Ep 191 - How to Engineer a Systematic Approach to Scaling Your Time and Energy With Dan Mott

“Do less, because less is more.”

Unlock the secrets to growing your solo business with insights from Dan Mott, revenue mindset coach for solopreneurs, creator of the Manifest a Million Challenge, and co-founder of MarketingOps.com.

In this episode, Dan shares his strategies for generating more revenue while staying true to your passion. Learn how MarketingOps.com grew to $1.25 million in just three years through unique relationship-building and innovative networking, including using Dungeons & Dragons sessions.

Dan discusses the connection between personal branding and spiritual growth, sharing how focusing on mindset and spirituality can reshape your business. He explains techniques like subconscious reprogramming and emotional awareness to avoid feeling like a victim of circumstances. Through his personal growth journey, Dan highlights the importance of discipline, focus, and emotional control for a balanced and fulfilling life.

Dan talks about using the Eisenhower matrix for task management and the power of delegation. He shares his experience of hiring a VA  to handle communications and organizational tasks, which freed up his time for bigger projects. Trust and commitment are key in this process, leading to business growth and a better work-life balance.

Key Takeaways:

1. Revenue Growth: Unique networking and relationship-building can significantly boost your business.
2. Mindset and Spirituality: Shifting focus to mindset and spirituality can transform your business and personal life.
3. Effective Task Management: Use tools like the Eisenhower matrix to prioritize tasks.
4. Power of Delegation: Delegating tasks can free up your time for more important work, leading to growth and balance.

Tune in to learn how to achieve more by focusing on less and discover actionable advice to scale your solopreneur journey.

Learn more about Dan Mott here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-mott/
www.six3media.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

It's very easy as visionaries, as business owners, to have a lot of ideas right, and ideas come and go and they flow with ease, especially if you're in the right state of mind. The problem is executing against them and finding the time to actually do that right. So it's really about prioritization and understanding which of these 9 million ideas that I have are the answer right, and so having, the first of all, clearing your plate and allowing yourself to kind of just stay focused on the top priorities. So, yes, I have all these ideas, but I need to just stay focused on, for today, for this week, what are the most important three.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Hey, hey, hey.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Welcome to Master Delegator Podcast, the podcast that unveils the secrets of effective delegation and productivity for business growth. My name is Christy Yoder, ceo of Smart VAs and Meet 5 Star VAs, and your podcast host. Can I tell you a secret? I am obsessed with teamwork and delegation. I consider myself a lazy entrepreneur, not because I don't like working, but because I always find ways to do things in the most effective and easiest way. I was born and raised in Manila, philippines, moved to the States and grew my agency from one person to more than 70 plus team members. As of this recording, I was able to grow my business 10 times more after I hired my first virtual assistant within three months. Together with my team, we have helped more than 300 stressed and overwhelmed business owners scale their businesses by delegating to virtual assistants, and that's why my goal in this podcast show is to help you grow your business by giving you fresh perspectives on delegation, outsourcing, hiring virtual assistants and up-to-date proven business strategies, and teaching you how to scale your business while living a freedom-filled lifestyle. Whether you're a business leader, entrepreneur or someone striving for peak efficiency, this podcast is your go-to resource. We bring you insights from industry experts, successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders who have mastered the skill of delegation. If you are ready to elevate your productivity and achieve more by doing less, you're in the right place. Subscribe to Master Delegator on your favorite podcast platform and join our community of proactive delegators. Now let's get started on the path to becoming a true master of delegation.

Speaker 2: 2:39

Hey, welcome to the Master Delegator podcast. Today I have a very exciting guest. His name is Dan Mott. He is a revenue mindset coach for sellopreneurs, creator of the Manifest a Million Challenge, co-founder of marketingopscom and runs a D&D networking group for business nerds. And today we're going to talk about how to engineer a systematic approach to scaling your time and energy so you can stay focused on the things that light you up. So stay tuned, because you are going to learn a lot from this episode. Welcome, dan, to the Master Delegator Podcast. I'm so excited that you are here with me right now. I mean, obviously, we have chatted quite a few times already and you also presented to our clients, I think last year, early last year or two years ago, I can't remember.

