Edmonton Accounting Firm | 2 – 2019.02.02 #BeatTheOdds Boot Camp – Schedule

2 – 2019.02.02 #BeatTheOdds Boot Camp – Schedule | Edmonton Accounting Firm

Wow. Good. First question to headed Dan, whose question is that we wanted to be naming, you know what I mean? Is Business Networking International. It’s a networking group that you, various chapters and they’ll meet weekly at a set location in a set time with a set number of people. So there’ll be one person from each chapter we’ll talk about a little bit more. I think it’s really good way for most small businesses to build up real brand loyalty, which is hard to do. But there’s various chapters throughout the world actually working at national. And again, there’s, every chapter has one person per se. So one electrics in one folder, one accountant and they meet weekly. I set time set place. Um, you know, see how you can help pass across real great way to find those real loyal customers, which is hard to do when your brand has no value.

That’s right. Yeah. So that’s what, um, what are some tips for building for, for a partnership? Who’s got that one? Yeah, tips for billing or referral partnership. If it deals a lot. And this will tie back into the last one. You’ll probably see other, they’re connected is probably the main tip is the frequency of what you have, how often you see them reaching out to somebody once is actually kind of a waste of time. So let’s say I’m going to go have lunch with this banker. I get a banker who called me up and I don’t know, we’ll have lunch with his banker. It’s a waste of my time unless I fly them to have lunch with that banker once every three months or six months or at least every year if you’re really playing the long game. Um, so if you’re looking at building a network partnerships, you want to go deeper rather than wire.

So if you have, you know,, Edmonton Accounting Firm, 30 people and you meet with them once a quarter, once every three months, that’s great. If you have 100 and twenties that you meet with once a year, it’s probably not going to work out as well. Quality over quantity. That’s right. Yeah, that would be the main one. So you can see how that ties into the bi cause it’s set time, set place and that’s an easy way to create that referral network. So that will be one. So if you’re there, we’re going to get into this. The calendar, everybody wants say, Hey, can I go with Josh? Do you want to go from [inaudible]? No, it’s usually, well first of all, I probably didn’t ask. The focus has someone else to do that. But you don’t usually you got to be really discerning with your time as a business owner because if you take everyone, you know it is, it’s got to go on. This is strategic and I’m going to buy into it and I’m going to do it right and I’m going to spend some time on it. Right. It’s pretty much anything that you do with kind of a cursory level, it’s probably not good enough.

That would be my, my tip on that. Anything else? Any other myths out there? But they break anyone’s hearts. What’s when any of those, any of those myths? Yeah. Yeah. That customers will come

to us because it, it’s good. Yeah.

So product or service is good. Chris is like an expert. Decades I’ve experienced it and he knows exactly what to do with garage doors, but nobody knows his name. Nobody’s going to come. It doesn’t matter if your product isn’t good, if they don’t know who you are is kind of irrelevant. Right. Um, so just because you’re good people have to know that you’re good dude. All right. Cause if they don’t know what I mean, they’re just gonna think you don’t, you’re like everyone else. Um, or they’re not even going to know that you did. So it’s not enough to be good is you have to make sure that your ideal, I like the customers know that. You’re good.

Great. Any others from that section? Yeah, if you could define all just because I do several tasks in a day but I’m not doing multiple things at the same time or cause that’s, that’s the one that is done. That’s something I’m doing wrong.

So you are working so Mykola too. You are working on a proposal for a clinic. Okay. And the phone rings. I’m from your bank and they want to do they have a problem with the county had to come in and sign a card. I’m making something up, right? That’s not multicare. You set out to do one task. Did you stop midway to do another? You didn’t stop at a set time. You stopped at a time where someone didn’t grow up with you now in your mouth. Okay, so it’s that task switching. So how many of you on here have your notifications turned on on your phone? You honest? How many have notifications

on your phone?

Stop that. Stop it. You cannot be getting a buzz every time there’s a Facebook post or a tweet or a text message, um, you, you, you’re quite frankly, you’re just not as intelligent when you’re getting distracted like that. That’s what the science says about it. If you’re consistently being distracted, you’re not as intelligent and your competition is sitting there in a dark room working on one task and only one task and their website is going to be that much better than you because they had, they were all in on it. Their presentation is going to be better than yours because they were all in that they turned off and notification they took their phone, they threw it in the river, and they worked on that presentation alone for two days and they’re going to look. So that’s what I mean by multitasking. And when we know this and this, we’ll get into no this section. So why is the number 168 the most important number in business?

