The word “leverage” has become all but a cliche in entrepreneurial leadership.
And for good reason. After all, you don’t want to be doing activities that are not in your strength zone and don’t build you or a business. So, we’re taught to get some leverage – get those activities off your plate through systems, tools & people.
The leverage conversation that you’ve heard before is now officially outdated.
What you want to do instead of adding leverage, you want to “buy back your time.”
In a recent book, serial entrepreneur Dan Martell breaks down the concept of buying back your time as opposed to simply finding leverage.
To be fair, the BBYT concept is similar to that of leverage. The biggest differences are the reason why, the mindset of and the activities that you’re doing in the BBYT process.
Martell says, “Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.” It’s a simple, yet profound shift in how we can think about adding team members and the reason why to add someone – or a tech tool for that matter – to a business.
The core tenet of BBYT is to remove activities off of your plate that don’t make money and/or suck your energy and replace those activities with ONLY those activities that have the biggest ROI and give you energy.
Martell contends that when you live into that sweet spot you enjoy what you do a lot more and your business & career skyrocket because the majority of your time is spent in income producing activities.
In the book, Martell shares a basic framework that anyone can use to buy back more time. He coins it: The Buyback Loop. It’s fairly simple: you audit your time & energy, then you transfer activities to someone or a tool that is not the best use of your time, then you fill your time with more dollar producing & energy creating activities. This loop continues on as you audit, transfer and fill into greater & greater productivity for you.
As you audit your time, your activities will ultimately fall into one of four quadrants. Martells calls it the DRIP Quadrant. D = Delegate; R = Replacement; I = Invest; P = Production.
Activities to delegate are those that don’t add to your business or main projects. Nor do they bring joy to you. Think of those tasks like email and calendaring that someone can help take off your plate. Think, too, about the errands you run that, while needing to be done, could be accomplished by someone else.
Replacement activities are challenging to off load, at first. These are the activities that drive the business or project forward that are high level activities, yet might not bring you the highest energy. You are not the ONLY person who can do it, yet it needs to be completed by a higher dollar expert. If you run a real estate team, this looks like agents on your team or a high level director of operations. You need to earn the right to release yourself in these activities.
Investment activities fall into the quadrant of not necessarily bringing wild profit or success into the business, yet you enjoy and get energy from doing those activities. These are investments in yourself – education, in relationships or other non-immediate ROI investments in your business.
Production activities are those that light you up with energy AND bring income into your business or are the crucial pieces to a project only you can do. I’m working with a client that is tackling this assignment for their business. As they look around, they’ve realized that what they love the most and what creates the most money are their community events and finding leaders to build other services to compliment the core business. They have ideas about their events that could lead to greater success, yet they’ve never made the time to invest in those ideas. As we’ve looked at buying back their time, it’s clear that they have so much more energy AND dollars to gain.
So, let’s get started. Look at the activities that you do in a given week and really audit those to understand the value of the activities to the growth of your business. You’ll have a clear picture of what time you are spending that is not in good use. From there, you figure out what activities you can delegate to someone else (or stop doing altogether) and what you need to earn to transfer more off your plate.
The goal is to keep filling your time with those projects that move the business forward AND that give you the most amount of energy.
If this speaks to you and you want to learn more, check out the book “Buy Back Your Time” HERE.
This is also a topic that our leaders just covered in Xperiential MBA. They learned how to buy back their time and have already started implementing the changes. If you want to be on the cutting edge of leadership development and become the leader that grows your team as well as yourself, check out the Xperiential MBA coaching & mentorship program with Chris Suarez HERE.