Episode 193： 10 Time Saving Hacks for the Entrepreneur
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Summary
As an entrepreneur, you're going to have a lot of meetings, but sometimes you'll have a bunch of meetings and all of a sudden you're like, why did I have this meeting? I don't even know what the whole purpose of this meeting was. And that brings me to 1. Ask everybody this question: What's our outcome? 2. Is this a 5 minute conversation or a 15 minute conversation? 3. If the group doesn't have an outcome, there doesn't need to be a meeting. 4. Let's manage the expectation up front on what the outcome of the meeting gives. 5. What s our outcome of a meeting?
Transcript
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30 seconds. One time for the underdog. Technician sequence start.
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Let me see you put them up. Reach the sky, touch the stars up above.
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Cause it's one time for the underdog. One time for the underdog.
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I'm Patrick Bedevi, your host of Value Team, and today I'm going to talk to you about 10 time-saving hacks for entrepreneurs.
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Listen, as an entrepreneur, you're going to have a lot of different meetings,
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but sometimes you'll have a lot of meetings and all of a sudden you're like,
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I don't even know what the whole purpose of this meeting was.
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And that brings me to number one phrase, which is you ask everybody this question.
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What's our outcome of this meeting? Very simple.
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Hey, if it's a one-on-one, what's our outcome of this meeting?
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Board meeting, what's our outcome of the meeting?
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A meeting with 100 people, what is our outcome of this meeting?
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And you ask a few people and see if they know the outcome.
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If the group doesn't have an outcome, there doesn't need to be a meeting.
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If the group does have an outcome, let's manage the expectation up front on what the outcome of this meeting gives.
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A lot of times people will come up to you, they'll call you.
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And you'll pick up a call because it's maybe an executive or an important person you're working with.
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Right off the bat, if you're running doing other things, this is how you answer the phone.
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Hey John, brother, this is great that we're talking.
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Is this a five-minute conversation or a 15-minute conversation?
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Can we schedule this for later on today to have 15 minutes?
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I'm available at 6 p.m. tonight, Central Standard Time.
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I'll call you at 6 and I'll give you 15 minutes of my time.
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So let me tell you what the other person is thinking about.
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The other person is saying, wow, this person respects and values their time.
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When they call you at 6 o'clock, they're not going to waste your time.
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They're going to go 15 minutes because you made it very clear.
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Is this a 15-minute conversation or a 15-minute conversation?
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And by the way, the more you do that, the more of your employees and executives are also
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going to be doing that with their teams and they're going to say, is this a five-minute
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So not only are you saving time, everybody else on your team is saving time.
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And let's just say you're the executive or you're the leader or you're somebody of influence
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and they're kind of excited to pick up your call.
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And you say right off the bat, hey, John, I know you're busy.
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They already know it's a five-minute conversation.
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If you don't say that, then it's all about how, what do you think about this?
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It could have been a seven-minute conversation.
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So sometimes you'll have somebody that walks into your office or they'll call you.
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But then you catch yourself like thinking on the call, five, 10, 15, 20 minutes to try
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to make the right decision rather than just saying, listen, this requires me to think
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Let me get back to you this afternoon at four o'clock or let me get back to you and sleep
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And simmering could be at night while you're sleeping.
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And it saved you time from not getting distracted of the project you were working on on that
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Now, by the way, when you say, let me get back to you, it doesn't work if you actually
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So a lot of times there will be an email trail, right?
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And people will add you in an email and they'll send the calendar for an appointment that they're
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having tomorrow at two o'clock with this meeting of nine people at the office.
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And you don't really know what the purpose of the meeting is, but you'll ask the question.
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Then somebody who's the decision maker, they will say, actually, after thinking about it
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with the two of us, you are not needed in this meeting, but we are going to need you for
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You just dismiss yourself from a one-hour meeting that everybody will have and they'll
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come back to with issues that you need to process with them, but for the first preliminary
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Just yesterday, there was something taking place upstairs for watching a certain video
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And I went up there and I said, listen, am I needed for this decisions that you guys
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Then they said, no, Pat, we don't need you for this one, but we'll need you for the
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If you're not aware of this, what you'll catch yourself doing is being part of meetings.
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Hours and hours of meetings that you do not need to be a part of.
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You'll have a strategy session and you're sitting there and no one can come up with the answer
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Who do we know that has the right answer to this question?