Speaker 1: 3:37

But thank you again.

Speaker 2: 3:39

Yeah, somewhere between there. Yeah, Thank you again for you know saying yes to my invitation to becoming a guest on the podcast and I'm excited to get to know you more on a personal and professional level. So I did my introduction to you and in my introduction I mentioned that you are the creator of Manifest, a Million Challenge, and you are the co-founder of marketingopscom and you also run a networking group. So tell us about those three things.

Speaker 1: 4:08

Yes, and also a social selling coach, okay cool.

Speaker 1: 4:12

I do way too much, which is exactly why I needed your team and Kurt to help me wrangle all of my ideas and everything together to really bring my business together this year, which has been really exciting and just such an awesome experience. So I'm so glad we've had such an awesome relationship over the past couple of years and exciting to dig into more stuff and continue to grow together. So yeah, a little bit more about me. So yeah, I'm a social selling coach. I work with solopreneurs to help them build a simple sales process that helps them break through the current sales barriers that they're having, generating more revenue in less time, so that they can stay focused on the things that they're most passionate about, which is serving their clients and doing the work that they really love.

Speaker 1: 4:57

Everything I teach is really around kind of the power of relationships and people and that kind of trickles through everything else that I do.

Speaker 1: 5:06

I met my business partner, mike Rizzo, who we run marketingopscom together.

Speaker 1: 5:12

We're a community for marketing operations professionals and in three years we were able to kind of take these same sales practices and relationship building techniques that I've been working on for years and years to take the company to 1.25 million in three years and plan to double that this year.

Speaker 1: 5:29

So I take a lot of those lessons from kind of both organizations and pull them upstream and downstream. And then, yeah, I'm very much a big D&D nerd and I wanted to play. I was like I asked myself a question how do I just play more D&D? So I literally just found other people on LinkedIn, other people in my network that I connected with, and I was like here's a cool way for us to just kind of create a very kind of niche micro networking event. And let me tell you, there is nothing like sitting down with like potential business connections or leads or partners or things like that and just having shenanigans and having fun for like four hours straight. Like you build deeper relationships in that amount of time than I've built with other people on LinkedIn over years and years. So it's it's really an incredible experience.

Speaker 2: 6:16

So those are kind of the three things I do.

Speaker 1: 6:18

And then I know you asked I know I'm sorry it's so much you asked about the manifest a Million challenge. So that is, we can dive into this more deeper but essentially I had the biggest spiritual awakening of my life the end of last year and I was looking for something to challenge myself and really push myself to become a better version of me. And I actually thought it was a joke when I found it. But a YouTube video popped in front of my face and I laughed at it and said manifest a million dollars in 2024. And I slowly came to the realization that this was the thing that I should be doing. So now I publicly share that on a daily basis.

Speaker 1: 6:58

As of the time of this recording in May, I've already written over like 95 editions of this newsletter and it's really cool to see in the past five months how far my mindset has come and how far I've shifted in terms of just really everything that I've been doing from a business perspective is really about the mindset. So it's so exciting to see all of these things progress and change as a result of me just kind of doing a lot of the inner work. And I'll tell you. For years, I've been talking about hiring a VA and getting help and being able to delegate and scale beyond me personally running my own business, and the moment that I decided to agree to this challenge and start publishing it and writing it and showcasing it publicly, that was exactly when I reached out to you and was like I need help, please help me.

Speaker 2: 7:52

Yeah, I remember when we were talking on the phone, you told me that you're starting this challenge and that you needed a VA. Well, I'm glad that you walked the talk and I'm glad that you are, you know, seeing results with what you're're doing. And for those people who don't know what dnd is, it's dungeons and dragons, right I always forget that.

Speaker 1: 8:10

I have to explain that to people just like rolls off my tongue and then I'll have conversations. People like yeah, wait, what is dnd?