You got it hours in a week. This is the most important number. You can have $0 million in the bank. You get $1 million in the bank, everyone gets 168 hours. Those are the rules of the game. It’s like Nascar every weekend only have they’ll same engine, same weight. Everyone only gets 168 hours. So all of your competition do. Dealing with the same thing. This is the most important number is the most important commodity, not Cassius time. You can never get more time. Um, researchers estimate for the average person loses 28% of the day ineffective as a multitasking. Notice that it’s not on there. It takes up to 21 minutes to reach your peak level of intellectual performance once you’ve become distracted. So once you’ve checked, that’s text message. Now you are going to be dumb or for the next 21 minutes. Okay? If business is per keeps, you know, there are winners and losers. Nope. Participation Ribbons. That’s not how it works. You didn’t get the job, you don’t get the job. Uh, we know this like he treated simply, we don’t, we don’t want to know it because it’s cool because the same people who you know, worked with Facebook and Instagram are the same people. They hire the same consultants that casino higher to keep you hooked when you go in there,

maybe, maybe, maybe

it’s the same thing. It’s the same reaction, same dope. And we release. That’s what’s happening. Okay? We like it. We’re addicted to it. We don’t want this to be true, but we know it to be true. So if you had to have a surgery, Kevin, you’re not Tony Robbins, but you’re a surgeon today and you are focused surgeon. You walk into that room and you are focused

basic.

You are arranging your weekend plans, you’re a good surgeon, but you are there and you’ve got the scalpel in one hand and you’ve got your phone in the other. You’re wise. Who wants Kevin to operate on? Then show of hands, who wants Kevin to Vm? Now we know this is true. We’re just fighting it because we don’t want it to be true. We want to think that we can multitask and be better, but we know it’s true. If you walked into the cockpit and an airplane and he’s texting, are you going to be happy with Westjet?

We know it’s true but don’t want it to be true, but we know what’s true. We don’t need the stats. So Gary Keller bounded Keller Williams, largest real estate company in the world. We’re one of my favorite books. The one thing, and again these aren’t even unique, you can find this book called deep work is a whole host of books. You can find that has the same principles, but I think he just says it eloquently. Um, and think about real estate. These are the people, you know, you watch million dollar listing, they’re going from here to there. They’re getting distracted. They’re here. You know, they’re, they’re answering this text and that Instagram, both the guy who built the largest company in the world is all about focus work.

Okay?

So multitasking, he said, multitasks is merely the opportunity to screw up more than one thing at a time. Huh? Tackling tasks in the order we received them is behaving as it, the squeaky wheel immediately deserves degree. What as Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke Duly noted the things which are most important. Don’t always scream the loudest. Do not go into your business and check your emails and work one by one all day. You were just working on other people’s priorities and not your priorities. The things that screamed allowed us aren’t always the most important. Um, leaving some things undone isn’t necessarily a trade off her extraordinary results.

That’s hard. There’s only so many things are going to fit in that hundred 68 hours. Which ones are important? Which ones are you going to do? You can’t do all of them. You cannot do all of them. Edmonton Accounting Firm, if you are what you repeatedly do, then achievement isn’t an action you take, but a habit you forge into your life and then again, time on task over time beats talent every time. Just repeat that one. Oh, I should say it 10 times time on a task over time eventually beats talent every time. It doesn’t matter. You’re better than me. I might even have competitive, there was a couple of competitors who sign up for this. I don’t know if they’re here, recognize it, but time on it. I can tell you all the tricks in the book, but I’m up at five. I’m there seven and I’m not getting distracted.

My phone on there, I lose it sometimes. How can I lose my phone? I don’t know where it is. Hours of talking about various people that sometimes they get my cell phone number, they want to call me because they think they’re going to get the problem answer quicker. Just like the worst idea in the world. It just called the line as people that they’re answering 24, seven, they’re there. Um, so we’re going to get into, you know, how do you do this? This, this all sounds good. All sounds nice. Somebody Dory, and I don’t want to get into the bio Tony Robbins. So I gotta tell you how to do this in real life. So it is time blocking. So time blocking is exercise of blogging specific periods of future days to ensure that there’s time set aside to do everything that is necessary to run your business effectively.

It also ensures that you’re not wasting time on activities that are less effective in achieving your goals, time blocking. So you’re time blocking huge or dates. What am I going to do on teacher days? You might not have that appointment book. You don’t have the appointment. Look, you don’t have an estimate. You don’t have a console. You don’t have a team. Even to consult with, but you have that time when you are going to make that proposal, when you are going to do the proposal, when you’re going to present it, when you’re going to meet with your team, look blogging for future days. Um, and people think you go back to this, one of the myths, that disciplined schedule, oh that’s terrible. I’m going to be business owners that wanted to work whenever I want. An undisciplined schedule will mean you were working whenever you want all time.

