Dan Martell - December 26, 2022


3 Steps to Overcome Overwhelm and Thrive in Your Business

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Zoom Alex Harimono Jim Rohn Jonathan
This AI will steal your job...unless you do this. Rich vs poor mindset

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

201.09

Word count

1,800

Sentence count

100


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I teach you a three step strategy that will take you from feeling overwhelmed and stuck to feeling free and thriving in your business. It s one of the most powerful strategies that I teach entrepreneurs to not only find time in their calendar, but to focus on things that light them up and make them money.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I wanna teach you a three-step strategy
00:00:01.860 that's gonna take you from overwhelm and feeling stuck
00:00:04.400 to free and thriving in your business.
00:00:07.480 I call it the buyback loop.
00:00:08.900 It is one of the most powerful strategies
00:00:10.820 that I teach entrepreneurs
00:00:11.940 to not only find time in their calendar,
00:00:14.940 but to focus on things that light them up
00:00:17.280 and make them money.
00:00:18.660 While ago, I was working with one of my clients, Jonathan,
00:00:21.000 who runs a local services software company,
00:00:23.920 and they had exploded in growth in the previous year.
00:00:26.960 They were doing about $11 million a year
00:00:29.640 and his calendar was nutty.
00:00:31.860 He was feeling overwhelmed.
00:00:33.200 He didn't know what to prioritize, what to strategize.
00:00:36.360 He was saying yes to everything
00:00:37.740 because he thought that's what I should do as a CEO.
00:00:40.100 And when I taught him the buyback loop process
00:00:42.160 within a two week period, that's all it took.
00:00:44.820 He was literally able to buy back almost a full week
00:00:48.160 so that he could go work on things
00:00:49.700 only he could do as the CEO.
00:00:52.320 That's what I wanna show you how to do
00:00:53.720 the specific three-step process
00:00:55.620 that is part of the buyback loop.
00:00:57.040 Let's get into it.
00:00:59.640 So the buyback loop includes three specific steps.
00:01:03.000 It's audit, transfer, fill.
00:01:05.240 As soon as we hit the pain line,
00:01:06.860 as soon as we feel like we've hit the cap on our capacity,
00:01:10.340 we wanna do those three steps
00:01:11.920 so that we can unblock ourselves
00:01:13.920 to take our business to a new height.
00:01:16.120 Step one is audit.
00:01:17.820 We want to look at our calendar.
00:01:20.040 We wanna currently understand and review
00:01:22.120 where are we spending our time.
00:01:23.640 Doing a time and energy audit.
00:01:25.640 And a time and energy audit is literally
00:01:27.680 logging every 15 minutes. What do you do with your time? Are you checking emails? Are you looking at
00:01:34.100 TikTok? Are you on phone calls? Are you writing proposals? Are you managing Slack, project
00:01:39.600 management, whatever you're doing every 15 minutes, you should set a timer goes off, you log it in a
00:01:44.000 book, you log it in your journal. And then what you do is after you have two weeks worth of logs,
00:01:49.420 you go back through at the beginning and you highlight in green everything that gives you
00:01:53.740 energy and you highlight in red anything that sucks your energy so that you start to get a
00:01:59.240 sense of the activities that light you up that make you feel excited about the future and all
00:02:04.680 the stuff that you're just like despair about you're just like oh not looking forward to it
00:02:09.000 then you take that list and you put one dollar sign if it's a cheap thing to give somebody else
00:02:13.240 to do and four dollar signs you can put two or three or four four if it's an expensive thing
00:02:18.300 something that would require a specialist,
00:02:20.560 an expensive consultant,
00:02:22.020 something that you'd have to hire
00:02:24.000 to do what you're doing today.
00:02:25.500 Maybe if it's like operate your business or be the CEO,
00:02:27.860 those are very expensive things to pay other people to do.
00:02:30.400 Once you do this time and energy audit