Speaker 2: 8:15

yeah, dungeons and dragons, very much so yeah, I mean, I heard of that game, uh, many times, but I feel like it's way over my paycheck, you know. I feel like it's for people who have a lot of brain capacity. Who was who's smart, you know, because you have to have, like, such a high imagination when you play that game, you have to be very creative, right? Hopefully? Hopefully, one day I'll get to play that game when somebody you know is good enough to teach me. But yeah, I've heard of that, probably eight years ago when I was working for a corporate, but I want to learn more about the spiritual awakening you had. So you sort of had a turning point. That's why you needed to do this challenge that you are currently doing right now. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Speaker 1: 9:05

Definitely so. I think it stemmed from because my two organizations are so completely different. Right Like Sixth Street Media is my social selling practice. I work with solopreneurs. They work for themselves, they're self-employed entrepreneurs, and marketingopscom is very much about marketing operations professionals who work for organizations in the primarily in kind of like technology industries.

Speaker 1: 9:31

So, being kind of a marketer, I was trying to, like, how do I represent myself, how do I position myself to the world? To kind of showcase both of these things in this. Like, how do I tie the common thread right? And that's something I struggled with for a very long time years in fact. I kept referring to it as my personal brand identity crisis. So I started hiring coaches and talking to people and asking friends and trying to figure out, like, what do I do, how do I position myself, how do I kind of get the best of both worlds? And in doing so, I discovered something so much deeper than that right and and ultimately the answer was it doesn't really matter. Like you don't, have I got so caught up in something that doesn't matter and I realized truly kind of deeper as a human being that right like this world is what we make it and it can. We are so in control of the reality that we create for ourselves through spirituality and mindset in the way that we think. So I got heavily involved into I mean, there's so many different flavors of it and people call it it's ultimately the same thing, though right. It's like how do you work with your mind? Um, is ultimately right.

Speaker 1: 10:42

So I'm doing a lot of work around kind of subconscious reprogramming and helping myself realize that I am not a victim of the world that happens around me, that I'm in control and no matter how crappy a circumstance around me might be, I'm in control. I choose how I feel, I choose how I react. And it's a lot of work around that. And I heard so many stories of people manifesting a house and manifesting a wife or a husband, or manifesting money or manifesting whatever they wanted in their lives, and I truly believed it.

Speaker 1: 11:17

But I wanted to push myself. I wanted to kind of like break the limiting beliefs of what I truly right, like what was kind of the what was, what seemed impossible to me. I wanted to go and do that because I wanted to prove to myself and document my process, document that journey in the process to share with other people like, hey, this is possible and this is what it's right. This is not my story, after I've already done it, and it's all like rainbows and sprinkles. It's like no, here is kind of like all the dirt that I'm eating along the way and how hard it sucks and how hard I have to work to pull it off. So that was ultimately what this was about was to test myself and to push my limiting beliefs and my boundaries and to help show other people in the process that, hey, this is what this is like and you can do it too.

Speaker 2: 12:02

Right, I love that. Hey, are you sick and tired of being overwhelmed because you are doing everything alone in your business and can't scale because you don't have a team supporting you? Well, you don't have to worry anymore, because smart VAs can provide you with a team of experienced virtual assistants that can do different tasks to support your growth From admin to bookkeeping, to social media, video and podcast editing to website graphics, seo and customer service. Smart VA's team can help you grow your business without any worries or stress from all the tasks weighing down on you. If you are a busy entrepreneur who needs help with your day-to-day tasks so you can focus on growing your business, then you have to visit smartvirtualassistancecom. So if you compare yourself from before the spiritual awakening to now, who who? Who was the past dan and who is the dan now that I'm talking to?

Speaker 1: 13:16

yeah, um, it's. It's hard to say right, because, like, there are so many versions of ourselves that we live out on a daily basis. Um, I mean, if you think about, like, when you spend time with your clients versus when you spend time with your parents, versus when you spend time with your childhood friends, you kind of act like a different person around those people?

Speaker 2: 13:35

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 1: 13:36

So we kind of live out a bunch of different realities at the same time and they all start to blend together. So when you kind of compare Dan today versus Dan six months ago, there's probably not too much of a difference. Um, in terms of, like, the way that I think about myself and the way that I think about the world is definitely different. Right, there's, there's a lot of things inside that you could probably kind of like trickle out and I would know the difference because I was in both shoes. But, um, yeah, it's, you know, it's. It's a lot more control, a lot more discipline, a lot more focus.

