how we can help you to do that, Metropolmastermind.com au love to do that. If you've liked what you've heard today and you're enjoying the podcast, please let us know. Like it, share it, and if you subscribe, it actually makes it much easier for other people to find us. So I'd love to see you subscribe to the podcast. If there's a particular topic you'd like to hear about, please jump onto our socials, send us a message and let us know. We'd be happy to make sure that we include it in future episodes. In the meantime, please make sure you spend time with those who matter most. This is Mark Creedon signing off on the latest edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. We'll talk soon.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us on the Mastermind for Business podcast. If you're ready to have a business that you're not a slave to, check out Metropolemastermind.com au or have a chat with Mark and the team at all the W's, see what's possible today.