00:02:32.580 and you understand the cost of those activities,
00:02:34.800 then you take all the red stuff
00:02:36.520 with one dollar sign next to it
00:02:38.720 and you put it in a bucket.
00:02:40.200 And that now becomes your hit list
00:02:42.120 of getting those items out of your life.
00:02:44.780 It's very obvious once you start looking at your time
00:02:48.140 and you review it, you audit it to get very clear
00:02:51.220 where there's a lot of waste,
00:02:52.640 where there's opportunities to delete, to defer,
00:02:55.960 to delegate stuff off of your plate
00:02:58.060 just by doing that energy and time on it.
00:03:00.380 But we're not done.
00:03:01.120 Now we gotta focus on transfer.
00:03:02.980 The second step is to transfer, okay?
00:03:05.180 We need to learn how to delegate the things we're doing
00:03:08.260 and teach other people to do it.
00:03:09.960 I use this methodology called the camcorder method.
00:03:12.720 And the way that works is I record myself doing the work
00:03:17.540 and talking out loud as I'm doing it.
00:03:20.060 Today, I just use Zoom and I do a meeting by myself.
00:03:23.360 I share my screen and I hit record
00:03:25.620 and then I record myself on my Zoom session,
00:03:28.880 sharing my screen so that I just talk over what I'm doing.
00:03:32.480 And the reason I do this is because
00:03:34.360 even before I hire somebody to give them the work to do
00:03:38.060 to take off my plate, I want those recordings.
00:03:40.800 And then those recordings,
00:03:42.400 if I have three, four, five of these recordings,
00:03:45.100 managing my inbox, publishing social media videos,
00:03:48.700 managing accounts receivable,
00:03:49.900 whatever it is for you, it doesn't matter.
00:03:52.860 Think about like taking all those items
00:03:55.100 that you highlighted in red, that's $1 sign,
00:03:57.800 and then just recording yourself doing that work.
00:04:00.400 That now becomes the training for the new person.
00:04:02.860 Here's the kicker.
00:04:04.240 When you hire the person, you give them the videos
00:04:06.880 and then they create what's called the SOPs
00:04:09.360 or I call playbooks, right?
00:04:10.580 The standard operating procedures.
00:04:12.940 That takes away from you doing it
00:04:15.560 and you do it all using what I call net time.
00:04:17.840 No extra time required.
00:04:19.540 You literally get the work done,
00:04:21.900 record yourself doing it,
00:04:23.500 then hire somebody.
00:04:24.920 They create the SOPs.
00:04:26.800 And then once you get it back,
00:04:28.340 you'll know based on what they put
00:04:30.000 in the standard operating procedure
00:04:31.160 if they understood what you said in the video.
00:04:34.040 So there's a comprehension feedback loop.
00:04:36.500 And then if for whatever reason
00:04:37.520 that person doesn't work out,
00:04:39.220 no problem.
00:04:40.000 You hire somebody new,
00:04:41.120 you got the training videos,
00:04:42.360 you've got the SOP, the playbook, and then the new person hits the ground running even harder.
00:04:47.480 That process changed the game for me on everything. I mean, I take it to a level today where
00:04:54.120 like I use my iPad, a lot of people don't realize this, but you can screen record and audio record
00:04:59.160 on your iPad on your phone. And as your pro you can literally on a flight, you could do this,
00:05:03.960 you could record yourself processing your inbox or managing your calendar, record the screen,
00:05:09.080 talk out loud into your AirPods or whatever, and then take that recording, upload it through iCloud
00:05:14.460 and share it with a new team member and say, you're now taking this over. There's so many ways
00:05:19.660 to use the camcorder method to make the transfer step in the buyback loop so much more easier for
00:05:25.880 you without adding extra time to your calendar to transfer items off your plate. The third step is
00:05:31.760 fill. And fill is all about filling your calendar that you've just bought back all this time with
00:05:36.820 new activities that are either going to make you more money, that's the kicker, and hopefully light
00:05:43.260 you up. They're things that give you energy. Now, most people get this wrong because they just
