Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy.

In this episode, I'm gonna share with you how to buy back your time to increase your profit.

It's literally, if you feel like you're frustrated, you've got way too many direct reports, you finish your day, and you're wondering, what did I actually get done?

And literally growing will cause more pain to you than you need to absolutely listen to this piece.

So I'm gonna share with you how I teach my clients to strategically buy back their time in a way that's more profitable, and it creates a business they don't grow to hate.

And be sure to stay at the end where I'm gonna tell you how to get access to my exclusive Download the Next Hire Focuser.

It's the worksheet that I use with my clients to help them walk through exactly where they should be focusing their hiring plan to buy back their time in the most profitable way.

So I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said this is probably the most important topic that I talk to my coaching clients about.

And the reason why is I've learned that if we don't learn how to hire people in the right sequence, that we'll eventually grow a business that is painful.

That the more we grow, we'll literally like be driving with the handbrake on, we won't wanna push on the gas cause it hurts, okay?

It sacrifices our time, it zaps our energy.

You know, and the other day I was talking to one of my coaching clients, Owen, and he ran into the same issue.

Literally growth in 2020, but started to stagnate and slow because he didn't have the right people infrastructure.

He didn't make the right hire because for him, a lot of times when we're hurting it's cause we think the next hire is an expensive hire, okay?

It's a VP, it's an operations person.

Here's right off the bat.

If you're thinking of hiring an operations person and you don't have a personal assistant, start there.

Like you never hire somebody to operate your business if you don't have an executive assistant taking care of that type of stuff to free up your time.

So I'm just gonna give you that quick one, but I'm gonna jump into the four key strategies that you need to consider to really understand the mindset, the beliefs and the tactics to buy back your time.

Number one, the buyback principle.

So the first off when people ask me, what does that mean the buyback principle?

Here's what it means.

It means when entrepreneurs, okay, will not grow into pain.

So if there's this threshold of pain, you growing, if it means more pain, you won't do it.

How does that show up in your business?

Well, it means that you're slow to reply to emails.

You don't follow up an introduction to potential partnerships.

You don't aggressively go for the close when you have a sales call.

You don't build certain features because it's gonna take a lot of time to map out the product roadmap or whatever it is.

But essentially it's painful for you to grow.

If you sell, you gotta deliver, you gotta activate, you gotta onboard.

There's all these things.

And what I've discovered is most people, when they do hire, they hire people to just add capacity.

They hire a developer, they hire a support person, they hire a frontline worker, whatever, which isn't bad.

But the problem is, is that if you do that a lot, eventually, usually around 12 employees, you're gonna get overwhelmed.

You're gonna hire a bunch of people to add capacity, but it actually doesn't free up your time.

So what you wanna do instead is, the buyback principle is 100% focused on shifting the hiring from just hiring for capacity to instead hire for capability.

Capability means you freeing up your time to be more capable to invest higher value time of yours into revenue generating activities.

Okay, so it's to buy back the lower value activities so that you can focus on higher value activities from your calendar.

Why is that important?

Because just think about this.

If you had a calendar and you, or you looked at your calendar, you said, here are all the things I've done last two weeks.

And you just highlighted groups of things, either red, they zap my energy, and they, I hate doing this, or green, I love doing this.

And you looked at it, it could be maybe today, 60% red.

Maybe it's only 40% red, but imagine this.

What if your calendar was all green?

What if you woke up and all the work you worked on, you did was stuff that energised you, added value to your business, generated revenue in high gross margin, profit to your business.

You would transform the way you attack the day.

You would jump out of bed ready to hit your work.

You would be motivated to talk to customers, talk to partners, talk to anybody that could help you scale up, because it would mean more of that.

And that's the opportunity.

That is the buyback principle.

And that's the number one thing you need to understand is that we're buying to get time out of your calendar.

Number two, calculate your EHR.

So your EHR stands for effective hourly rate.

Here's a simple equation.

If you take your revenue, okay, and you just call it a million dollars, okay, or even your ambition this year, if you wanna get to a million dollar revenue, and you divide it by 2000, which is about the amount of hours that a person's gonna work in a year, that means your hour is worth $500, okay, $500.

Well, if you look at like the list of tasks that you're working on throughout a two week period, there's 80% that are low value, okay, the 80-20 rule.

And there's 20% that are high value, maybe between two to $500 worth of value.

These are things like selling, marketing, partnerships, product development potentially, right?

But these are things that only you can do or the things that bring you energy that creates a lot of value for your business.