Speaker 1: 14:12

Um, I am kind of like going back to feeling like less of a victim to the world. Right, Like I am emotionally aware and conscious of I'm feeling angry right now. Right, Like I have two young. I have two young kids and for anyone else who has young kids, they know like it sucks getting punched in the face and it sucks like getting yelled at and things thrown at you.

Speaker 1: 14:34

It's very easy to get kind of overwhelmed by that scenario and get angered or angry or disappointed or yell at your kids and things like that. And when we feel emotions, we react on them without, without thinking about it, just happens Right, Especially kind of like the negative lower emotions vibrations. So when you can kind of like realize I'm angry right now and you ask yourself, does this anger serve me, or does this thought that I'm thinking serve me? Or does this thing I want to say actually serve me? Yeah, it might feel good to go tell this person to F off, but is that truly going to be the best thing for me and for them and our relationship together? Or is it better for me to just take a deep breath and take a step back and realize that, yes, they're saying mean things to me, but I don't have to let that hurt me? So having that emotional awareness is definitely kind of the thing that has changed my probably the most in the past six months.

Speaker 2: 15:30

I love that. That is something that I have learned, or that I'm learning recently as well, that you know I don't really have to control everything. When somebody does something to me, I don't have to really react to that. I can be quiet and, at the same time, be peaceful about it. The best revenge is not doing nothing at all. Right, sometimes and I've learned that, you know, and as business owners, we like controlling things right and most of what we do, you know it's important to control things because we don't want any problems to arise and if there's a problem, we tend to have an immediate solution to the problem already. But when it comes to our personal life, sometimes it doesn't work that way. Sometimes we just got to learn to let go things and let the problem solve itself, and sometimes it does. And I love that.

Speaker 2: 16:27

You had that spiritual awakening and for most people I'm sure they had that spiritual awakening. It may be different from what you experienced or from what I experienced, but I think it's important that we get to a point where we're like you know what. I want to change something, and I'm not changing because of the people around me, but I'm doing this for me. So, yeah, it's so nice to hear that from you. Um, tell me about the word manifesting. I feel like that word gets a bad rap because for most people they think that when you manifest something, you just lay on the couch and then not do anything. Just you know manifest, you know not. You don't have to work, you just need to manifest and think about it all the time. So tell me about that word manifest, manifesting. What is your own definition of that?

Speaker 1: 17:19

Yeah, it's. It's definitely not just an easy kind of kick your feet back and just wait for the world to happen to you. It very much does happen in that way, but it takes a lot of work to do it and it takes a lot of inner work. That is something that we're not mostly used to, right? So, like I would say that my life almost started over, right, like when I had this last. I've had a couple spiritual awakenings, but nothing like this. I almost feel like an infant walking through the world with my eyes open. Now, right, like I realize how far I've come in the past six months and I'm like I'm really only just getting started because I can see, like, the world for what it is now and it's very interesting right. So it's like I'm learning at a very fast pace, but I'm still realizing that I'm only still at the beginning of this, so I have a long way to go.

Speaker 2: 18:12

Right, that's true. And so you've recently hired a virtual assistant to help you with. You know your daily, day-to-day operations and you know you have six. You have six, three media, you have marketing ops, you do the manifesting challenge and you have the networking group. You do lot of things, you know, and I feel like, for us entrepreneurs, we do a lot of things because most of us were visionaries. You know we have a lot of ideas and we can't just stay put. You know we want to keep going, but, um, in your case, you know, um, even though you have a lot of things that you're doing, you are not stuck in doing what you don't like doing, because you know that there are other people who can do it for you.

