Your Weekly Battle Plan on Elevate Springfield

Summary

In this conversation, Robert Ferriell discusses the importance of time control for small business owners and how leveraging AI can help create more time.  Ferriell introduces a structured approach called the '90-Minute Weekly Reset' to help business owners organize their tasks and utilize AI for communication, content creation, and operational efficiency. He concludes by urging listeners to take control of their time and implement these strategies to enhance productivity.

Takeaways

• AI is a powerful tool for small business owners.
• Most people have a priority problem disguised as a time problem.
• Being omnipresent in marketing is crucial for visibility.
• AI can help create content quickly and efficiently.
• Editing is much faster than creating from scratch.
• Treat AI as a team member for better results.
• Defend your time by scheduling dedicated AI sessions.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Elevate Springfield, where we'll dive into strategies and stories that help you rise to your full potential. Each episode, we'll talk about how you can take intentional steps to elevate your life and your business while making a meaningful impact on those around you. Along the way, we're gonna bring in the change makers from our community that are already elevating. We'll bring the actionable strategies, you bring the discipline and follow through, and together, we can elevate Springfield. Alright, let's go, Springfield. Time to 10x your day, 10x your life, 10x all of it. And that includes Springfield, y'all. You are listening to the Elevate Springfield Podcast. Robert Farrell here, certified 10x coach, speaker, and mentor, here to bring you actionable strategies. You bring the discipline and follow through. And together, we're gonna Elevate Springfield. You are listening to your weekly battle plan here on Elevate Springfield, where every Sunday we're gonna give you ways to control time, ways to create time, and some things that we encourage you to add to that battle plan. We're gonna get right to it after the break. Looking for expert tree care with hometown integrity, look no further than Sangamon Tree Service. They're your trusted local pros, delivering quality workmanship, exceptional customer service, and fair, honest pricing. Every time. Whether it's trimming, removal, or storm cleanup, their team brings professionalism and care to every job, big or small. Call the name your neighbor's trust, Sangman Tree Service, or visit them today at SangmanTreeService.com. Sangaman Tree Service, rooted in quality, built on trust. And we are back. Hey, first of all, happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there if you're listening on drop date today. Hey, before we get into our training on time today, let's talk about a couple of things that are coming up. First thing, this Thursday, we have our Elevate Springfield Insider program. It's Thursday, 11 o'clock via Zoom. Is the second and fourth Thursday of the month. This week we have Dr. Brian Willian from Align Life Chiropractic. You've heard him a few times on the show now, and he's gonna join us that day. So hey, if you're not part of that yet, head on over to bigdogbc.com/slash elevate and get you signed up. We'd love to have you on Thursday for all those calls. We record them and have them in the portal for you if for whatever reason you're not able to make it. But hey, we're 10X out there. We hope y'all make it each and every time live so you can get those questions answered from the experts themselves. So hope to see you Thursday at 11 via Zoom. Head over to bigdogbc.com slash elevate, or you can check out the show notes and get the link there. You know, I'm a big fan of uh what they have going on at the Springfield Lucky Horseshoes. If you haven't seen, they've got their dinner for the diamond coming up, and uh the wizard himself, Mr. Ozzy Smith, coming to join him on May 21st, 6 30 to 8 30. That's going to be a great event out at Robin Roberts Stadium. They just have a lot of great stuff going on leading up to the season, and then later on this month, the season actually kicks off. So we're getting awful close to summer here. So many great things happening here in the Capitol City. Good place to go check out events. Head over to visit springfieldillanois.com and head over to the events tab. They've got a lot of great stuff there, and then make sure you're checking out the Chamber, SILSA, Local First Springfield, LLPNG, all of us, and get involved with those folks as well. So today it is Sunday, so we're talking about controlling time and creating time, right? So what I'd like to talk a little bit about today is as you guys know, you can't make more time once you use it, it is gone. You can always hire more people, you can borrow more money, but you can't get it time back. You, your closest competitor, and everybody else has that same amount of time, that same amount of hours in the day. So how can we leverage our time or control our time to create time? So the biggest source of leverage right now to small business owners is AI, not the buzzword, not the hype, the actual practical tool that's sitting on your phone right now or sitting in your laptop right now. And most folks are still using it simply as a search engine. So today we're gonna touch briefly on how to control time using AI and how you can actually create some time for yourself with these tools. As we've mentioned before, we all know that most people don't have a time problem. They have a priority problem dressed up as a time problem. See, every uh business owner says something similar. I'm slammed, I'm drowning, I can't find