1: “Can you meet me at my house?”
The voice on the phone was Dan Martell‘s brother, Pierre, Dan shares in his book Buy Back Your Time.
“Sure. What’s going on?” Dan said.
“Well . . . it’s better if we talk in person,” Pierre said.
Pierre was in his twenties. Six months earlier, he had started a home-building business.
He was a self-described “jack of all trades,” and had jumped into his new venture with gusto, applying for permits, paying bills, rolling out the tools at 7 a.m. for his carpenters, and rolling everything back up again at 5 p.m.
Dan couldn’t believe his eyes as he walked into Pierre’s house.
Dan was an early investor in his brother’s new business but hadn’t seen him in several months.
Not only had Pierre lost 20 pounds, but “when I looked around his home, all his furniture was missing.”
“Pierre! Did you get robbed?”
“No, no . . . ,” he stammered. “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong, but the homes aren’t selling.”
Pierre had finished building two homes and was working on a third. But no revenue was coming in.
“Pierre was in dire financial straits,” Dan writes. “He’d refinanced his own home, maxed out three personal credit cards, and moved all his furniture into a model home, hoping that staging it would help it sell.”
His bedroom was empty, besides a sleeping bag and a leaky air mattress that he shared with his dog. “Each night, he pumped it up,” Dan recalls, “and each morning they’d wake up on the hard floor again.”
Standing there that morning, Dan consoled his brother, “Pierre, don’t worry. We’re going to figure this out.”
“My brother is a brilliant salesman,” Dan writes. “When we were kids, our dad ran a popular fish-and-chips food truck in the summer months. Eight-year-old Pierre watched all those customers queue up in the sun and calculated that about half were only buying cold soda. He figured people who didn’t want to wait were walking away, so he dragged a cooler next to Dad’s truck and sold icy cans of pop, making up to $300 in a single day.
“At twelve, Pierre bought an old car, restored it, sold it, then used the money to do it again,” Dan notes. “By sixteen, he’d made enough money fixing and selling old cars to buy himself a new one–a shiny Mustang GT. Like I said, a brilliant salesman.”
As Dan thought about the situation, he realized Pierre had a problem: His jack-of-all-trades mindset.
“He’d been so busy picking up hammers that he’s neglected his unique gift: Sales,” Dan writes.
Pierre and Dan talked through the situation. Pierre needed to get out there and sell the homes he had built.
When he spent time with prospective buyers, Pierre “quickly realized that despite the great build of his houses, they had no curb appeal, no landscaping, no finishing touches, no splash of color or warm lighting—all important factors to the key decision-makers in home purchases (usually women).”
In time, Pierre hired an architect to design his homes with large windows, functional kitchens, and great bathrooms.
“As a result,” Dan writes, “he went from almost going bankrupt to selling sixteen houses in his second year. Over time, Pierre learned to delegate and specialize to the point where Martell Custom Homes became the largest custom-home builder in all of Atlantic Canada.”
2: We all have unique gifts. We all have ways of creating value. The 80-20 Rule tells us that 80 percent of our results come from 20 percent of our actions.
Dan believes the percentage may be 95:5 for entrepreneurs—”suggesting that only 5 percent of everything we’re doing is driving 95 percent of our company’s returns.”
To succeed in business, we need to clear off our calendar so we can maximize these gifts.
“Think of every task as sitting on two continuums,” Dan writes: “One of energy, one of money. Each task is sucking some amount of energy from you on one end, or lighting you up with lots more energy on the other end. Meanwhile, that same task makes us somewhere between no money and lots of it.
“When the overwhelming majority of our tasks,” Dan observes, “are in the bottom left corner, making us little money and sucking lots of energy, then we’re living a pretty chaotic lifestyle. . .
“That means if we spend ten hours at work today answering emails, making calls, talking to employees, going to meetings, developing content, only thirty minutes of what we’re doing is driving tangible results in our businesses.”
There’s more bad news: Research shows that when we don’t enjoy doing something, we’re not likely to be very good at it.
“In other words,” Dan suggests, “while we think we’re sacrificing for a worthy cause by working hard at things that challenge us, we’re actually costing our companies. It’s a lose-lose move. I know, because I’ve been there.”
Pierre was working himself ragged doing lots of things. But he was neglecting the one area where he could make the biggest impact: Sales.
“He was busy with lots of activities, but none of them were making him money, and all of them were costing him energy,” Dan observes. “He kept working harder and harder, but he kept doing less and less of what he loved. Again, the result wasn’t a huge payoff. Quite the opposite. By letting go of his passion for sales because of day-to-day work, he wound up in debt and almost went broke.”
3: But that’s not the entire story. Many of those activities we don’t enjoy still must be done.
The big insight is: Just not by us.
What we need is a system. “Winners and losers have the same goals,” James Clear writes in Atomic Habits. “We do not rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems.”
We must figure out what to stop doing and what to keep doing. Our goal is not to manage productivity but to manage our energy and emotions.
Dan tells us not to hire to grow our business. Instead, we hire to buy back our time.
“Entrepreneurs should use their resources to purchase more time,” he writes. “All this extra time should go toward those tasks they excel at, they enjoy, and that add high value to their business.”
Dan calls his system for doing this “The Buyback Loop.” There are three behaviors. Audit-Transfer-Fill.
“A Buyback Loop occurs as we continually audit our time to determine the low-value tasks that are sucking our energy.
“Then we transfer those tasks, optimally, to someone who’s better at them and enjoys them.
“Lastly, we fill our time with higher-value tasks that light us up and make us more money. Then we start the process over again.”
Another key learning: The Buyback Loop is not a one-time activity.
“Did you catch it?” Dan asks: “Audit, transfer, fill. Using this approach, we can continually upgrade our time throughout our entrepreneurial journey, again and again.”
When we begin our audit, we will likely identify a host of low-value tasks that are sucking our energy. “Once we’ve off-loaded those and upgraded our time and energy, we may start working on new marketing projects to get more customers or have the time to get on sales calls that we enjoy.”
Next, we must focus on improving our leadership capabilities and company strategy.
This spiral often begins with a moment of pain that convinces us or forces us to try something new.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What would I fill my time with if I wasn’t spending all of it at work? What would I do if I had ten extra hours per week?
Action: Do it right now. Get a pen, and write it down.