Scheduling Freedom

0:04 Hi, you have learned to censure. Wow for you. Your This is the Pipe Main here on the Adventures Pipe Man W four c Y Radio, and once again it's time for a positively Pipe Main segment. This is where we give you great business strategies, motivational strategies, empowerment strategies and much more. And right now we have our expert resonant or resident expert something like that, something like that in business and powerful business strategies and we're gonna learn.

0:53 Oh my god, the one we're going to talk about today is exciting for me because just about every business owner experience is that, even the strongest and most positive of us. And so let's welcome to the show. Michael Barbarina. How are you? Fantastic? Dane? How are you? I'm doing good except a little dyslexic today I think maybe I don't know. Really huh well, thank you for having me. And today I want to talk about something where I'm going to get vulnerable. How do you like that? Oh? Yeah, I need to work on this really bad, and I have been. But it does take time, especially when you're sixty eight years old and you've been doing something for fifty years, you know, the same way. But basically I'd like to talk today about scheduling freedom. We business owners get caught up in you know, working more than forty hours. We get caught up and working a ton of our is because of well, the emergency nature of your business, the reactionary nature of your business. And what I want to do today in our in our segment is talk about three fundamental shifts that have to happen.

2:16 And then I also want to talk about once you have those shifts in mind, what are the fundamental pillars that you really have to attack if you will, if you're going to really schedule freedom and scheduling freedom means being able to having the business you know, serve you first and foremost, but also serve you to the point where now you have the time to spend you know, more time to spend with your family, uh and you know you could go to your kids games, You can adjust your schedule anytime you want, and the and the business is still serving you with the the leverage, revenue and income that you've always desired. And that's really where I think all of us want to be. Certainly where I want to be and certainly what I'm working towards and like I said, being being vulnerable today. This is something that I'm still in the process of working on.

3:16 So the three fundamental shifts that are needed for scheduling freedom is shift number one is going from reactive to proactive. So instead of letting your day happen to you, you design your day around your priorities. So instead of responding to whatever screams the loudest, I think every business owner knows what it means to that you focus on what moves your business forward most efficiently. Now, these things not easy to do, and we have some pillars of fundamental pillars of success on how to achieve these. But that's shift mind shift number one. Mind shift number two is going from task or to outcome focused, or task focused to outcome focused. So instead of measuring your success by how busy you are, which sometimes we business owners do.

4:10 I know I do that, you measure it by the results you produce. So instead of wearing your eighty hour workweek like a badge of honor, you've on creating maximum impact with optimal efficiency. It's a little different. And then the third shift is from indispensable to systematics. So instead of being the person who has to handle everything. You become the person who builds systems that handle everything. Yeah, that's that's really the really critical because once you build a system that handles something, you don't have to handle it anymore. The time leverage of that one system that you built that handled something that you were handling has an incredible compound effect.

5:03 I think you have to trust that system too, because a lot of us as business owns that system may not do it as fast as you do, or even or as good as you do. And I think you just have to let that go because you're never going to grow to business. There's only so far you can take the business on your own, no matter how great you are, how talented you are, anything like that get You're only as good as your team, which your system is your team. Absolutely. And you know, we talked about mindset shift being one of the critical five steps that you have to take in order to implement business and financial strategies that your competition isn't doing. And think we talked about that two weeks ago, and this is part of that shift, and I realized it isn't easy, but it's so very necessary and building the right system, just if you just built one system this month. Even if you built one system this quarter, you know, because this is where you know, it's October and and this is quarter four. And if you just built one system, the compound effect of time savings that one system will have is unthinkable. It's it's unimaginable.

6:19 So so now, achieving true scheduling freedom requires mastering five fundamental pillars that I that I mentioned I would talk about earlier. And these really aren't time management tips. These are strategic frameworks that will change how you operate your business. So the first, and this is I'll tell you it's hard to get business owners to do this number one. This first thing, and that's what's called a time audit and awareness. So before you can optimize your time, you need to understand where your time is going. People don't want to know that. That's why I want to do. I think you're right, but I can help. I can tell you something. I came up with an idea this week for a business owner that I've been pounding this into him, always complains about there's no time, there's no time, there's no time. Well, let's see what you're spending your time on. And of course he came up drive three weeks in a row, to which I pounded the table and said, look, he loves his cell phone. Now, most cell phones, if not all cell phones have recorders on them, so you don't have to write it down. Just talk into the into the phone what you're doing right now, and that's it. And then we'll take all of that recording and we'll format it to understand what you're doing.