the hours, don't have enough people, don't have the right people. But then when you look at all the different things, hopefully you've done your time study. When you look at that time study, there's a lot of stuff in there that somebody else could have done, or something else could have done, like AI. Because you know, there's probably four main buckets of work that you're doing most of the week, right? Bucket one could be revenue generating work, that's selling, closing, meeting clients. Bucket two could be strategic work, planning, hiring, building systems, stuff like that, right? Bucket three, operational work, your emails, your scheduling, your invoicing, your reports, and then bucket four, garbage work stuff that you do because that's the way it's always been done, and nobody's really questioned whether you should still do it or not. Most of the time, what you'll find is people spend far too much time in buckets three and four, and the first two buckets, one and two, the revenue generating work and the strategic work, get the leftovers of that time. So, one thing that could help you out with that, and one that could take some things off your plate from buckets three and four is AI. So here's a few leverage points you could use to help you get the biggest return on time when it comes to AI. And while I'm talking about this, really think about where you're at on it. Grade yourself on each one. Leverage point one communication. If you're still writing every email from scratch, every proposal from scratch, every follow-up from scratch, you're leaving hours on the table every single week. An AI assistant can draft some of those emails in your voice, can turn a two-line bullet point into a polished proposal that can summarize a 40-minute meeting into three action items in just a few seconds. If communication eats a couple hours out of your day, AI could potentially compress that down to say 20 minutes or 30 minutes, but it's probably gonna compress it even more than that. That's not even really a productivity hack. That's creating time. That's 90 extra minutes a day for those first two buckets, the selling, the building, the thinking, right? Multiply that by 250 working days, that's 375 hours a year. That is more than nine 40-hour weeks handed right back to you because you utilized AI in the right way, not as a search engine, but actually as an as a way to create. Leverage point two, content and marketing. In 10x we talk all about being omnipresent. Because if you're not omnipresent, you quite frankly are invisible. And if you're invisible in the marketplace, you are dying. AI could take one good idea and turn it into multiple pieces of content for you, or it can help you create multiple pieces of content faster than you ever could. Companies that are winning right now have great marketing. They may have a big marketing team, but here's the thing with AI it can give you that leverage without having a massive marketing team. The ones that are winning are the ones with some of the fastest output, the ones that just keep on producing content and keep on marketing. And you can use AI as a tool to do this. So if you're a small business, maybe you're a solopreneur, you're still out there doing all the work as well as running the business. AI can be a lifesaver for you when it comes to content and marketing. And then leverage point three, operations. So any onboarding documents, SOPs, job descriptions, training materials, policy updates, customer FAQs. So those are things that, hey, maybe you have them right now, or maybe they're on the list of I'm gonna do them at some point. Have AI give you a draft, then you edit. Done. We always talk about how important systems are. The businesses that run on documented systems are the ones that succeed. And AI can be a bridge to help you get all your systems in place. So where are you at on those three leverage points? That's the communication, content, and marketing, and operations. If you just simply incorporate AI into these three leverage points, it's gonna create a ton of time for you so you can really concentrate on those high value activities, those buckets one and two. So here's something you could do each and every week. Let's call it the 90-minute weekly reset. So maybe every Sunday or first thing every Monday, whatever day you treat as your kind of reset for the week, sit down for 90 minutes with your AI assistant and do a few things, and I'll show you what exactly to do. There are many different AI assistants that you can have out there. I've used a number of them. You really just need to figure out what works with the systems that you have. You might have one software package already that includes AI assistants. If you want any help with that, give us a shout over at bigdogbc.com or give me a shout on social. I'll help you out and talk to you a little bit about some of the ones that I have used personally. So, what can you do on that 90-minute weekly reset? First, brain dump. Open up the blank chat, dump everything that is on your mind about the business, every worry, every opportunity, every loose thread, every customer issue. Don't worry about editing, don't worry about organizing, just dump it out of your brain into it. Then you can tell the AI, tell your agent to read all of this, group it into themes, tell me what's urgent versus important versus noise, and in a couple of minutes, you're gonna see your week a lot clearer than you did before. Then do a calendar audit. Put your calendar in there and say, hey, tag every meeting and task as revenue, strategic, operation, or garbage. Look at the report, see where you're spending most of your time. As we talk about, you need to know