00:05:47.820 respond to the world's demand on their time. There's no strategy behind it. Here's my filter.
00:05:52.180 This is my strategy. And I learned this analogy from a guy named Alex Hermozzi. Definitely check
00:05:56.360 him out. But it's the idea of the ladder of success, okay? The ladder is built with these
00:06:01.760 three parts. And these are the things that you want to consider when you're filling up your time.
00:06:05.380 The first one is skills.
00:06:06.660 That's the left side of the ladder.
00:06:08.420 What are the skills that you need to develop
00:06:10.660 as an entrepreneur to overcome
00:06:12.500 the biggest challenge in your business?
00:06:13.900 Maybe it's a marketing skill.
00:06:15.160 Maybe it's a confidence skill.
00:06:16.440 Maybe it's a communication skill.
00:06:18.360 Maybe it's a leadership skill.
00:06:19.960 Strategic planning, financials, whatever it is for you,
00:06:23.400 you need to identify the gaps in where you're currently at,
00:06:27.020 what you wanna achieve and invest in those skills
00:06:29.380 from going to seminars, reading books, buying courses,
00:06:32.980 hiring a mentor, hiring consultants,
00:06:35.380 to teach you these skills so that you can move up that left side of the ladder. That's the
00:06:40.380 beginning. The right side of the ladder is made up of beliefs. And beliefs are so important as
00:06:45.020 you grow your business because it's the blocker that's stopping you from even being able to take
00:06:49.240 action often. You know, Jim Rohn, who is one of the most important motivational speakers from
00:06:54.940 the past century, he had this great example of this sales guy that looks outside and there's a
00:07:01.120 storm. And he looks outside of the storm and he goes, holy cow, look at that storm. There's no
00:07:05.820 way I can go out today and sell. He's a door-to-door sales guy. This other sales guy looks outside,
00:07:11.000 he sees the same storm and he goes, yay, a storm. It's going to be great. Everybody's going to be
00:07:16.020 home and none of the sales guys are going to be out. Think about that. Two different people,
00:07:21.400 two different beliefs. One had the proper belief that's going to make him take action to actually
00:07:26.180 grow his business. That's the right side of the ladder. The center of the ladder is character
00:07:30.880 traits. This is how you show up. It's who you've become. It's your identity. And the investments
00:07:36.080 you want to make there are things like relationships, right? Your associations to
00:07:41.160 other people are going to affect your development of character traits and your environment. You know,
00:07:46.740 paying to be part of groups where other people inspire you. They motivate you. They force you
00:07:52.880 through positive peer pressure to play a bigger game. These are the things that are going to
00:07:56.940 develop your character. So when I'm thinking of filling my time in my calendar, I'm always asking
00:08:01.300 myself, what's the future skills I got to develop to get to the next level? What beliefs do I got
00:08:06.360 to challenge and overcome to make this process easier? And then who do I need to become? What
00:08:11.600 identity do I need to adopt to make that journey easier? That is the ladder of success that you want
00:08:17.840 to build and design as you fill back up your calendar with all the time that you bought back
00:08:23.520 using the buyback loop.
00:08:25.140 So if you're feeling at capacity and you're overwhelmed,
00:08:27.940 consider the buyback loop, those three steps.
00:08:30.340 Audit your calendar, do a time and energy audit,
00:08:33.360 then transfer all the red stuff that's low value
00:08:36.100 off of your plate, and then fill it up with things
00:08:39.160 that are gonna create your success ladder
00:08:41.260 so you can take your life to the next level.
00:08:43.520 Be sure to check out my new book, buybackyourtime.com.
00:08:47.620 Go check it out, it's on all platforms.
00:08:49.840 I dive into the buyback loop and all these other principles
00:08:52.600 to allow you to elevate your business and your life.
00:08:56.180 And I'll see you next week.