Episode 85: Leverage: The Creative Entrepreneur’s Best Productivity Hack
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A continuación: Episode 86: The Creative Entrepreneur’s 3 Biggest Productivity Challenges Cancelar 10
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“It is much easier to put existing resources to better use than to develop resources where they do not exist.”
– George Soros
The challenge for creatives is that we do too much, have too many ideas and struggle with bright shiny idea syndrome. Or we think we have to do it all ourselves, that we can’t afford support or that no one can do it as well as we can. Perfectionism and control can kill your productivity.
This is why productivity hacks and leverage are two of the best and yet, often the most difficult, for creative entrepreneurs to understand what do they mean. How to implement them, how to get started? How do you start building a leveraged business model? There’s leveraging time and tasks, but there’s also a leverage of your relationships with people to grow your business and why.
Here are 7 Clarifying Questions for Leveraging: What can I take off my plate?
How can I effectively leverage my time, my content, and my relationships in order to grow my business this year?
What other use could I particular book, worksheet, podcast, whatever, what other use could I put it to?
Is it urgent, important or even necessary?
Could someone else do this better or faster?
Will this effort help me in multiple ways?
If you were to actually let go of tasks that someone else can do, what would change for you?
We ask ourselves and our clients these questions a lot.
It may mean sacrificing something else in order to make that happen, but it’s going back to what we talked about last episode and slowing down to speed up. It is about spaciousness, it about choice and it’s about really being 100 percent committed to building your business.
So many people that talk about building their business and growing the business but when it comes down to it, they keep themselves really stuck by playing small, by not looking at what they could be leveraging, by being completely stuck in perfectionism. They get a lot of things going, they get a lot of things in process but they never actually get them running because they’re waiting until they feel right. A big journey towards leverage is letting go of your own perfectionism.
Join the Creative Business Accelerator If you’re ready to stop working all the time and making yourself crazy, and instead want to get focused and clear so you can attract high-end clients, make great money and have a thriving business, then it’s time to become a member of the Creative Business Academy!
Resources Mentioned: Author: Gretchen Rubin Book: Better than Than Before [Link]
Author: Minette Riordan Book: The Artful Marketer [Link]
Transcription Services [Link]
Free Gift: Downloadable 30-Day The Artful Profit Planner [Link]
Transcript Show Transcript (4,321 More Words)
Brad Dobson: Welcome to the Path to Profit podcast. With your hosts, Dr. Minette Riordan and Brad Dobson.
Hi and welcome to episode 85, 85 of the Path to Profit podcast. Today’s episode with Dr. Minette Riordan and I’m still Brad Dobson. Today’s episode is about leverage. The creative entrepreneur’s best productivity hack.
Minette Riordan: We love productivity hacks. We tend to spend a lot of time on Flipboard, reading articles and buying books on productivity and habits and getting more done. Right now, we’re listening to Gretchen Rubin’s book, Better Than Ever, that’s all about habits, or actually, I’m listening to it. You haven’t started reading it yet.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, she bought be a copy and said it’s mandatory reading.
Minette Riordan: It’s really good. I’m listening to her on Audible, she’s hilarious, she’s super funny. Highly, highly recommend Gretchen Rubin, anything that she’s doing is super fun and well researched as well.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, she had a good interview on the Tim Ferriss podcast recently.
Minette Riordan: And then her own podcast with her sister is pretty funny. Yeah, so anyway, we’re big Gretchen Rubin fans.
Back to the topic at hand, productivity hacks and leverage is one of the best and yet, often the most difficult for creative entrepreneurs to understand what does that mean, how to implement it, how to get started so we want to talk about what leverage is, how do you get started leveraging, building a leveraged business model. There’s leveraging time and tasks but there’s also a leverage business model. How do you leverage your relationships with people to grow your business and why … not why, what is the connection between leverage and productivity, why are we bringing these two things together today.
You want to share the quote?
Brad Dobson: Sure. This one’s from George Soros, who’s a billionaire business guy, “It is much easier to put existing resources to better than to develop resources where they do not exist.”
Minette Riordan: This is hard for me.
Brad Dobson: It’s so true though.
Minette Riordan: It is so true.
Brad Dobson: You don’t get to always embrace your bright, shiny ideas.
Minette Riordan: No.
Brad Dobson: Sometimes you maybe polish up the bright, shiny idea that you completed a couple years ago.
Minette Riordan: And put it out into the public.
Brad Dobson: Which is kind of the basis of leverage.