Speaker 2: 19:02

So, in terms of scaling, many people talk about how to scale a business. Oh, you hire this marketing, blah, blah blah. But how about scaling our time and energy? How, how do we do that? I feel like that is really a good question, because we only have 24 hours a day. How do you scale your time? You know we only have so much energy. How do you scale your energy? So, tell me about how you do your systematic approach when it comes to protecting your time and energy so that you can do more yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:46

To your point. It's very easy as visionaries, as business owners, to have a lot of ideas right, and ideas come and go and they flow with ease, especially if you're in the right state of mind. The problem is executing against them and finding the time to actually do that Right. So it's it's really about prioritization and understanding which of these 9 million ideas that I have are the answer Right, and so having the first of all clearing your plate and allowing yourself to kind of just stay focused on the top priorities. So, yes, I have all these ideas, but I need to, I need to just stay focused on, for today, for this week, what are the most important? Three right, like three is an easy, a manageable number for us to dig ourselves into without getting overwhelmed, and when we give ourself that space to kind of deeply think about a few ideas or topics, it opens up more ideas in that particular realm on how to achieve those faster or more efficiently. So that's I think the most important part is to create space for ourselves.

Speaker 1: 20:50

Less is more, and I've been reading 10X is Easier Than 2X by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, and it's really great. I'm still only just getting started with it, but there was a concept in here of like what are your standards, what are your standards for your clients, your business practices, everything in life. And I'm kind of starting to realize more and more that I need to tighten up right, like, who are the people that I want to serve? I need to find a smaller and smaller group of people. How do I want to serve them? I need to find, like, a more dialed in approach to being able to do so. Right? So, again, less is more. How do I do fewer things Just so much better, because that right it's not like, but if I do something twice as good, I'm not going to get twice the results. I'm going to end up getting 10 times the results. Because, again, less is more right?

Speaker 2: 21:41

yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly right. And how exactly are you applying this to your, to your life?

Speaker 1: 21:49

it's not easy yes, it's.

Speaker 1: 21:53

It's, it's very much conditioning and and forming habits around it. So having right, even just like a daily practice for I mean, I I don't know how much of this you need, but right, like I practice meditation and journaling exercises and many other things in kind of my morning and my nightly routine, are kind of the things that I attribute the most success to. So having a routine, a process in place that helps you gain clarity around what is truly most important to me, what do I care most about? What lights me up, what am I most excited about to do today or that is going to get me to the thing that I truly, truly want in life, and working towards those things.

Speaker 1: 22:34

That part is probably easier than saying no to everything else. Right, it's very easy for us to say yes because we want to help people or we want to do things, and that's not always in the best interest of ourselves and our time, because, again, time is limited and busy to me is a bad word, right, I don't want to be busy, because busy doesn't mean productive, so it's hard, it's conditioning, it's it's being able to write, like even if some new idea, like someone reaches out to you and says, hey, would you want to do this with me? Do you want to do that? Like you have to say no, you have to. You have to say you know what, as much as I want to do this me saying yes to you means that I have to say no to something I already agreed on, and I think that kind of idea has helped me a lot, because I'm a very giving person. I want to help people. I enjoy spending time with people, so I give my time willingly and freely and easily.

Speaker 1: 23:25

But if I think of it in the fact of like well, I already promised my time and my focus to this person or this thing and now I'm going to take it away from them, like that's far worse than having said no in the first place, that helped me a lot in getting a lot more comfortable with saying no.

Speaker 1: 23:41

But then even kind of like tactically right, just having templates or like blocks that you can use that say like hey, and there's you can Google this and there's a lot of really good examples online Like hey, as much as I would love to do this, you know I really need to be protective over my time and the goals I've already set for myself and unfortunately, this does not align with them, so I'm going to have to, you know, politely, say no and right, and and when you say it in that way, people, people, actually kind of respond positively to it, cause they're like that's right inside. They're saying that sucks, like I wanted to do this thing with you, but they totally respect it and they honor it. So it's really cool.

Speaker 2: 24:15

Exactly. And you know, every time I say no to someone, not because I just want to say no, but because I couldn't really do it. You know, every time I say no to someone, I feel so much satisfaction. You know, I was just like, yes, I'm not a people pleaser today. Know, I was just like, yes, I'm not a people pleaser.