your numbers. You need to know where you're spending your time. The numbers do not lie. You might find that you're spending far too much time on that garbage category. And then next, this is gonna be a little bit of a portion of this 90-minute reset, the week build. So you're gonna build this next week or the start of this week. So with the AI, you map your top three revenue priorities, your top two strategic priorities, and you assign them to specific blocks on the calendar. Mornings if you're a morning person, wherever your peak energy hits. We've talked about time blocking before and how each and every block of time should have something assigned to it. Then, and this is the part that a lot of people skip is you ask the AI to draft the deliverables, the first version of the proposal, the first version of the hiring ad, the outline for this or that. So when the week starts, you're not staring at a blank page. You're editing. Editing is ten times faster than creating a brand new document. And then finally, the last piece of it is the delegation pass. You ask the AI, based on these tasks, what could a virtual assistant, a junior team member, or another AI workflow handle instead of me? Make the list, send the list to the AI workflow, send the list to the junior team member, and you stop touching the work. This is ninety minutes spent on a Sunday or first thing Monday morning. That is it. If you run that each and every week, I guarantee you're gonna get yourself some time back. You're gonna create some time for you that you didn't have previously. And ask yourself, what could you do if you created another eight hours a week to do things that really move the needle? So three mistakes that kill all of this. Mistake number one would be treating AI like Google. Google gives you links. AI should give you work product. Stop typing one-line questions, start typing context, tell it who you are, tell it your business, tell it your customer, tell it the goal and targets, tell it the format you want back. The quality of what you get out is directly tied to the quality of what you put in. That old adage, garbage in, garbage out, rings true with AI as well. Mistake number two would be using it once and quitting. A lot of times people that don't like AI or hate AI gave up because maybe their first answer they got was generic or their first piece of content that they got back wasn't good. But here's where you push back. You correct it, you tell it what to do, you say, hey, make this shorter, more direct, in my voice for this audience. You coach it like you would a new hire. The business owners who are getting massive results from this tool, treat it like a team member, not just a question and answer mechanism. And then mistake number three: no protected time to use it. As we've talked before, if it's not on the calendar, it's not a priority. If you do not put the 90-minute weekly reset on your calendar, treated like a client meeting that you cannot move, it will not happen. The whole point of this is to defend your time, right? Prioritize that. It's in there for a reason. So block it, protect it, show up for it. So as we've talked before, controlling time means deciding with intention what every block of your hours is going to produce. This matters even more now than it did even a few years ago because your competitors are using AI right now, whether you are or not. And every week that you spend doing 40 hours of work that AI could have done in four, that is a week of ground you are giving up, and it is gonna compound every single week. So leverage these great tools to help you control and create time. And your assignment for the week is do the 90-minute weekly reset. Block it on the calendar, run it, do it, but you actually have to do it over and over. So if you're running a business out there, use this to help you control and create time. Hope that helps. We'll be back after the break. Hey Springfield, when it comes to reliable, high-quality roofing, you don't want to leave things to chance. That's why you should reach out to Acosta Angeli Ruffing, your local roughing expert serving Springfield and surrounding communities, from quick dependable repairs to full replacement, from residential to commercial, they are your trusted pros. Call them today at 217-993-2748 or visit their website to book your free quote and inspection. Don't wait. A little leak now could lead to major damage later. Trust the local experts, protect your home, and get peace of mind with Acosta Angeli Roofing. Well, thank you for joining us today, everybody. Appreciate you making us a part of your day. Hey, don't forget while you're out on social, check ours out. You can check my personal one out at RobertFarrell at everywhere. Check out those Elevate Springfield pages, those big dog business coaching pages as well. Check us out over on YouTube. Give us a subscribe, give us a like or a follow on any of those channels. We would certainly appreciate it. So, hey, take what you learned today. You bring the discipline and follow through and together. That's right, y'all. We're gonna Elevate Springfield. Be great.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

When I first walked into Pseudokon Karate Club, I was just looking for a way to get stronger. But what I found was so much more. Here we train in traditional karate, the real stuff. Passed down through generations. Every punch, every kata has purpose. I've learned self discipline, confidence, and how to protect myself. Not just in class, but in real life. It's not about being aggressive, it's about being prepared. This is more than a club, it's a way of life. Join us at JudoCon. Traditional, powerful, real.