Minette Riordan: It is the basis of leverage, why we’d say repurposing things that you’ve created is one definition of leverage and I’m glad you knew who George Soros was, ’cause totally had no idea, just liked the quote.
Brad Dobson: You’re so lost.
Minette Riordan: I’m not lost, I just found a really cool quote. Leverage by definition, means to use something we have or have access to strategically and intelligently to get the best result. If you really want to be strategic, make that the best result for all involved. I love that, adding on that last piece of the best result for all involved.
Sometimes all who is involved, who are involved, is you, as the solopreneur. Sometimes, it might be you and your family that can be invited into creating more leverage of your time and tasks. When I look at leverage, I really consider that you can leverage your time, you can leverage your content and you can leverage people and that’s kind of what we wanted to get into today.
Do you want to talk about leveraging time?
Brad Dobson: I guess, something that’s coming to mind as we talk about this is-
Minette Riordan: I can see your little wheels spinning.
Brad Dobson: I come to this naturally as a software guy because everything we do is about code reuse. We very rarely write pieces of code that we didn’t intentionally think forward, “Well how can this be reused?” How could it be used in the future by another project or reused within the program that I’m writing.
It’s in my nature to look for things that I can leverage that way or to reuse. It just came to mind as we were talking about it. In terms of leveraging time, I think it’s about finding things that are gonna do double duty. Is that blog post you wrote something you can also, well, have in a newsletter, in an email newsletter or something you can also post on social media. Is that talk you gave, something that you can transcribe and use as a blog post, or an email? Those types of things where you’re thinking ahead or you’re thinking about, well how does this serve me in multiple ways?
Minette Riordan: Another way you can leverage your time is by letting go of tasks that someone else can do. They might be able to do them better or faster and when you … every time that you free up your time as a business owner, it frees you to do the most important work, which is usually sales and marketing, connecting with people, going to networking, doing, speaking, like Brad referenced his speaking.
If you were to actually let go of tasks that someone else can do, what would be different for you? What would change for you? We ask ourselves and our clients this question a lot.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, and trust me, I get it. If you’re sitting there saying, “Well I can’t afford to hire somebody.” We are definitely there in lots of ways, we’ve been there in lots of ways. Sometimes, you just simply don’t have that opportunity.
Minette Riordan: Can I give a different example of that?
You might not be able to hire someone full time, and I heard my friend, Rebecca Hall Gruyter say this and I thought this was a great example. She would set money aside for outsourcing and so she might have just enough money to hire someone for two hours to maybe do graphic design or a couple hours to set up an email opt in.
It’s not about employees, it’s not about bringing people on consistently, it can be very much on a project by project basis, whereas you have the cash, you outsource, You can also look at outsourcing much more personally. Hiring a housekeeper that comes out of your family money as maybe your business can’t do that yet, but your family is committed to that. Asking your family of help.
I remember a couple years ago, Brad and I were walking on the beach and I’m like, “I can’t keep doing all the cooking grocery shopping,” and it wasn’t that anybody said I had to do it, I just did it and felt like, “Oh, it’s my job.” Right, ’cause I’m the one who actually likes to cooks and I actually like it when I go get the groceries. I was totally caught up in my own story that it had to be me. I told Brad, I can’t do this anymore and so now we share the grocery shopping, everybody in the family shares with the cooking. Both my kids are amazing cooks. We’re down to one kid, I lost one of my cooks.
Ultimately, we got to the point where we hired a personal assistant to come and do some of the shopping to take hat completely off of our plates. Sometimes it’s personal. We hired a gardener a couple years ago because we were tired of the way the front yard looked and we weren’t having the time to go out there and do the weeding. Looking at all the different ways you could be leveraging your time, not just in your business.
Brad Dobson: Yeah and in for the business, or actually for personal as well, I’ll give you the example of a bookkeeper. In that case, even if we couldn’t afford it, it’s still cheaper for us to have a bookkeeper than for us to do the stuff ourselves.
What would happen, and the same is true for tax stuff. What would happen is, I’d do a poor job of the books, I’d do a poor job of the tax stuff, because it’s just not in my skillset and we’d end up-
Minette Riordan: It cost more money at the end of the day.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, we’d end up not getting the 3,000 or 5,000 dollars back in tax [inaudible 00:08:29] that we should have, well that’s a lot more money than it would cost me to have the bookkeeper and the tax accountants.
Minette Riordan: For the whole year.