Does that make sense? You’ll be working whenever you want all the time. Having a discipline schedule gives you the freedom to take time off from business knowing that there is time carved out for everything that needs to get done in a later date. So if you have a discipline schedule, when you are done, you are know when you were done. You go home, you do what you need to do, you come back the next thing. You’re not worried about it anymore. You don’t think he’d do I have to do this, do I have to do that? If I needed to do that, I blocked it into my calendar. This is a recurring event that’s going to happen. I need to check my financial statements. I need to do, Edmonton Accounting Firm, I, I need to do some cold calling. Okay. Uh, I need to have time to do estimates.

I don’t need to worry about it because I know what I’m doing that I know I’m doing it next Tuesday at three o’clock. My head, its ability on the street. Just like that’s how it works. You go home, you can actually have a chance of, you know, participating in family life and nothing on 24, seven. So what we’re going to review is a Kevin Hale Tower. So Kevin is a master electrician. Kevin wants to give them a bit of year. Your, your, your background. How many years have you been an electrician? I’ve been electrician 20 years and uh, in a very different situation that Chris is, I’m the only electrician and my family, I had nobody in my family or my close knit friends, uh, reasonable or started this, that were business owners. So I was very much alone and getting into what I was doing. Um, always loved the trade.

A lot of people love treats. People get into business because they have that one day where they’re fed up with their boss, they’ve had enough, and he said, you know what? I’m good at what I do. I can start a business and do this. I wasn’t in that situation at all in my career. I go evolves into a lot of management. It’s a roles and supervisory roles and I would always get feedback from my crews that you don’t want to have, even though this isn’t always the, I need a place to work. I come to work because of the way you run things and will you treat people. So that was a real inspiration for me to start to heal the power of solutions around today. Actually February is the start of year five. So it’s been a long journey. But I can tell you right now, I am the victim of a, or I was a victim of a, an a an or an organized schedule, not using time blocking nods, not utilizing the calendar.

So we’re going to look at Kevin’s schedule, Kevin’s timelines, everybody see that back in the back? And you actually, and you guys read that, let’s just get it. This is not a day, you know, per say this is not, um, you know, it’s not a scheduled date, but this is repeatable weekly schedule. That’s right. You go week. Yep. Well we say, yeah. Okay. So you knew that repeatable weekly schedule there. There’s a lot of uh, if you start reading the material, you’re going to see this idea over and over in slightly different forms. Some people will call it, you know, if it’s worth doing every day, it’s worth doing, do it everyday. That’s like grant card online. I don’t know if it gives you enough flexibility as a lot of other people who claimed the repeatable weekly schedule. Kevin use. Peter will need to be scheduled.

I use your repeatable monthly schedule. So I have four different weeks and I blocked them up accordingly cause I might not do the same thing. And we do that. I do on the week one. Edmonton Accounting Firm, but this is the idea. It’s the same thing. It’s repeating all the time. So Kevin, let’s, let’s, let’s walk through it first thing in the morning. Now you can pick up supplies. Yes. Anytime. Yes. Why? Why do you pick them up in the morning when we speak about this? Okay. I’ll, when I first started the business, I was a one man show, so no, no one was depending on me to have material ready for lucid. They could do the job they needed to do. So that was me. I picked up material whenever I needed it. And on the way to the job, let me start hiring employees and the business grew and my overhead group and all of a sudden we’d have jobs scheduled for that day and I realize I did not have material.

So I would run like an idiot to the supplier at seven in the morning and hopefully I could get to the job site for my crew by eight o’clock then I thought, well, you know what, I’ll just send the dice. So getting material, well that gets damn expensive because when you’ve got two guys in the van that you’re filling out and upwards of $150 an hour, can you afford some of the wholesalers? I can’t. And it was a very poor way of running my business if and when you’re the first guy at the supplier in the morning. I had some experience that I used to run a construction company. So you’re the first guy that supplier in the morning. Is your order done? It is, is we’re going to pick it up. You can send it in to at least a day or two before and uh, yeah, they kind of waiting for you.

You can be in their home in five minutes because that first half hour hour in the wholesalers, it’s a social event because you’ve got a lot of guys in there. The new employees that are coming, I don’t care. Well look it. They’ve got a box at tennies. They’ve got the coffee. We’re going to kick back and chatted up with the guys at the car and you’re chomping at the bit because you got a crew. We were going to be, because you forgot to give material. So first went in there ready to rock in the morning, pick it up, get out the door, get some money. Yeah. And you can be that guy. If you’re the guy who shows up at 10 30 they take you seriously. But when they have to get it done, well they look at you like you’re obviously in not that big of a hurry because at 10 30 in the morning, there’s not too many people at the wholesalers.

Everybody’s come and gone. So, so if you are a contractor, those supplier business, I’ve seen it all. I’ve done it, I’ve seen clients do it. It is first thing in the morning. You want to be that guy. You’re sitting out there in your truck right there at 7:00 AM when they open, they’re like, where’s my stuff? I call this. Yes. Just get ready. Just train them. This is be ready. The next time there’ll be an in and out of there and don’t be out here. Next thing. So another big thing. And your job is permits. Yes. So one of the jobs we do requirement electrical and there’s there’s time needed between the time that I applied for pregnant and want to actually receive it and then our industry you’re not supposed to begin working on once you have your electrical permit. How many times I would realize on the date of the job smokes, I didn’t pull the permit and I’m calling down to the CD and shoes and some guide on there.

