Transcription
Do you ever feel like you're working all day, drowning in tasks, but your business still isn't growing as fast as you want it to? Well, what if I told you that if you worked less, your business would actually grow faster? I've helped countless six, seven, and 8 figure entrepreneurs install a system inside their business that has not only given them ours back every day, but the freedom to do what they want when they want without slowing down growth.
So, in this video, I'm going to show you that exact system so you can just copy it and install it into your business to take back control, build a business that runs without you, and grow faster than you could imagine with less headache. Now, you might be wondering, "Yeah, but will this actually work for me?" Well, in short, the answer is yes, but only if you're willing to change the way you operate. Because look, you cannot expect your business to change if you do not change.
This system that I'm going to show you has worked with seven figure ecom brands, 9 figure distributors, six figure solo agencies, seven figure medical practices, six figure coaches, consultants, construction companies, you name it. It does not matter what industry you're in. It matters whether you're willing to make a bloody change. So, with that, let's break down the system.
Now, the first thing we're going to do is set some constraints. Most business owners never stop to ask themselves a really simple question. What do I want? They just react to whatever the business throws at them. And when you do that, guess what [ __ ] happens? You build a business that feels reactive, that feels overwhelming, and feels damn heavy. So the first step is to define your constraints. And we do that in the form of your ideal week. Just exactly what you want your entire week to look like. Get clear on that and decide when you work, when you stop, and what the rules are.
Of course, you might not be able to follow that ideal week right away. That is completely fine. You can move toward it over time. The important thing is that you know what it is. If you want to work 2 hours a day, cool. Do that. If you want to work 4 days a week, amazing. Do that. Or heck, if you want to work 16 hours a day, that's also fine. So long as it's something that you're choosing to do. But you have to define that. You have to define how you want your week to look. Because without it, without that constraint, you have no anchor, no direction, no structure. No constraints. And so therefore, you have no reason to try and improve how you and your business operate. Like I had a client who runs a huge company that lots of people will actually have heard of. And he wanted to play golf every wedd. That was something in his ideal week that made it super easy for him to construct weddings so that he finished at 12:00 p.m. or whatever so that he could play golf. Not having these constraints is like trying to build a house with no blueprint. you end up with chaos and chaos does not scale. And look, remember this is your life. This is your business. Run it how you want to run it. Do not let it run you. And you cannot do that without these constraints.
And now that you've defined your ideal week, let's see where you stand now and bring some order to how you're actually spending your time so that you can move toward your ideal week. This means two things. Okay, we have to create your standard week, which your standard week is it's simply a recurring blueprint of what happens when. So, a lot of your tasks in business, in fact, most of them will be recurring. And right now, you might just do them, you know, whenever you find the time to do them, which in reality is likely never, or maybe you just do that randomly when you get the time. Well, unfortunately, that's not going to help you work less. It's not going to help you scale faster. Okay? So, what you need to do instead is create your standard week. essentially what your recurring tasks are for each day of the week. You know, maybe every Monday you decide you do your team meeting. Maybe you choose to do all your content on Tuesdays and Thursdays. How this looks does not really matter. You just want to take all the tasks you have to do each week and decide when in the week you're going to do them.
Now, for some things, this will be obvious instead in stone, like maybe you have a team call every Monday, so it's obvious when you do that. But for other tasks, it'll be up to you when you choose to do them. Of course, there are ways to optimize this structure by theming and batching. But the main thing is is that you have the standard week built so you have structure and order in your weeks and so you can guarantee you get your important tasks that actually matter done.
Because with that, the second way to bring structure to your time is planning your days in advance. So this is simple, like so simple, but guess what? Almost no [ __ ] business owner does it. Like this is a harsh truth, but if you have a task that you need to do and you don't get them done, but you also don't schedule to do them each day, then it is your own damn fault. If you want something done, it must be scheduled. Simple. So, every night you plan tomorrow. You don't just write a to-do list. You schedule the things that matter because if it is not scheduled, it will not happen. You will find a reason to put it off, push it, delay it because you know fires pop up, things feel urgent, etc., etc. But those things are not important. And if you don't have a schedule, you will simply prioritize those urgent things over the things that actually matter and grow your bloody business.
My rule at selfmastery.co, links in the description if you want to work with us, by the way. But our rule is that if you want something done, schedule to do it. And part of how you should schedule should involve you looking at your standard week. So if tomorrow is Tuesday, you go to your standard week plan, look at Tuesday. They're the tasks you have to do on Tuesday and then you schedule them. Of course, you also, you know, you schedule any one-off tasks and whatever else you have to do that day, but the standard week forms the foundations of your plan for each day. And here's the key, you also don't schedule randomly. Okay? You schedule based on priorities because that's how you prioritize. If something is your priority, it is the most important thing. Therefore, comes before everything else. And therefore, you do it before everything else. You do it first. So, you schedule your days in order of priority.
