The time management habit every business owner needs

This concept transformed my life when I was first starting running my marketing business. It's an easy to remember productivity mantra (and strategy) made popular by Tim Ferriss in his book The 4-Hour Workweek.

The mantra has 3 Simple steps: Automate, Eliminate, Delegate. And the habit is to make a point of looking for ways to take each step, every single day as an entrepreneur.

In this episode, I'll share:

•  What the process of automate, eliminate, delegate actually is
• How I sometimes do one of these steps very wrong
• Some tech recommendations to speed up your work flows and help you automate
• Examples of what many business owners need to eliminate

And I'll give you a highly actionable FIRST step you can take right now.

If you want to spend less time working, even in your own business... Want to make more money and scale up without burning out... Or even if you just wanna take a baby step and hire a VA this year so you can stop growing your business solo...

This episode, and this new business-owner-habit could be totally transformative.


ps. In this episode, I mention my new mini course Testimonials That Sell. HERE'S the link to that. 

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Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

 As your business grows, starting as a solo preneur, and then maybe you hire a VA and then you'll hire a bit of a team.  You have new problems at every tier. A lot of people will say new level, same devil as if to say you have the same problems that every tier on a bigger scale. I honestly feel like it's new problems. 

I get new problems, problems that I never had before. Sometimes they're what we call champagne problems. Like good ones to have, but 

No doubt wherever you are in your business journey. You're still going to be solving problems at every level. So might as well get used to it now, now in terms of solutions. Solutions to scaling solutions to growing. One thing I  found to be true  One thing I have found to be true at every level of business is the concept of automate eliminate delegate.

as a beginner business owner  is the concept of automate eliminate delegate.  I remember when I first heard this, I was probably, I don't know, a couple years in, and it was like revolutionary to me.  This is a really popular phrase. I tried to figure out who started it. 

It sounds like Tim Ferriss really popularized it, but I'm not sure that he invented it. Uh, in his book the four hour work week, but let's break it down because no matter how big you get, I promise this one, isn't going away.   As much as overachievers like you and I want to,  we cannot do it all.  And that's why having go to phrases like this can be really helpful if you're like me as a reminder that it is normal to not be able to do it all.   And that it is actually key for your growth.

The more tasks you hang onto and grip onto and don't teach your team and don't give your team permission to manage on their own. The more you're going to stunt your scaling and stunt your growth. Let's start with automate. Now Tim Ferriss book, The 4 Hour Workweek, that was written back in 2007. So automation has come so far since then. One of my favorite automation tools, and this isn't an ad, I'm not getting a kickback from this,  but one of my favorite tools is Zapier.  The best way to describe what Zapier does is it links two pieces of tech that wouldn't otherwise link.

 Here's an example of how I use Zapier in my business. When you enroll in my program, Magic Marketing Machine, you pay using Thrivecart, right? So it's a piece of software I pay for that acts as kind of like a shopping cart, ?

You pay through there, And once you pay, you get immediate access to the program, which is hosted through Podia. You might never know the names of those softwares from the client experience, but I know on the back end, those are the pieces of software that I'm using. So when you buy something through my Shopping Cart and Thrive Cart, Zapier connects those two things so that you immediately get enrolled, Into Podia.

Normally Thrivecart and Podia, they wouldn't talk to each other. They're two different pieces of software. So Zapier connects the two. So that's an example of an automation that saves so much time because when I first started with my group program, I had to do that manually. So anytime someone enrolled, I would get an email alert and I would race to Podia, hoping that it's like, you know, not in the middle of the night, because people enroll at any given time.

And I would race to Podia and I would do it manually. I would add you in manually. And that was really stressful, and it's really not scalable. Meaning, as soon as, , you have dozens of people signing up a day, you can't do that manually anymore. Thankfully, there's an automation for that.

And when you're resenting, , setting up an automation, or when it feels hard, or you're like, oh, I have to learn all these terms, I have to learn how to put this all together, Remember all the time that you're going to get back by not doing something manually. So all of the times my day was disrupted, my productivity was disrupted, the stress of running to put that all together, like it wasn't fun to learn those softwares.

If you know me, you know that I've been pretty tech averse throughout my career. Like I'm, I get, like, I don't love learning new technology, but it has to be done in order to grow your business. Because you need more time back. You need more time to be sitting around having big picture thinking or operating in your zone of genius.