Speaker 2: 24:38

Today I said no, you know, and also that person who received your no I mean, maybe some of them they may reciprocate it in a negative way, but most of them they will admire you for saying no, because most people they can't say no. You know, because when I was saying yes all the time and I received no responses, um, or the answer no, I was like admiring those people who were saying no to me. I was like, wow, they're very direct, they can say no to people. I need to be like that too. So that's why, every time I say no, I feel so satisfied because I'm like, okay, I did it.

Speaker 2: 25:13

You know, that's the goal, because you need to protect your time and I love about what you said on. You know, you have to have space for more and you have to clean your plate to clean your plate, and so it's important that you know what are the three tasks that you need to focus on, so that you are hyper-focused on those tasks, even though you have 10,000 tasks more that you need to do but there's always another day to do those tasks Just focus on the three tasks that you are going to do for today. So, in your case, what are mainly those three tasks that you are going to do for today? So, in your case, what are mainly those three tasks that you normally do?

Speaker 1: 25:56

Truthfully, it varies quite a bit. Sometimes they can be extremely little tasks, but the thing is they're so incredibly important and they need to be done today that I just need to write them down on my list to be like. This needs to get done because it is easy to forget and I don't want to miss out on this because that could that could mean slowing down a project or messing something up. So I have a, I use a pen and paper, I have a daily, I actually have a weekly planning. So I, up at the top, I put the date, I put the top three things that I want to work on for that week, and then I do the same thing for every single day Monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday. What are the top three things I want to work on for each day? And, truthfully, I don't always get to it. Yesterday I didn't, because yesterday was crazy and I was on calls all day and I just didn't have time to plan or think, but I didn't have time to work on anything other than being on calls anyway. So that's okay, right? So, like I think, I think it's okay to kind of mess with the system a little bit, but it's it's very much a balance between what's important and what's a priority. And there's the.

Speaker 1: 27:00

I don't know if you've heard of the Eisenhower matrix, but president Eisenhower came up with this. It's just basically like the. You know, the four quadrant matrix is what's what's high importance, low importance, what's high priority, low priority. So ultimately you're, I'm just like right, I use ClickUp for my task management.

Speaker 1: 27:19

I go in there and I just look and I say what have I flagged as high priority versus low priority? And I sort by that. But then I'm also looking at like well, when's the due date? Right, because like this thing might not be as important to me but it has to be like the deadline's done today. All of a sudden it becomes both right, like it goes up in priority as a result of that. So again, like I track right all my ideas that I have I write down and I transfer and I keep them and I use that to kind of filter them out. And that way I can kind of just look at the rate 80, 20 rule, I can look at the top 20% of activities and I can just add my day, go and say like all right, this is the most important thing I need to work on. Typically it is going to be or ideally it is going to be things that are more focused on working on the business as opposed to in it.

Speaker 2: 28:04

Right, yeah, I love that. Hey, are you looking for a community to learn how you can be effective in delegation, so you can focus on the things that matter the most in your business and grow to 6-7 figures? If this is you, then today is your lucky day. Join our Facebook group today to get your questions answered on delegation, outsourcing, business growth, hiring, hiring members and many more. We offer so much value in the group, so join our growing community by going to facebookcom. Slash groups slash master delegator. See you there. I love what you said about it's. You know it's conditioning as well, you don't. I love what you said about it's conditioning as well you don't get to do it immediately.

Speaker 1: 29:03

You need to form habits and do you consider yourself a of like more in business but very much personal life, right, Like we call it, more of routines and habits? But yeah, I'm, I'm highly systematic, so, and that's literally what I. What I help other people do, too is so I'm very much about just my memory's not great and I'm very like I get excited about things. My imagination tends to run wild and I get distracted or lost, so I need those systems to rein me back in and keep me focused.

Speaker 2: 29:32

That's awesome, and you mentioned about weekly planning. So you do plan what you're going to do day to day on a weekly basis. Do you also incorporate your personal activities in there, like picking up your kids, reading a book, exercising?

Speaker 1: 29:48

Well, what's really cool is if you make something a habit and you do it daily, weekly, monthly, whatever the cadence of that is, it frees up the bandwidth. You don't have to think about it anymore. Right, like I have to go. You know like a weekly thing might be to run my KPIs or do my planning for the week. Daily might be like calls that I have to do or that these things live on my calendar. I don't have to think about them.