Everything else, this long tail of activities needs to get off your plate.

So what I say is that if you can hire somebody for a quarter of that value, meaning that it fits $500 an hour, that's 125.

You could pretty much hire anybody.

Just even think if you're $1,000 or 100,000 a year, that's $50 an hour.

Is there anything you can hire people for $12.50 to do that's on this line of long tail activities?

The answer is yes.

You can hire people through sites like Upwork to buy people, to out task certain functions.

Most people think I need to hire a full-time person.

No, you don't.

Out task that work using your effective hourly rate as a gauge, okay?

So a quarter of your EHR is where you should be looking for opportunities to invest the buyback time.

Number three, hire multiple hats.

Most people when they hire, they hire one person to do a thing.

I need a designer, all they do is design.

I need a Facebook person, all they're gonna do is Facebook.

I need a whatever and all they're gonna do is this.

Here's my thing.

If you look at your calendar and you see these chunks of work, okay?

Maybe there's what you'll discover is there's two buckets of type of work.

One's more office and operational.

The other one's more marketing type tasks, social media, posting, Facebook.

What you wanna do then is say, how can I hire for a role that they'll do those three buckets of things?

Because there's value in that.

So I think that people forget when we started as entrepreneurs, we wore seven hats, 14 hats, a ton of hats.

We wore all the hats.

And then what we do is we hire people and we hand a hat over.

What I'm saying is hand over three hats.

Hire somebody who's gonna lead your marketing and say, here's all the things I do in marketing.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

You now do this.

I know you may not have experience, but I trust you.

And there's free courses online and there's YouTube videos.

Go check out this guy, Dan Martell.

He's pretty smart.

He's got a bunch of videos on certain things and just hand it to people.

I think people underestimate how capable folks are if you actually empower them and you coach them to success.

And you just say, these are the outcomes that I'm gonna hold you accountable for.

Figure it out.

Let me know if you're stuck.

And every week we're gonna meet and you're gonna show me where you're at and are you making progress?

So that to me is one of the big ideas, the aha moments between the buyback principle is you buy back multiple hats.

You give groups of activities to one person and say, hey, you're in charge of invoicing, client activation and receivables, okay?

It might sound crazy, but why?

Well, because they're working with the customer to activate them.

So they should make sure the invoice got done.

And if somebody hasn't paid, ask them about it since they have a relationship with the customer.

That's what I'm talking about when I say hire for multiple hats.

And number four, build throughput.

So my whole thing, when I look at scaling companies is I'm trying to drive revenue.

I'm trying to create throughput amongst my management team.

So for me, it's not even that I buy back my time.

If you have leadership, you need to teach them how to buy back their time.

If everybody at your organisation is understanding this principle in hiring, not to add capacity, but to free their time up so they can work in more of their genius, their unique ability, it's a game changer.

If you just ask people to hire folks to add capacity and it doesn't free up their time, you're gonna burn them out.

They're not gonna stick around with you, especially your A players.

So I hire executive assistants for all my senior leadership team.

Why?

Because it's the cheapest amount of labour capital I can deploy to have them free up their time to think strategically, to look like, essentially they're in the forest.

They gotta look up and look over across the forest and say, where are we going?

That's strategic thinking.

If they're leading a marketing, a sales team, customer success, they need the space in their calendar to do that.

And that doesn't happen if we just keep adding people to fill capacity.

We need to increase the capability.

We need to increase the throughput, what I call management bandwidth, so that you can scale your company even faster.

So quick recap, four strategies to buy back your time, to increase your profits.

Number one, the buyback principle in essence, okay?

Number two, to calculate your EHR and use that to hire.

Number three, hire for multiple hats.

Number four, build throughputs.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I wanna share with you an exclusive resource.

It's called the Next Hire Focuser.

It's literally the worksheet that I use when I'm coaching clients through this process for them to understand, where are you spending your time?

What brings you energy?

What's valuable to the business?

What are the lists of things that you're doing that you could group together and hire that person to make sure that you have a very clear task list of things when you bring that person in.

Here's what you're now owning, hand it over to them.

Give them guidance, coaching to success.

Click the link below to download your copy of my Next Hire Focuser to make your next hire a success.

It will free up your time and add tremendous amounts of profit to your business.

I'm really excited for you to deploy that.

Let me know in the comments how that works out.

If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel, smash that like button and share this with any other entrepreneurs you know are struggling and need to consider redeploying their capital into more effective people time.

So share that link with somebody you love.

As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.