Brad Dobson: Are there other things like that … yeah if we weren’t paying for a gardener, we’re paying for someone to clean the house, we would just have no time and no spaciousness like we talked about in the last episode-
Minette Riordan: Podcast about slowing down.
Brad Dobson: To have the opportunity to do what we’re doing. Sometime there’s actual life decisions that you need to make related to those as well.
Minette Riordan: It may mean sacrificing something else in order to make that happen but it’s going back to what we talked about and slowing down to speed up, it is about spaciousness, it about choice and it’s about really being 100 percent committed to building your business.
I have found so many people that talk about building their business and going the business but when it comes down to it, they keep themselves really stuck by playing small, by not looking at what they could be leveraging, by being completely stuck in perfectionism. They get a lot of things going, they get a lot of things in process but they never actually get them going because they’re waiting until they feel right. That is a big journey towards leverage as well, is letting go of your own perfectionism.
I happen to be a little bit of a type A personality that’s like, “I can do it better I can do it faster, it takes me 10 times as long to train someone else how to do it.” When we first hired our personal assistant, it was really frustrating because I realized I was expecting her to read my mind and so I learned how detailed I had to be and once the details were in place, then it was easy. That’s another great example of slowing down to speed up. I had to slow down, document the processes, ask her to implement the process, fix the process wherever it was broken and keep going.
By doing that, it completely freed me up to do the more important work in our business. I’m the salesperson, I need the time to have sales conversations, sometimes those can take two or three hours over the course of a few days or a few weeks. I have one that, we’re gonna be going on the third or fourth call next week and I need to have the time to do that and not be stressed and worry about what’s for dinner tonight.
Brad Dobson: Yeah or if you’re someone like me who’s chose self-sufficiency, you just don’t want to give those things up because it’s something … it’s a point of pride or a point of just of who I am, that I can do all those things on my own. That’s not helpful either. That doesn’t help leverage your time for … if I spend 10 hours this week on a job that would pay eight dollars an hour, that’s …
Minette Riordan: I don’t think you hire anybody or eight dollars an hour-
Brad Dobson: Well, whatever it is-
Minette Riordan: I guess if you went to the Philippines, which is possible.
Brad Dobson: That’s 10 hours that I’m not spending on a 100 dollar an hour task or a 500 an hour dollar task. You really have to look at the economics for some of those things as well, especially if you have customers waiting.
Minette Riordan: Yeah, and it really is understanding what your time is worth. I think that when we value our time, it really shifts our perspective and our belief in our self that we can create a leveraged model.
A whole completely different definition of talking about building a leveraged business model is looking at how you can leverage your relationships. Looking at who are your strategic partners and your referral partners. Who are your business colleagues that you can ask to help you promote a project that you have going on, whether that’s a new lead magnet, a new free gift or whether it’s a workshop that you’re hosting, you can find people that will mutually share out your content and information and collectively, the reach is so much bigger.
I found myself really resiting, reaching out and really asking people for support. I had to really dig deep about one feeling, like my stuff was good enough, two, feeling like I wasn’t too small, three, thinking I had to do it all by myself and four, knowing who to ask, how to ask, when to ask. All these things a couple years ago got really caught up in my head about inviting partnerships and asking people for support. I wouldn’t say I’m still really good at it. I’m good at hiring support, I’m not always good at reaching out and asking my colleagues for support and I know it’s a place where I can stretch and grow in my business. I offer support, I promote other people’s stuff.
It’s just that noticing where you get … getting caught up in your own mind about why you cannot create a leveraged business model, why you cannot ask for support. Is it time, is it money, is it fear is it perfectionism.
Brad Dobson: And those people might just be your family. Maybe you’re small and you got 50 people in your Facebook, that’s okay, you can still ask those people for help and leverage those people. Don’t misinterpret the word it’s not like you’re forcing them to do something. You can be bigger than just one by using those relationships and asking for help.
Minette Riordan: And making sure they’re reciprocal, right? Making sure they’re reciprocal. I think we get stuck in not making it okay to ask for help or we get stuck in giving and being generous and don’t have clear boundaries about how much we’re giving or how we’re asking so having clear boundaries around your leveraged model, is also really important.
Brad Dobson: We got through time and people for different things that we could leverage?
Minette Riordan: We did get through time and people so let’s dive in a little bit, ’cause I think it’s probably the way that we use leverage to increase our own productivity the best, right? Is through repurposing content. Let’s talk a little bit about that.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, we like content. We’re good at creating content.
Minette Riordan: Yes, both of us are good at creating content.
