“Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire” reminds me of “10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less” and “Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork“.
Busy fools
Stephen Covey once said, “The key is not spending time but investing it.” Simple busyness can’t be the secret ingredient to business success. Even efficiently staying busy isn’t the answer. Most entrepreneurs are extremely efficient. The secret to reaching the next stage of your business is spending your time on only the tasks that:
(a) you excel at,
(b) you truly enjoy
(c) add the highest value (usually in revenue) to your business.
You can always get more money, but you can never get more time. So, you need to ensure that the stuff you spend your time on makes the most significant impact.
Your most finite asset
Know how to optimise your business’s most finite asset: the founder’s time. Rethink how you see your business. Time is the currency, the vehicle allowing you to purchase what you love or avoid what you hate. The Pareto Effect suggests that 80% of all results come from 20% of activity. The accepted 95:5 rule makes the numbers even more dramatic for entrepreneurs, suggesting that only 5% of everything you do drives 95% of your company’s returns. Research shows that small business owners) are wasting a lot of time—on average, about twenty-two hours a week.
Audit your time
Apply the buyback principle. Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time. The Buyback Principle means that when choosing what to do today, you should select the highest-value tasks. That’s what’s in your future, beginning now. Just look around and audit how you’re spending your time. Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they’ve learned to do what they love and only what they love.
Apply the DRIP matrix
- Delegate: makes you little money, drains your energy
- Replace: makes you money, drains your energy
- Invest: makes you little money, lights you up
- Produce: makes you lots of money, lights you up
Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time. 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome.
Buyback rate calculation
Your time is worth how much your business pays you divided by two thousand hours. The rule of thumb is that no one—not a founder, administrative assistant, baseball player, or barista—should be performing a work task that they could outsource for one-fourth (i.e., 25 %) of their current effective hourly rate. What your company pays you / eight thousand = Buyback Rate.
The 5 assassins that kill your success
- The Staller: You sabotage your success by hesitating on big decisions.
- The Speed Demon: You make rapid decisions, such as hiring the quickest/easiest/cheapest option.
- The Supervisor: You fail to properly train, you are micromanaging others, and you are failing to empower others to grow and learn.
- The Saver: You have money in your bank account but don’t understand the value of spending it on growth opportunities.
- The Self-Medicator: You turn to food, alcohol, or other vices to reward yourself when you have success.
The Staller won’t let you move past big decisions. The Speed Demon ensures you keep making the same mistakes. The Supervisor ensures your time never upgrades, meaning you’ll spend more and more frustrating hours on tasks that you’re only mediocre at, at best. The Saver is tricky—he tells you to save your money, costing you time. The Self-Medicator is perhaps the hardest to detect.
The Only 3 Trades That Matter
Level 1 trader: employee Level 2 trader: entrepreneur Level 3 trader: empire-builder
- An employee trades their time for more money
- An entrepreneur trades their money for more time
- An empire-builder trades their money for more money
Your calendar can’t lie
It’s always fascinating to watch entrepreneurs worth millions compare how much they’re worth to what they spend their time on. Time audits aren’t anything new. I call mine a Time and Energy Audit because not only will it help you find out where your time is going, it will also help you see where your energy is going.
The 4 steps of a time and energy audit
- Determine your Buyback Rate.
- Audit every fifteen minutes of your workday for two weeks.
- Assign dollar amounts to each task using one to four dollar signs.
- Highlight everything in red or green. Delete unnecessary work.
The Replacement Ladder
Rung 1: Administration
Rung 2: Delivery
Rung 3: Marketing
Rung 4: Sales
Rung 5: Leadership
There are three key components at every rung of the replacement ladder:
- The key hire you need to make
- Your current feeling of stress or liberty
- The responsibilities that must be transferred to the key hire (ownership)
Once you climb up the fifth rung, you can reach a level of freedom most entrepreneurs don’t even know is possible. By Rung 5, other capable people are running your business. Reaching flow.
McDonaldizing your life
Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design. Most companies call these documents standard operating procedures or playbooks. A Playbook is exactly what it sounds like: it tells everyone on your team how to execute a play. Playbooks can be created for anything, from simple tasks—like finding and vetting new leads or creating company financial reports—to large playbooks containing all the information for an entire department. Importantly, a playbook isn’t going to capture everything, but it will save you time.
Other topics
The book covers a broad spectrum of concepts. Such as context switching, buffer time, optimising for energy, bleed time, task batching, decision fatigue, and ultimately it is all about delegations and leadership. Empowerment, commander intent, transactional management versus transformational leadership, purpose, coaching, metrics, feedback, passion and impact.
Dream
Finally, I could not agree more; you need to dream without limits and create a 10X vision. What legacy do you want to leave behind? How do you want to be remembered 200 years from now? Because when your dreams are huge, you don’t get paralysed by the in-between stuff. Create a clear picture. Make it extremely visual. If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else. The rest is mapping. Insert the milestones and checkpoints, focus on the big rocks (personal and business) and insert the pebbles (=specific actions). Very close to our 100-day planning service https://www.ronimmink.com/what-can-you-achieve-in-a-100-days/
Constantly audit your time
At its core, it is simple. Constantly audit how you spend your time; consider how to transfer time-consuming, low-value tasks; then, importantly, fill your new time with what lights you up and makes you money. And score yourself every week against the 7 pillars of life
- Health: without it, you’ve got nothing.
- Hobbies: decompress. Have fun.
- Spirituality: tap into the energy. This isn’t about religion, although it certainly can be.
- Friends: don’t drop the ball.
- Love: go all in on your relationships. Half-assed relationships don’t work.
- Finances: face up to your finances.
- Mission: know why you’re trying.
Four thousand weeks
Finally, I would also read “Four Thousand Weeks“. The question That book questions why you should focus those 4700 weeks on being productive, managing your life, living on a conveyer belt, being busy, hacking life, working more, making to-do lists, making more money, joyless urgency, work-life balance, employment, busyness, distraction, goal setting, efficiency, inboxes, cramming more, 99 lives, bucket lists, clearing the decks, FOMO, social media, timetables, economics, clock-time, results, etc. You should consider what you want to spend your time, energy and attention on. Life is too short.