And that brings us to step three. This is where most business owners break. They fall apart. They simply do too many things. They treat every task like it's urgent. Their calendar looks like a bloody war zone. But do you want to know something? Your business only actually has two to three non-negotiable tasks. A marketing task to get leads, sales task to convert leads, and a fulfillment task to deliver your product or service, whatever you sell. Now, those tasks obviously might have smaller subtasks. Like if the thing you do for marketing is create content, that's the major task. But creating content has loads of smaller tasks like getting ideas, writing, recording, editing, etc. But you get my point. And look, think about it like this. If you only did those three tasks in your business, if you only did your marketing, sales, and fulfillment tasks, would your business still run? Yes, it would. Would your business still grow? Yes, it would. But if you stopped doing any of those three tasks, would your business still run? Would your business still grow? No, it bloody wouldn't. It would eventually fall apart. Okay, so those three tasks are the only tasks that are non-negotiable in your business. And hence, they are your priority. They're the most important thing you can do. And everything else, every other task, it's either like a strategic project, a one-off thing you're working on that will create asymmetric returns, or it's a distraction. And honestly, you'll be so [ __ ] surprised at how many tasks you're doing each day that simply don't matter. It's something that surprises every single one of my clients. I get them to audit their standard week after they make it. So all the tasks they do regularly. See what can be automated, eliminated or delegated. And it is in seeing how much can be eliminated, never mind automated or delegated. So that's something you should do. Go through your standard week after you make it. So all the tasks in your business that you do and see what can be eliminated, but also what can be automated and delegated and then you know do that. But these non-negotiables, you do them first every single day because look, prioritizing is simple. If it's a priority, it's more important. Therefore, you do it before everything else you do it first.
And of course, the goal over time is to delegate those non-negotiables. So, if you already have them delegated, you obviously don't have to do them first because, well, you don't have to do them. Somebody else is doing them. But then after that, you have your strategic actions. Strategic actions are what we call at selfmastery.co big projects like hiring, building new offers, launching new campaigns, systemizing, etc. big projects that you sort of do once that'll move the business forward and create asymmetric returns. You should only ever have one strategic action at a time unless you have a big team and therefore have the bandwidth and people able to work on multiple different projects at once. Because otherwise, if you have a small team or if you're still solo, if you're trying to do four different strategic actions, four different projects at once, you'll spread yourself and your team so thin that you'll make barely any progress on any of them. So focus really is the key here. The less you focus on, the more time and effort you can put into one individual thing, and therefore the faster you can make progress. And really, that's all prioritizing is, okay? You figure out what actually matters for your goals, i.e. what actually helps you grow the business. You focus entirely on those things and you ignore everything else ruthlessly. And sure, this is hard. There's so many things in business that feel important, but there's so few things that are actually important. So, cut the bloody fluff. Audit your entire calendar. And if a task does not grow the business or make customer experience better, eliminate it, automate it or delegate it and preferably eliminate it.
And of course, aim to delegate your non-negotiables over time, especially fulfillment and sales. Because to be honest, in this day and age of the internet, I believe every founder of a business should be involved in marketing to some extent so that your face can be the face of your brand. So people know, like, and trust you and are more likely to work with you. Because if your business does not have a face, a potential customer will find a similar business that sells what you sell that does have a face and will go to work with them. So having your face and voice involved in marketing, at least to some extent, will be an unfair advantage to your company, especially in the long run. Like if you think of Gym Shark, Gym Shark's a billion-dollar company, but yet Ben Francis, the founder, is still the face of the company.
Anyway, once you've got clarity on what to do, the next bottleneck you need to fix to grow in 4 hours a day is how you show up. Because most entrepreneurs, on top of having a time problem, also have a focus problem. They multitask. They contact switch. They check Slack nine times an hour. They deal with fires the moment they come up. And then they wonder why they close the laptop or leave the office at 7:00 p.m. and still didn't get the things they needed to do done. Luckily, the fix is bloody simple. Deep work blocks. So, do all your important work in deep work blocks. These are one to two hour blocks of time where you focus entirely on that one task with zero distractions, which is the next fix. Distraction management is critical. Remove all distractions, your phone, emails, apps, websites, whatever. I recommend Opel on your iPhone and Mac and have it set up during your deep work bars to block every single thing but the thing that you're using for the task.
And then finally, and this is the big one, leave all fires, emails, messages, and problems until the end of the day. Yes, you heard me. Leave them all till the end of the day. So see anything that like pops up throughout the day that you would normally, you know, that needs your attention that you would normally rush to do, leave it until the last hour of your day and do it in what we call at selfmastery.co the daily rap. Every single business owner I get to do this at the start when I tell them to do it is like, "What the heck? I do not know if this can work." And guess what? They do it. It works. It changes everything. So trust me, you can leave problems, fires, and emails until the end of the day. You will not break your business, especially if you have all the systems properly built that we teach you to install at selfmastery.co using the mastery operating system. If you want to find out more about that, click the first link in the description below.