Brad Dobson: I think our big deal this year is-
Minette Riordan: I’m creating art instead of content.
Brad Dobson: Is starting our creative business accelerator, which is a way that we’re able to leverage the tons of content that we have into a program that we can leverage for money and we can help our clients with in multiple different ways.
Overall, from a content perspective, there’s just so many thing that’s you can do with not a lot of technology. I’ll give you the example of this podcast, and we talked about this a little bit in the last episode. This podcast, we record with a program called Zoom, that you can get … I think the free one is, or not free but the low cost is pretty cheap per month.
Minette Riordan: For Zoom?
Brad Dobson: Yeah.
Minette Riordan: Yeah, it’s like 14 dollars a month.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, so we can sit here and record video, it will give us video and audio output. We upload the video directly to YouTube, which is free, as you know. We upload the audio to Amazon S3, which you get free as part of your Prime subscription, we have Prime and hey, why not use it.
Minette Riordan: I think we pay maybe two dollars a month now because we have so much content up there.
Brad Dobson: Then we send the audio off to Rev.com, REV.com, we pay for transcription, it will cost us 25 or 30 dollars. Now we have a full textual transcription of the audio. We turn that into a blog post, now Google can see it with all of the words instead of just being audio or video that’s kind of opaque from an SEO perspective. Then we can post that blog post and the content on Facebook or Twitter or whatever social media channels that we want and we can send it out by email.
Us sitting here for half an hour and talking about some great creative things, we can turn into just a whole bunch of things. That’s really what we’re talking about, is an example of how to leverage content.
Minette Riordan: Another example of that would be the book that I wrote in 2015, the Artful Marketer. I wrote that book in about six weeks because I repurposed content. I pulled content from my blog, from speeches that I have given from workshops that I had lead.
Actually, writing that book helped me realize how clear my whole teaching and training system was for my business coaching practice at the time. I still repurpose the content from that book. Part of it became a lead magnet, called Rapid Growth Results, part of it, we use over and over and over again in our live workshops and training.
Brad Dobson: One page business plan.
Minette Riordan: Our one page business plan came from that. I have turned it into different speaking opportunities, where I speak about different aspects and topic of the book. We’ve used it in newsletters, email. One book that was a summary of all the content I had already created and then made all that content better, more coherent.
Brad Dobson: And you leveraged me into and editor.
Minette Riordan: And I leveraged Brad into an editor, yes. Although, we did have a paid editor for that one as well. Then from there, we also have been able to constantly able to leverage that into sales, into content, into credibility and social proof that I know what I’m talking about.
Whenever you create one thing, I always like to ask, “How else can I use this?” In fact, the end of last year, we did a content audit, I don’t know if we actually talked about that on the blog. That would be probably a good topic to talk about or maybe go back and see if we discussed doing that.
We did a content audit of everything that we had created so far and mostly stuff that I had created over the last five years. It was a lot.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff there.
Minette Riordan: There’s a lot but when it came down to it, there’s maybe three core topics. Kind of as an umbrella for the Path to Profit Academy are our areas of focus are money, marketing and mindset and productivity is kind of under that umbrella as well. I often think of time management and productivity as actually as a mindset challenge.
Brad Dobson: Absolutely.
Minette Riordan: More than any kind of practical, tactical thing that you can implement. It’s really understanding what’s happening when you’re not getting the things done that matter.
To me, learning how to look at your business and say, “How can I effectively leverage my time, my content and my relationships in order to grow my business this year? What can I take of my plate?” We actually taught our clients how to do this on a weekly basis as well. We have a couple of key questions that we invite them to ask. You want to share the questions about the task list?
Brad Dobson: These ones here.
Minette Riordan: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Brad Dobson: What other use could I particular book, worksheet, podcast, whatever, what other use could I put it to?
Minette Riordan: Then just looking it or your weekly task list, ask about every item on your giant to-do list.
Brad Dobson: Right. Is it urgent, important or even necessary? Could someone else do this better or faster? If I were to give up my free … [crosstalk 00:19:58].
Minette Riordan: If I were to free up my time.
Brad Dobson: … free up the time spent doing that, id be able to do X. How much could you do by freeing up your time? Then additionally, when you’re looking at any effort, as yourself, will this effort help me in multiple ways? Not everything is going to be just the golden goose, I guess that’s a good example. It’s not gonna keep giving.
I’m pretty sure that a lot of the task that you’re doing, are things that you could use in different ways. That talk that you’re working on could turn into a blog post or visa versa, that type of thing. Are you messing around in your bank accounts or QuickBooks? Could you look at reports and get information for your bookkeeper at the same time? Anything like that. Does that make sense?