Speaker 1: 30:13

I literally just go through my day and then my calendar kind of looks at me and says, like you need to do this next. And I'm like cool, let me shift my mindset and just do that thing. So anytime that you can make something a habit or a routine, it helps kind of. Just like, I think of your mind as a computer, like you're just lowering the RAM, like you don't have to think about it anymore, you don't have to process it anymore, you just do it on autopilot. That helps create space for like all right, well, what are, what are the one-off things that I need to do? What are the projects that I need to do? So then that kind of gives you a right like now, okay, I've got a lot less to. Okay, what has been your learning so far? Maybe even more at this point? And I always gave myself the excuse that like, oh, I don't know exactly what to give them, or I don't know what to delegate, or I don't know Right, like I didn't feel ready, I didn't feel like I had enough to give them, and that was always the reason that I said no Like, or that was the reason I just never pulled the trigger. And then I realized I need help if I'm gonna be able to achieve this goal. So I was like I just need to commit and then I'll figure it out along the way. So I kind of had like a rough idea. You know you and I started and I was like I spend a lot of time because I run multiple companies. Like I have to manage, you know, multiple email inboxes. I have my like Slack, I have LinkedIn, I have a bunch of different places where people can communicate with me, and it's very hard to keep up with that and I spend hours and hours just playing catch up every single week and I was like that feels like such a drain for me, not just in time, but also in terms of like mental bandwidth, right. So I was like I need help.

Speaker 1: 32:02

Kurt came on, started helping me a couple months ago and that was the place that he started. And he started helping me kind of like clean up my inboxes, help me manage my communications and my contacts, and he made me better at communications as a result of that, because he was just feeding me like here are the most important things, here's what you need to worry about. We built SOPs and processes to say like he can handle all these things and if it's unique or new or you know he needs to ask a question, he helps me just filter down here are the top couple things you need to worry about today or what do I do with these things? So definitely made it much more easy for me, which then created a lot more space for me to actually start working on activities. And then, as we got more and more comfortable, I was like, oh well, you can help me with this or you can help me with that and again, things that are that need to be done periodically. So I started handing off some of my monthly routines or my weekly routines to him, as well as just projects where I was like, hey, I want to do these 10 million different things, but here are the top three priorities, but I can still work on four, five and six because kurt can help me do those. So, right, like he's helped me kind of expand and and as, as the closer we work together and the more time we spend together and the better he understands me and my business, it's a lot easier for him to come in and make suggestions or be like can I take that off of your plate or help me even organize my ideas better, so that way he can have access to just what I'm thinking and where he might be able to assist me.

Speaker 1: 33:24

So I would say the biggest thing is like just get started, because in the process of doing so, you will find so much more that you can, you can delegate. And it's still always going to be a challenge, because I told you, christy, like I literally just got off a call with him before speaking with you right now and he's like all right, can I do this? Can I do that? I'm still struggling to like give things up.

Speaker 1: 33:46

It's very hard for us as business owners to like be like to let go of things, like give things up. It's it's very hard for us, as business owners, to like be like to let go of things. Um, but him just constantly reminding me and asking me and kind of like helping me hit home the points on why I'm, why am I wasting my time doing these things um, it helps me kind of condition, recondition my mind to be okay, I do need to let these things go. I need to kind of just trust, I need to I I have this belief in my head and it's not a true belief that I have to be the one to do this. That's not true, right?

Speaker 2: 34:14

So I love that. Yeah, we definitely learn a lot just by having somebody help us in the business. You know, dealing with people it's not easy, you know, especially when you're dealing with a person where you have so many differences and responsibilities, right, and if you're so used to doing things on your own, it's really hard to let go. It was also hard for me to let go at the beginning and actually my manager asked me. She asked me, christy, how were you able to let go? Because I delegated so many responsibilities to my manager and then she delegated responsibilities to her team members as well. And she asked me like one day she's like how do you let go? And I said, just trust.