Doing the things you love to do so you get lit up and excited to go to work. That's really important for your business growth. The next step is to eliminate. This one has been so stressful over the years. Sometimes that means eliminating something that you sell that's not lucrative. Sometimes that means eliminating services from your offering. For instance, as a social media manager, I used to offer paid ads services, and I would run a paid ad here or there. I worked for a lot of films, and it was short term contracts for films that were like going to a film festival, or maybe a web series, or a TV series where you only need to do the social media while the series is  actively happening.

I mean, that's not my recommendation. My recommendation would be to run the social media all year, but usually they only have money and interest in running it while the series is going, like, not during the off season anyway. So, with those short term contracts, I'd be like, yeah, sure, you want ads? I can do ads.

And I knew how to do ads. I had learned how to do ads and, uh, I was okay at it, but I wasn't an expert. And so it made more sense for me to quit offering things that I wasn't excellent at and hone in on the part that I was really freaking good at. Which was the organic social media marketing. So suddenly I have saved all the time spent troubleshooting things.

I don't know how to do even time in sales calls because I can say point blank. Here's what I offer. Here's what I'm good at. Instead of negotiating, doing things I'm only okay at, or finding service providers to  subcontract stuff out to, it's just so much clearer when you make decisions like that, it's scary.

It's uncomfortable and it's necessary. 

Next up is delegate, and I'm going to tell you where I go wrong with this all the time.  I think I'm a pretty good delegator. I'm pretty good at, , handing tasks off and letting people imagine them in their own way and accepting that everyone's going to kind of look at stuff differently. But where I'm so bad at delegating is the teeny tiny things that I do all day long in my business and the little band aids that I put on and the little connector pieces that I, introduce , and I don't delegate them because I don't even notice I'm doing it.

So I've had this business seven years, right? It's had eight years, something like that.  In that time. I have had every job. I have been the community manager. I have been the virtual assistant. I've been the operations manager. I've been the supervisor. I've been the copywriter. I've been the teacher.

I've been the programmer. I have had pretty much all the jobs at some point. So if I see something that's wrong or needs to be done and I know that I can fix it in two seconds, I will fix it in two seconds. And that does not a scaling company make. 

That's okay at first and I don't think you need to even  beat yourself up if you're doing that right now But becoming aware of all of those little holes that you're patching with your own skills and your own time Is so important because then you can give that responsibility to someone else teach them how to do it and that is how you build a business that you can take vacations from and Clock out early and know that everything's gonna be fine.

 That's You That's the key to that.  

 If you're getting started on this automate eliminate delegate journey, I'm going to give you an action step, super actionable  the very first thing to do to start moving in the right direction.  You're going to keep an eye out every single day for repeatable tasks. Put a little sticky note on your computer. So it's top of mind, you're going to look for repeatable tasks. These are things you check in on every day. 

Things you already have assemblance of a system for those repeatable tasks that are teachable, and that are always the same every time you do them. Those are some of the easiest things that you can outsource to a virtual assistant, a few hours a week. And because you're keeping an eye out and you're super focused on repeatable tasks. 

You can start to notice tasks in your business that have no semblance of being repeatable. You can start to notice things that aren't systematized yet.  And recognizing those will help you create systems around them. You don't need to do it all in a day. You don't need to do it all this week or this month,  but once you get down this journey, if you're anything like me, you're going to become so aware of all the things that aren't easily repeatable and that you don't have a system for, and you can build them and you can work towards them being like so silky smooth and easy to implement.  



As a matter of fact, this is a big part of magic marketing machine when it comes to systematizing your marketing, right.  Instead of just jumping online and posting something. And that's your marketing for the day, being intentional about it, being strategic about it and creating systems that you can one day delegate and that speed you up and that you stick by. 

So instead of. Posting hither tether. When you think about it, having time that is scheduled, where you follow your content strategy and you  automate some of your posts so that you don't need to spend more time out of your day manually posting them,  they're just going to go up at the scheduled time. While you're in the bathtub or going out for a walk or doing something else, that's going to make you money.



It's not like other programs, I'm going off on a tangent now, but it's not like other programs where I'm telling you to post three times a day and jump on every trend. 

The minute it happens, because when you're a busy business owner, that's not, that's not really an option. Unless social media is  the number one thing that you're working on .  The best strategy is one that's sustainable. And that might not be the sexiest word sustainable, but what's the strategy. 

If you don't actually implement it and you can't do it quickly and you can't do it every week, you know? All right. 



So excited to have you here because you're here. It means you ready to go out there and do big things with your business and grow and create an empire. And that is a really admirable and really exciting. 

So. Thanks for being here. And I'll talk to ya in the next one.