Minette Riordan: Totally makes sense. I kind of put him on the spot with the question there but its that whole concept of learning to look at what you said that you want to accomplish and really deciding, is it urgent, important or even necessary for you to do this. Could someone else do it better, faster cheaper than you could do it, because remember, as the head of your company, the primary sales person and the primary creative designer, writer, programmer, photographer, whatever, your time is very valuable.
Not to say that our bookkeepers time is not equally valuable but she gets things done better faster and cheaper, not because she’s low cost, but because she does it so much faster than I could do it. It takes way less time. It takes less investment in time and money.
Brad Dobson: You know what came to mind again is the four hour work week. The Tim Ferriss book.
Minette Riordan: Tim Ferriss.
Brad Dobson: Talking about how he basically outsourced everything, not necessarily saying you want to do that but take a look at that book. There’s an attitude in there, and I’ve seen it in so many successful entrepreneurs of clearing your schedule of the [inaudible 00:22:16] jobs. There’s somebody else out there that will do them way cheaper and way better.
Minette Riordan: And they will benefit from having the work, right? To me, it’s also you’re supporting the economy, you’re supporting your community when you-
Brad Dobson: Or the Philippine economy.
Minette Riordan: Or the Philippine economy. It doesn’t matter where you outsource it to. We have no judgment about that. There’s lots of people having great success, I’m outsourcing to the Philippines right now, so it’s and easy way to get started with outsourcing.
It’s just that remembering that you don’t have to do this by yourself, you don’t have to do it all alone. This is again, a reflection of our last podcast episode about Slow Down to Speed Up. This is about slowing down, looking at what you can take off your plate, what can someone else be doing so that you have the time you need to focus on your most important work.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, definitely. I think the only thing that I would add to that is, when you do slow down and look at what you can leverage, please, please, please look at the repetitive tasks that you’re doing-
Minette Riordan: Yes, where could you create system, we didn’t even talk about that. Oh, that’s the next episode.
Brad Dobson: Yeah, well we’re gonna talk about systems in the next episode.
Minette Riordan: Yes.
Brad Dobson: If you have those types of things, those are incredible opportunities for leveraging your business where you can outsource them.
Minette Riordan: Yeah, and we have a great free resource to help you mange your tasks and make sure you’re working on your most important tasks.
Brad Dobson: The Artful Profit Planner.
Minette Riordan: And it’s at artfulprofitplanner.com, you can download a free copy of our 30 day profit planner, along with a video training of how to use it. This is not a scheduler, it’s not an agenda. You could recreate the whole thing in your bullet journal, if you’re fond of bullet journaling. I think I talked about bullet journaling on here before. It’s a pretty way to plan but it’s all about understanding how to manage your tasks, how to break projects down into bite sized increments and create more momentum in your business.
Brad Dobson: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, really good stuff and did we say we’ll have that in the show notes?
Minette Riordan: It’ll be in the show notes. Everything’s always in the show notes but it’s artfulprofitplanner.com, ’cause we know you’re probably listening to things in the car or out on your walk or while you’re doing the dishes, that’s where I tend to listen to my podcasts.
Artfulprofitplanner.com is where you can find that and you can find the show notes at pathtoprofitacademy.com.
Brad Dobson: You bet, click on the podcast tab at the top.
Minette Riordan: Yeah, and yo can find all of our show notes, including the whole transcription, you can see exactly what Brad was talking about how we’re leveraging more of our content in order to free up our time to work on other good stuff.
On our next episode, we’re gonna talk about?
Brad Dobson: Episode 86, The Creative’s Kryptonite, The Battle Between Systems and Flow.
Minette Riordan: And it is a battle, it is gonna be a good one. We don’t know what we’re gonna talk about yet but we have a cool title.
Brad Dobson: We’re gonna get out the [inaudible 00:25:01]. She’s gonna be flow and I’m gonna be systems.
Minette Riordan: If I’m flow, I’ll be dancing, you’ll have the [inaudible 00:25:06].
Thanks everybody, I’m Dr. Minette Riordan, along with my husband, Brad Dobson and we are the founders of the Path to Profit academy.
Brad Dobson: Bye guys.
Thanks for listening.
You can also view this call’s video recording on our Youtube channel.
The post Episode 85: Leverage: The Creative Entrepreneur’s Best Productivity Hack appeared first on Path to Profit Academy.
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