Speaker 1: 35:06

Yeah, there's no other choice. Right Like it's. I can get stuck in this forever, knowing that it's going to cost me an hour of my time every single day. You know, whatever the cadence is, it's going to cost me an hour of time every single day. Or I can give it to someone, and sure, it might get to be a little rocky during the handoff. But those are going to be the indicators of here's what we need to fix and here's how we need to improve the process. And then, pretty quickly, it's smooth sailing after that.

Speaker 1: 35:33

And then, right, like Kurt's going to come in and say like hey, we could be doing this better. Hey, have you thought about this? Right? So, like he has a lot more. It's almost like I have too many things to do. So when I go do something, I'm not thinking about how do I do this better, I'm just like I just need to get it done, whereas when he's sitting down and doing it, he can say there's a better way to do this, or here's a faster way or more efficient way to do this, so we can create a better experience for your customers in the process. So so, right, like giving someone the responsibility of something that we don't even want to do in the first place helps improve the process overall. And yeah, you're going to have that little hiccup in between, but that is just part of the learning curve and that's how you make things better.

Speaker 2: 36:10

Yeah, it's collaboration too. It doesn't mean when you hire somebody, regardless if it's a VA or an independent contractor, it doesn't mean that you have to control that person and feed that person with tasks all the time. You have to let the VA also give you recommendations and give the VA freedom to just communicate to you what he or she thinks is best for the project, Especially if you're working with an experienced virtual assistant, because they've worked with so many businesses already. So they've seen what worked and they know what doesn't work. But it still depends for business owner, because it's just different. You know, you and I were so much, um, different. We may be the same on many things, but I'm pretty sure we still have a lot of differences, just like, um, you know, reading a book. I don't read a book as much I'm into watching YouTube videos, because whenever I read a book I cannot finish a chapter. You know why the visionary in me thinks about a million ideas already as I'm reading the book, so I can't stop my head.

Speaker 1: 37:23

It's really hard. You're not even reading anymore. You're just sitting and staring at a page I don't read anymore, just one page and then.

Speaker 2: 37:28

And then I read the front page, front page and then the back page was like I have 10 million ideas already and I couldn't move on because I'm stuck, because my I just get too excited. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, as we wrap up, what do you want to share with an entrepreneur or a business owner that's just struggling with their time right now, with their energy and even scaling their business?

Speaker 1: 37:57

It's really about just letting go. Do less, because less is more. But even for the things that you do need to do, trust that technology and people can help you and they will scale you, because we can't do everything on our own, as much as we want to and as much as we might love the pain that we put ourselves through to, kind of like, do these things, and because we're creating something, we're building something. It's our business, it's a part of us. So it's very hard to let that go. But when we do let go, when we shed the extra layers, we find something beautiful on the inside. So I think that's the most important part is just let go. Trust that if you stay focused on the absolute most important things, you can delegate so much more than you realize I'm still figuring this out myself. But you can create something so much more impactful and so much more than you realize I'm still figuring this out myself. But you can create something so much more impactful and so much more beautiful in the process by just letting go.

Speaker 2: 38:56

I love that. I love it. All right, this is your time to promote yourself. Share your social media links or your website link. Just share with us where people can find you.

Speaker 1: 39:08

Yeah, you bet I spend most of my time on LinkedIn, so feel free to drop by. Dan Mott, you shouldn't be have too hard of a time finding me. Or Christy, I'm sure you'll link it up in the show notes, but come say hi to me, you know. Let me know that you heard me on the Master Delegator podcast, or just drop Christy's name. More than happy to have a chat. I also have some free resources in there. If you are looking to improve and implement a sales process for your own organization, to help you scale, to help you make more money in less time, there is some free resources for you there that might be helpful.

Speaker 2: 39:46

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dan, for your time today. I appreciate it and I love our conversation.

Speaker 1: 39:52

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, christy. I love talking about this stuff, so anytime.

Speaker 2: 39:55

Thank you, hey. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you like this episode, please share this with your entrepreneur or business owner friends on social media, so they can have freedom and flexibility while running a successful business as well. Please also subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your feedback will inspire me to continue creating content like this and help me improve this podcast show for you. Thank you so much again for listening and I'll see you again on the next episode.