7:44 So when you'd start a task or start a stop a task, you just hit the recorder. So that's the best idea I could come up with him, and of course it's working. Yeah. So but this guy is so attached to his phone. Now. I don't know about other people in your audience, but most people have their phone with them, so it helps them. But it's you're gonna stay trapped if you don't identify how you're spending your time. So you need to track your time for a full week, just a week, every single activity, every interruption, every distraction. But it's it's just so relevant and you'll discover that activities that take that you think take thirty minutes actually take two hours. When you when you're you know, all of a sudden, now you're on your phone it's two hours later and you thought it was going to be thirty minutes later. Yeah, and you realize you're spending your day, you know, three hours a day or four hours a day on tasks that could be delegated or eliminated totally.

8:50 It's just like finances too. Like while it's in the investment business, you would do a financial needs analysis, right, and you would always find at least east at the very least, and usually more two hundred dollars a month in ghost money that people couldn't account for. And people with that too, they don't want to do that analysis because they don't really want to know how much they're spending, you know, but that's the only way they're going to get to have more money, and that the freedom is the same thing. I did it with brokers that worked for me when I had a brokerage firm. Basically, generally brokers worked twelve to sixteen hours a day at my competition all the time, and I had this viewpoint of you know what, I've seen what happens as being a broker myself. When you got to work at twelve to sixteen hour day, you pace yourself, you don't have any personal free time, so you steal that personal time at work, and so you're doing personal time at work to stretch out at twelve to sixteen hours. When I found out by implementing what I did, it was by telling my brokers they only had to work an eight hour day.

10:05 They would work in that eight hour day because they had personal time. They didn't have to steal personal time. And that goes for business owners. Listen, you know whatever you do as a business owner, yes, you tend to be a slave to your business, but that doesn't get you anywhere because it inhibits you from moving upward and forward. And you need to have you time. And we all do it. I do it. I'm guilty of it. There's times that I only I don't even go anywhere all week because I'm too busy working morning till night. And I sit there and say, well, isn't that dumb because I could probably get all that stuff done still and have personal time for me, and I would be more motivated, have more energy because I had the freedom of me time.

10:58 Interesting, Yeah, no, that's that's a that's a great point. And so you know the goal of the time audit is it to micro manage every minute. The goal is to just gain awareness of where your time is actually going versus where you think it's going. You know, and you can't fix what you don't measure. It's just another another reason why you do the time ondit. But the second pillar is priority alignment. This is where most business owners completely miss the mark because they try to manage their time without first clarifying their priorities. And this is where I go back to what we wrote about in our book, Dean and what we talked about God. I think it was one of our first shows where the eighty twenty rule comes in, where eighty percent of your revenue comes from twenty percent of what you do every day, and that twenty percent was broken out in a seven step pathway to profit formula. And I'm just going to quickly review those You go back to that show, because I think the show is called the eighty twenty rule or something to that effect.

11:56 But it's lead. Generation, attracting your ideal customer conversion optimsation, converting those leads into your sales process, closing rate improvement, and rolling more prospects into your product or services. Customer retention which is very well ignored. Keeping the customer you have. Which might get that. Why people ignore that. That's yeah, they ignore that. That's the biggest, easiest. Yeah, that's the biggest one that's ignored. That's the biggest one. Wow, we all think that we once we get a customer, we get to keep them by default. And then the fifth is average dollar. Increasing that average dollar, so increasing the transaction value. The sixth is frequency of sale, getting customers to buy more often. And then of course we have to control our cost both fifth fixed and variable costs. And if you're not spending the majority of time of your strategic time working on these seven areas, you're missing eighty percent of your revenue potential. Yeah, so that's what's pillar number two. Pillar number three is calendar control.

12:57 So your calendar is essentially your life. If someone else controls your calendar, they control your life. And and if urgent tasks control your calendar, then urgency controls your life. Yeah, and you don't, You don't control your calendar, to where if you don't control your calendar, chaos controls your life. So, for whatever reason, the calendar, that's why I say the calendar is your life. And the rule is simple. If it's not on your calendar, it's not going to happen. This means time blocking your priorities before you schedule anything else. I had to learn this, So every every space in my calendar is blocked at the start of a day.

