Do you want 20 hours of your week back?

Have you ever wondered why you've done well in business up to this point but find working less than 40 hours a week is one of the biggest challenges you've ever faced?

For some reason, a reduction in workload seems to elude most business owners and they can't figure out why.

What I hear from almost all my clients at the beginning of our journey together is that they don’t have enough time. They’d like to increase their income but already feel stretched to the max.

As it is, they’re working long hours. They’re gone early and home late. Their marriages suffer as a result and they miss out on watching their kids grow up.

And when they are home, there’s always an undercurrent of stress that keeps them from being truly present with their families.

Let me tell you about Brady.

Brady originally reached out to me because he felt trapped in his business. He was working 60+ hours a week and felt he had hit a glass ceiling.

He couldn’t see how he could increase turnover without creating more hours in his day.

The problem was he had a work harder, not smarter mentality.

He knew what he should be doing, but didn’t have a simple and effective framework to get it done.

As a result, when things got busy, his time was spent IN the business, when it would have been better used for big picture strategies driving growth and expansion.

The solution was simple.

For two weeks we tracked every minute of his day and found where he was getting bogged down.

Within a three-month period, he hired a full time admin assistant and a full time project co-ordinator to take on the workload.

This freed him up to focus on business building activities such as marketing, quoting and sales.

In a few short months we've helped him change his mindset and the way he operates as a leader in his business, where he has decreased his working hours by 20 hours a week, and now has his business structured in a way to add an additional $1.5million in the next 12 months - still only working 40 hours a week, max.

Now it's your turn...

For 2 weeks track how you are spending your time during each working day for a week. It is important that you do this in real time, NOT at the end of the day so that all activities are picked up. Your memory will protect you from your current reality! You will not remember all the phone calls, disruptions with people sticking their head around your office door etc..

It is important that you categorise your time carefully. For example, simply categorising ‘phone calls’ does not differentiate between internal phone calls with your staff (which is supervision/management) and clients (which might be estimating, sales, scheduling, after sales service).

Once you have completed unpacking your week, put a dollar value to your various activities for what it would cost you to pay someone else to do that task. E.g from 6pm to 7pm – typing up invoices to be sent out the next day. I could pay an admin person $25+ Super per hour to complete this task. This will show you the value of your working week - the higher the total figure, the higher the value of the time you are spending in your working week.

Let's quantify your results...

When you calculate the number of hours per week that you spend on these tasks, how many hours are you saving by delegating them to someone else?

I will save _______ hours per week.

Now I want you to say this sentence out loud, then write it down somewhere, and look at it regularly…

“Now that I can leverage others within my work, I will have ____ hours a week to devote to working ON my business with the goal of GROWING my business and spending more time with my family.”

Now that you have ___ hours per week to work ON and GROW your business, what are things that you can do NOW to increase your capacity and focus on tasks that grow your business?  

It’s a simple yet profound exercise. I recommend it to everyone. The results will amaze you.

Rob Kropp

Founder - Pravar Group