1: Imagine a baker. Someone who loves baking cookies.
The baker is so good at baking that their friends and family members recommend they start a business.
So that’s what the baker does.
“At first, it’s a side hustle,” Dan Martell writes in his book Buy Back Your Time. But before long, the baker has clients all over town.
It’s hard to keep up with the demand for cookies, so the baker hires a couple of part-time college kids who also love baking.
The baker tallies up their hours every couple of weeks and pays them.
“The business keeps growing,” Dan writes. While the college kids are baking, the baker puts in the orders, drives to the store to pick up supplies, and posts photos on social media.
Business is booming.
But when the alarm clock rings on Monday morning, the baker dreads going to work.
Why? Because someone has to do payroll, order supplies, market the business, and manage clients.
The baker is doing everything except what they love: Baking.
2: Many entrepreneurs get hiring all wrong.
As our business grows, we hire “willy-nilly,” Dan observes.
We “aren’t thinking about our time, we’re just thinking, I need some help to get something done,” Dan writes. “So we hire someone to help. The challenge is we now have another person to manage on top of all the work we were already doing.”
We have an idea. An opportunity arises. A crisis hits.
“I need a videographer.” “I need a podcast producer.” “I need a marketing guru.”
“What we often don’t realize is that we’re hiring out parts of our business that we enjoy,” Dan notes, “and ultimately, we end up performing all the lowest-value work in the company, effectively becoming the company’s administrator.”
So… Don’t hire?!?
“Of course we should hire help, but we should only hire help with the right mindset,” Dan writes.
We “don’t hire to grow our business,” he notes. We “hire to buy back our time.”
3: So what gets in the way?
“No one does it right,” we say.
“I get it,” Dan observes. We “think we’re best at marketing, sales, coding, website design, ordering, hiring, firing, stocking the shelves, cleaning the floors, the administrative work . . . everything.”
And. . . , we’re probably right. “To be honest, likely no one will care as much as we do, because it’s not their company, their money, or, really, their customers,” he notes.
What we need to do is change our mindset.
“We don’t aim for 100 percent perfection,” Dan writes. “Instead, shoot for 80 percent. Yes, lower our expectations. . .
“Because here’s the deal: 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome,” Dan writes.
“Not having to come in on the weekend to get caught up is 100% freaking awesome.
“Not having to spend half our week doing something we hate for the hundredth time is 100% freaking awesome. . .
“If there’s draining work on our to-do list, and someone else can get it done 80 percent of the way. . . , then we should transfer that task.”
Not only do we avoid doing work we dread doing, but we can reinvest this time into tasks and activities we love that make us money.
We “immediately set ourselves up to increase our revenue, allowing us to off-load even more of what we dislike. . . It’s an eternal, never-ending game of business.”
Dan writes: We “get to upgrade our time and hire someone else to take on tasks that we ultimately don’t enjoy. We take on more work that lights us up and pays us well. Then we make more money, moving us up again. Continue this loop and eventually we’ll wake up, look around, and see that we’ve built the life, even the empire, we want.”
Typical entrepreneur: “One day, I can stop this madness if I work hard enough.”
Next-level entrepreneur: “Today, I’ll build a game I want to play forever.”
Notice the last word in Dan’s philosophy: “The Buyback Loop.”
“I could have stopped working when I was twenty-eight, after I sold Spheric for millions,” he writes, “but I don’t want to retire because I love what I’m doing. I love creating and building companies. I want to keep playing my infinite game. The more I do that, the more money I make, and the better my life gets.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I holding on to tasks that drain my energy instead of delegating them so I can focus on what I truly enjoy?
Action: Identify one task I dislike and commit to delegating it this week, freeing up time for work that energizes and excites me.