But in fact, when you use the daily rap, you'll train your team to solve things themselves because they're not you're not there to hold their hand the entire bloody time. And look, you cannot build a business that runs without you if you insist on being the firefighter. Sometimes in business, right, sometimes you have to step away to see what falls apart so that you can fix what falls apart. If you're always there, if you're always the glue holding everything together, how can you know what needs fixed? You're always holding it together. So sometimes you have to step away. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to install a daily wrap. Now, most people think everything's going to fall apart and anticipate all these problems. There's actually very rarely a problem. Most of the time, it's just a couple of questions from your team, which is very easily solved when you ever whenever you have the right systems.
But once you've mastered your own operating system, now it's time to systemize your business, which is, you know, it's actually an incredibly simple process. It just takes a bit of time. You map out all four core systems in your business, marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Then map the processes in those systems. You do this visually start to finish in something like Canva whiteboard. It's really good. Then you audit these systems. Okay? So essentially go through every step and ask yourself what can be eliminated or automated. And once your systems are clean, you document the processes with SOPs, assign ownership to team members for each process and system. And then you build scorecards to track performance of each system and potentially also team members. And this is the secret most business owners never realize. A system is just an engine. The data from in your scorecards is the dashboard. Because with data, you can now see, oh, I'm getting this output from this system and I don't like it. let me make changes in this input or this process in this system and see what difference it makes to the output. So essentially your job then is to tweak the input to improve the output. And when you see the data of your systems, you no longer need to guess what to change. You know exactly what's working, what's not, and what to fix. And therefore, you know scientifically what to change. And that that is what creates consistent growth.
But once the systems are all mapped out, you'll probably notice something. Okay? You'll probably notice you're still doing way too much to grow, working just 4 hours a bloody day. Maybe you're the one still sending invoices. Maybe, you know, you're still closing sales. Maybe you're managing 19 tiny fulfillment tasks that eat your day. So really, to work less, you've got two options. One, you eliminate the task. Or two, you delegate the task. That is it. There is no third option for working less. Because look, here's something most people seem to not realize, and it's that if a task takes 1 hour, it takes 1 hour. Simple. There's not much you can do to make it take less time. You know, maybe if you're really [ __ ] at focusing and you're always getting distracted, you can fix that and maybe you'll save 15 minutes, right? But like I'm recording this video right now. If it takes me 20 minutes, it takes me 20 minutes. Okay? It's that simple. And if you have 12 tasks to do each day, and each of those tasks takes 1 hour, that's 12 hours of work. No amount of hustle or clever batching changes that that is 12 hours of work. So if you want to have 4 hours of work a day, you either have to eliminate 8 hours of tasks or delegate 8 hours of tasks to somebody else.
What you do really depends on your business. Like for some businesses, especially coaching or consulting or anything that's largely online based and less labor intensive, you can cut down to 4 hours a day just by cutting the fat. Okay. For other businesses like um construction companies or anything a bit more labor intensive, you'll need to hand off fulfillment through delegation and potentially hiring if you don't have the team members. Either way, your system map tells you exactly what to remove and exactly what to hire for. Because with your systems map, when you assign ownership to each system and each process, you're assigning responsibility who does what. So you look at your systems map, see what you're responsible for, and then you delegate what you're responsible for to other team members or if you need to, you hire. And in other words, what you're doing here is you're making other people responsible for the tasks you're responsible for so that you're no longer responsible for them, therefore don't have to do them.
Now, who you delegate to and whether you hire and what you hire for is really based on employee capacity and leverage. But you know, I have to leave some things for my clients, they pay me a lot of money to help them grow in 4 hours a day. But if you want me to help you grow in 4 hours a day by systemizing your business and personal operations, click the link in the description below. I'll solve all your problems and I'll help you. But seriously, you can figure this out yourself. Obviously, you don't need to pay me. But if you want to fast track the process, get accountability, personalized coaching, and all the rest. Work with me. I'll help you systemize your business and your personal operations so that you can grow in 4 hours a day and build a business that runs without you.
Anyway, the final piece of the puzzle is feedback. This is not an overnight process, okay? Your systems will not be perfect immediately. In fact, that's not the point of systems. Like a system is not a magic wand. You don't wave it and makes everything in business, you know, fixed. But it makes everything in business so much easier. But it is not magic. And so you need feedback to improve your systems, business, and time over time. Your scorecards, which you build when systemizing your business, gives you the data for each system. Therefore, tell you how to improve your systems based on what metrics are underperforming. And by improving your systems, you improve your business for your time. You compare your actual week to your ideal week. Look at what's different and what's stopping you from living your ideal week. You look at what's working, what's lagging, what's breaking. And every week you make small changes. You fix the bottleneck in your systems. You streamline the process. You delegate something new. You improve how you operate. And that is how growth becomes predictable. That is how time becomes leveraged. That's how you build a business that runs and improves without you. You start by systemizing yourself. So how you plan, prioritize, and execute. Then you systemize your business so that it runs without you at a high standard. Then you track the data, iterate, and improve.
If you're ready to stop reacting and, you know, start designing your business around your life, how you want to live. This is how you do it. Just copy, do it exactly what I said. And if you want the more detailed look into how to systemize your business, click this video on screen now and I'll show you exactly how to do.