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By the way, this is the same thing when I'm in Athens and I'm lost and I don't know how
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She'll say, we have to go through this street and this.
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Let's go to the ships and we find it because someone who lives there is going to have a
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better way of assisting us on how to get there versus us trying to learn the city.
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That saves you a lot of time and a lot of drama.
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So, look, a lot of times as you're building a business, you have a lot of different projects
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We have Project X, Project A, Project B, whatever it is.
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And as you have these projects, at the end of every project, you need to come out with
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Step-by-step process on what we need to do to solve this issue and make this project
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At the end of the project, you've got to ask one question.
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And the question is, who is taking the lead on this project?
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If you don't do that, then everybody feels committed to every single project rather than people
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And then at the end, you ask the one question that I asked earlier, which is what?
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I can't do this because I think she will do it better than I will do it.
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So the question is, who is taking the lead on this step of the project before you finish
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the strategy session that you had on a project that you're working on?
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You have some issue, a crisis, something, whatever that's taking place that's come up, right?
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As you're going through step-by-step of processing this issue, you've either hit a wall or you've
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already solved it and processed the issue, but people are still talking.
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We get back to work, whatever we're working on.
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So many times, you'll have a lot of people that are constantly asking questions from the
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Rather than creating a CRM, like for instance, we spent over seven figures on an app that allows
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me to have geoconference that a message, we have 7,000 agents nationwide.
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This geoconference allows me to send a message to any zip code, 50 mile radius, 100 mile radius,
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And allows me to have a timer on there where the message disappears in six hours.
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So having a CRM, a communication platform where people in different departments can get
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So at any given moment, I can go and say, what's going on over here?
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So look, as you grow, and eventually you're going to have a lot of different departments
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Compliance, sales, backend, support, customer service, customer retention, finance department.
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But before you have all these different departments, you may be running a team of three people,
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For us at this point, we bought a multi-seven figure app that we designed only for us that
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communicates, that's got so much security in it, that's insane.
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And it's got different departments, different level leadership.
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Because a lot of times, if one department is distracting another department, is distracting
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another department, that department is dealing with an issue that's none of their business,
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So you have to figure out a way to get the messages amongst each department to them.
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Maybe you're not a hundred million dollar company now.
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Maybe you're just starting out your $100,000 business.
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You create certain communication groups like a GroupMe or a CyberDust or a text or a certain
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communication that you can do collectively, the team can in that department collectively,
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for them to know exactly what's going on with the updates.
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And then as you grow, these communication platforms are going to get bigger and bigger
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And eventually, you will also probably have your own proprietary communication tool you use
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So a lot of times when you're new, your employees need education and you're the one that's educating
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everybody because you know what you expect from people.
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So you'll sit with an employee 42 minutes here, you know, 38 minutes here, another 48 minutes
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here, and you'll find yourself saying the same thing to 50 other people, right?
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And by the way, I am all about face-to-face, one-on-one orientation with new people to get
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You can't just say, watch this video and that's it.
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There's got to be a human being that's sitting there talking to them.
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But in order to really scale, you need to have an educational system in place.
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We created an educational system very similar to valutainment.
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Valuetainment, a big part of it was a lot of people kept asking me questions.
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You know, what is the struggles as an entrepreneur?
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So now anybody that asked me questions, watch this video, watch this video, watch this video.
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You know, I'm not explaining 22 minutes of the video because it's there for somebody
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That same principle was used with our company way before valutainment came out.
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And so if you're watching and say, well, Pat, how do I do it?
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If you put it on YouTube, and let's just say you have a password-protected website where
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you just want your employees to see, you don't want it to be open to the public, then you
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can use YouTube, even if it's an unlisted video because it can be shared.
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But you can use Wistia, which allows you to put the video and embed it on your website.
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And the only way I can see it is based on the password, login, all that stuff I got to
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And you spend $100, $200 a month with them, depending on how much bandwidth you have.
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But having an educational platform with your business, no matter how big or small you are,
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that can give you hundreds, if not thousands of hours that gets back to you instead of
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And by the way, if you haven't already subscribed to Valuetainment on iTunes, please do so.
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And if you have any questions for me that you may have, you can always find me on Snapchat,
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And I actually do respond back when you snap me or send me a message on Instagram.