13:42 I might only have two meetings, but every space is blocked with the priorities that I have to address. This is part of my growth and development and part of me learn how to how to get how to schedule freedom. And it means protecting that strategy agent time like you would protect a meeting with your most important client. That's the key. And so most business owners fill their calendars with reactive activities and then wonder why they never get any proactive work done. Strategic business owners just do the opposite. They protect their proactive time and fit reactive time around that. Yeah.

14:23 And so the fourth pillar is what I call distraction. And I know I'm running out of time here. Okay, Okay, it's important. Okay. So the fourth pillar is distraction management. Those distractions are not random events that happen to you. They're predictable interruptions that you can systematically prevent or managed to see. The average business owner gets interrupted every eleven minutes. Imagine that every. Eleven I do imagine that. I mean that means they never get deep into the strategic work. So you need to identify your most common distractions and build those systems first, as we talked about earlier, to manage them. And it's and is it employees who interrupt you with questions that they should know how to answer?

15:15 Is it build a better training? Yeah? You know what I mean. That's the other thing. Some employees just like to play. It's safe, So they asked the boss, right, that's a that's a safe way to get you. Know what I do in that situlation. Yeah, tell me I have learned my lesson and I will not answer the phone first. Five minutes later, I kid you not never mind, I figured it out. Oh god, because especially nowadays, good people's first thing is to ask somebody or even ask Google. You know, it's not to think, you know, and to sit there and go, well, what should I do?

15:59 Without asking? And then when I don't respond right away, it forces them to have to think and then they come up with the answer unbelievable. Unbelievable. And so the fifth pillar is self care in personal time. This is the pillar that most business owners sacrifice first and it's a mistake that destroys everything else. You cannot build a sustainable business if you're running on empty. You cannot make good strategic decisions if you're exhausted, stressed, out, burned out, whatever you want to call it. So self care isn't selfish. It's strategic. Taking care of your physical health, mental wellbeing, relationships. They all make you more effective, not less effective. So arrested, energized, focused business owner will accomplish more in six strategic hours than an exhausted owner will accomplish in twelve chaotic.

16:55 Hours, no doubt. And so you have to schedule time for exercise and family time, not because you have left over time, but because these activities fuel the energy and creativity that you need to excel your business. What's funny about that, too, is you know that when you say the family time, the way I am now is the same as I was before I had kids. And basically what that message is is when I did have kids growing up, that I scheduled family time. And guess what, I was just thinking about it, Like just this morning, I was thinking about it was amazing that I got through everything I did and business was so successful by working less than I ever had. Amazing.

17:46 Yeah, it's amazing how that can work. That's why that freedom so important. And we think we don't have it, and we think our business is going to fall apart. We think we're not going to get climbed. And what you really find out is you get a lot more by scheduling your freedom, because not only do you have your freedom, but you have your energy, you have your mindset, and you have everything else to make your life not stressful and happy instead. Right right, absolutely, so great words from you, and I want to hear more great words. So let's tell everybody how they can reach out to you and get more information on this but many other subjects and even help for their business because you do help businesses. You're not just absolutely a guest on my podcast. It's not, you know, So let's let them know how to dig in.

18:42 Okay, just go to NEXTSTEPCFO dot net and you can download a free copy excuse me, a free copy of my book called Powerful Business Strategies Progging in my Throat here, sorry, Dan. And so what we also love to do is we love to interview business owners. It's our favorite thing in the world because we keep writing additional additions to our book because business is always changing. So you go to next step CFO forward slash contact, fill out the contact form and the message section right book interview and the way the book interview works, it's it's sixty minutes on zoom. I present strategies from my book. I ask you, simply ask you what you believe would be the impact of that strategy should a business owner implement it in your industry?

19:29 And I document it for the book. And by the way, all the things that I talk about, I provide clarity, a step by step roadmap. I help you upgrade your skills, I help develop your mindset, and I also optimize your environment. So all of those things is what I work towards it. And hey, where about implementation. I never say that we're business coaches. First of all, we're CFOs that understand strategic implementation, because implementing strategies is where it's at. It's not learning them can learn anything on Google like you said, or AI. There you go. Well, yes, you are a master at the powerful business strategies. And I'm glad you're on our show every week and you'll be on again next week.

20:12 So everybody's got to tune in. If you've missed any other episodes before, go to the back catalog and check them out. These are key secrets to your success, and they're right here for you on the Adventures of Pipe Man. Thank you Michael, thank you for having me here. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Pipemin. I'm w for CUI Radio.