3 Steps to More $ in Less Time, 3 Steps to Less Stress, 3 Rules for a Marriage You’ll Love
Business
3 Steps to More $ in Less Time
Last week we covered how spending less can help us create more free time because the less we spend, the less we have to make and making money takes time!
This week let’s talk about making more money. I know it kinda feels dirty just talking about making money, but that is only because the media has stereotyped capitalists as elite Wall Streeters who are manipulating the system to make gobs of money. Well, that depiction is just not accurate for 99.9% of us working to build businesses in America.
What the media has missed is that business (and therefore capitalism) is a noble purpose. Businesses exist to meet a human need. The better we meet that need the more money we will make. Yes, we can increase our earnings in the short term by sticking it to one of our stakeholders (community, customers, employees, shareholders) but those gains are short-lived and will have you always looking over your shoulder. That is no way to live a life.
Today, let’s talk about how we can make more money for the purpose of creating true wealth, which we defined earlier as free time.
By The Hour – If you are an x-CPA or lawyer one of the huge benefits of getting out of the profession is no longer tracking your time! What a pain in the booty that was… But, now I track my time voluntarily just so I can be a better steward of it. Remember that being as rich as Bill Gates but having no time to spend it is not a win. Therefore, we must make the money we need in the least amount of hours possible. I hope you get to do work that you love, work that you’d do for free, work that is fulfilling and purposeful. But, even if all of those are true there are still activities outside of work that need you, that you cannot have true wealth without. You need to spend time with God, your wife, your kids and community members to have a great life.
Therefore, track your income creation by the hours it takes you to earn it.
Go For Value – As I mentioned earlier businesses are paid for the value they create for their customers. The more value we create, the more money we make. That means we must know what our customers value. Have you asked them? You might be surprised that what you assumed they value is incorrect or at least not the full story. Once you know what your customers truly value, you can work to create more of it for them and quit wasting time delivering them things that don’t add value.
If you are an employee, you are paid for the value you create for your workplace, not the time it takes you to create it. If that is not true in your workplace, you’ll need to work with your leadership to define the key outcomes of your position. How can your role provide the greatest value to your organization? Once you know that you can abandon low-value projects and focus on delivering the highest value to your employer.
Remember that these are long term plays. Your income or revenue will not jump immediately, but as you create more value for your customers and employers, your value will increase, which will lead to more money for you and your firm.
Lever Up! – I’m not talking about financial leverage like buying stocks on margin but using leverage to create more value in less time. If we know how much time it takes us to deliver value today, how can we create more value in less time? There are two major opportunities to create leverage; systems and people.
Systems that you are constantly improving allow you and your team to be more effective. You’ll make fewer mistakes, spend less time learning and create more value for a lower cost. How do you think McDonald’s ensures their french fries are great regardless of who cooked them? Systems!
People make systems work. You and your people will become more productive using systems, but I am talking about adding resources to your current structure. Thanks to worldwide job boards like Upwork and Fiverr you can find specialists in just about anything with a few clicks of your mouse. Hate creating PowerPoint presentations like I do? Somebody on this earth loves making totally awesome PowerPoints and they’d love to make them for you. You know how good you get at doing something that you love and that you get to do often? That is the power of specialization and the internet has made that kind of specialization crazy easy.
Grab a copy of the Executive Focus Model in our subscriber resource library to find the work you should stop doing.
Create more value for more people and you make more money. More cash, guilt free. It is a beautiful thing!
Next week we’ll focus on the third leg of our True Wealth creation stool – Doing Less.
Health
3 Steps to Less Stress
Stress is deadly and having more work on your plate than you can accomplish is a major source of stress. To avoid “too much on my plate” stress you must do the following:
- Prioritize – Know what matters most to you in life and where you can make the biggest contribution to the success of others (your organization, family, community, church). Never let someone else set your priorities for you.
- Think About It – Never, I mean never accept a new project, task or responsibility on the spot. Ask qualifying questions about the “opportunity” including clarifying the deadline and deliverables and then ask for time to see if or when you can fit it in. I am a classic people pleaser and I have finally developed the habit of asking for time when people make a request of me.
- Say No for Now – There a million ways you can add value to the world, but if you try to do too many of them at once you will fail. Keep your focus and you will do more good than you will with your talents scattered across too many projects. There will always be an opportunity to help with the cause at a later date. Saying “no for now” feels better to you and the person hearing the no.
Life, Fun, Whatever!
3 Rules for a Marriage You’ll Love
I love to find people who are excelling at life at home, at work and in the community. Though I’ve never met him, Michael Hyatt appears to be a great example of excelling at life and someone I learn a lot from. He just published a new post (and podcast) on 3 Simple Rules he has learned from his 38-year marriage with his wife, Gail. Jill and I are only 6 years into our marriage, so I know there is something to learn from Gail and Michael. Here are his 3 rules. Check out his blog for the full post.
- Prioritize Your Marriage – Work, kids and community responsibilities can all steal away the time our marriages need to thrive. We must prioritize in our calendars the time we need to deepen the most important relationship in our lives.
- Value Your Differences – How I struggle with this one! Way too often I am focused on being right, or providing solutions when all Jill needs is to be heard. As a husband and wife, you are incomplete without the other. You are incomplete without the differences that often drive each of you crazy. Embrace those differences and know that God put you together (with those differences) to make you whole.
- Seek Outside Support – Seeking outside help has become way more accepted than it was in my parent’s generation. Counselors of all sorts abound and are a great resource to help you grow your marriage. So are marriage studies, books and mentoring relationships with married people that you admire. Don’t just be open to outside support, seek it. You would if you needed help in your business or your health.
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