63. Knowing The Value Of Your Time

As an entrepreneur, we all face the same challenge: there's simply not enough time in the day. You're juggling multiple projects, managing teams, and trying to stay on top of your game - which can lead to burnout and overwhelm. What if I told you the key to doing more of the right things (those things that make the cash register ring) in less time, is to understand how much your time is actually worth.

On this episode of The High Performance Marketing Podcast, I'll invite you take a step back and really think about how much your time is worth, where you're spending the majority of it, so you can make informed decisions about what tasks you should focus on and which ones you should delegate or outsource.

Links I reference on the show:

https://www.writebrandmarketing.com/time

Harvest Time App - https://www.getharvest.com/

Clockify Time App - https://clockify.me/

Transcript

Welcome To High-Performance Marketing, a podcast committed to helping small business owners connect with their ideal customers using simple marketing and quality content. I'm your Marketing Guide, Ali Garbero.

Years ago, I worked for a leader of a small organization, who was an amazing individual. This person would come into the office each day full of life and energy. This person lit up a room. There was a lot of passion and excitement around the work we were doing, but this leader was also a little bit like a whirlwind storm. You could hear this person coming a mile away, and as this individual walked into my quiet office space each day, where my head was down focused on the many things I was trying to get accomplished - the fires of the day were immediately listed off as urgent and in need of resolution right now. This of course was distracting and caused us to fail in our ability to make the forward progress we wanted for the business.

After some time, I presented this company owner a strategy on how we could divide our efforts to become more profitable. Much of this strategy involved my stepping into a larger role to run the behind the scenes processes, management of staff, things like that. The goal was to offload the things that didn’t make money to free up our fearless CEO, to spend more time on client-facing relationships - which as you know, are those revenue-generating-activities businesses rely on to grow.

Part of pitching this proposal meant helping this owner look at the ways they were spending their time, what their time was worth, and why spending it trying to put out fires each day or on lower cost activities wasn't the best use of time.

So on today’s episode of the podcast, I thought we’d lean into knowing the value of your time so that you can make decisions with clarity about what’s holding you back from making progress.

First, let’s acknowledge the obvious…as an entrepreneur or small business owner, it is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations of your business. Whether it’s working to put out staff issues, or getting involved in the why a project is behind, what’s wrong with the soda machine, shipping issues, fulfillment, marketing - wearing the hat of Chief Everything Officer is common. The problem is time is a finite resource and one of your most important assets, so if you’re hitting the pillow at night exhausted feeling like you did everything but nothing at all, it’s most likely because you’re either not managing your time as productively as you could, or because you aren’t delegating to the right people.

So first, I always say “show me how you spend your time” and I’ll show you how it shows up in your bank account. As a leader and owner of the company, time management and productivity are critical factors that directly affect your earnings. The more effectively you manage your time, the more you can accomplish in a given day, week, or month.

If you looked at my calendar you would see time blocks for everything I need to account for in my day.

So I categorize this into buckets like

Family

Fitness + pe