Can you get this today? It’s 40 hours but you can get away with this once or twice but it gets old and they don’t have been a public sphere. So walking that time for me in the morning, we’re going to look ahead at the jobs we have come out and made sure. Yeah, we’ve already got an electrical permit applications and I received the ones for the job and starting it seemed like a no brainer. But again that was a, I was leading up to the last minute. What are your guys do when they’re waiting for a permit? Not much. Well, I mean, I’ll be honest with you, we would get started on this job and it wasn’t the right thing to do, but we don’t do that anymore. But that was, that was it. One thing I want to just add to this, especially with the supply, you know, getting material to the guys have the permits and that.

I didn’t realize how much this lack of organization was affecting my people until it came to a head and you don’t, you said something really, really struck me this morning was that progress without rich in this fiction friction happened to the point that I almost lost my key employee and it was completely, I looked in the mirror and this, Kevin, this is your recall, but it kicked me braid in the pants to get this rolling and it has been the sense that you need to see me. That’s a big like Kevin, just to hit on real good one there. People think that these regimented work is going to make their employees more dissatisfied, not at all the regimens that work made them more sentence. They litigate guys just people want to come to work the end of the day. They want to know what the expectation is. They want to have things prepared for them. Let them carry on with your day. So do you think you’re going to float around in Gubei Bio Circle? They’re probably gonna quit on you cause they’re gonna be so confused. I don’t know what you want and they’re not going to do, they’re not going to be like the productive. Um, if it’s clear expectations, now we have job site, but it’s, you’ve got to have them at a benefit of these job sites. Visits.

How many times? I have assumed from the phone call that I made that everything is going great on the job site. Oh yeah, we’ve got it covered. Don’t worry Kevin, you don’t need to come buy it. Okay, good. I can carry on to something else and then you’re the end of the job. I realized that I did make a visit to that site. Um, no. What, what we were supposed to do was not, was not done by the guys and a customer is not happy. There’s a rework and it doesn’t look good for the business. It doesn’t look good for me. The guys are upset and only would it take you, what’s me to stop in for half an hour physically take a look what they’re doing and take some time to walk through with my guys and make sure we’re on the same page. So, and the beauty of having two hours, sometimes we, we may have just one job going on in the morning. Well that allows me to spend more time there because if you’ve got one job, it’s probably a wonderful job worth, you know, three or four people on it requires more time on that site, that couple hours who would see me, these rework and a lot of money. One of the most common things that entrepreneurs will do is they’re always chasing the next deal and they won’t do things in their business because they’re chasing the next deal. So you could theoretically put one of these estimates up here. Okay. What could that end up costing you?

Yeah,

well, I mean, it’s going to cost me money. I’ll go to sleep, what I mentioned before. Yeah.

So we’re worse. Worse case scenario, you know, you know, what does it Miss Jocelyn look like for you? Or You thought it was running? Okay? You had it on your town. You Do, you should go see it, but it said it was okay and then you, you went and did something else instead. Some of the worst. What’s the worst thing you’d say?

Okay.

You know, we’ve had some doozies I’ve done, sorry, I’m drawing a blank your truck. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So then you move into, Edmonton Accounting Firm, you know, my experience is, you know, clients, they’ll go and do an estimate instead and then their guys with waste thousands of dollars a product. Um, you know, because of the plans look one way. But sometimes the verbal instructions mean are meaningful too, and they think they’re doing it the right way. So you’ve got to go and see him. All right. Um, so these are the things that, you know, you should be doing job sets. No. How much job site is, is that there’s some sort of quality control in any business you’re thinking of? This doesn’t apply to me on some electrician. There’s probably some sort of quality control in almost anything that you’re doing here. And you just, you know, it was back on a certain enough time for it.

And if you don’t do it, yeah, you might get it under, but you might lose the existing sale that you have because that’s what you now, now that you mentioned that, oh, sure. What we talked about the ad, I did have that happen last year where I had a, a customer contact. I mean, we’d been on the job for two days. Everything was going great. He was a little bit, it was not a town. So I, you know, I didn’t want him to run it back and forth and back and forth. And, uh, all of a sudden I get a phone call from this fellow on a Sunday and he’s like, can you come up and see me? And I’m like, Oh yeah, there’s a remaining. Okay, well I just need you to come home. And he wasn’t an old, very wealthy, retired rancher and go third and said, you know, your, your guys are, you know, they’re doing their works.

Okay. But, um, uh, I think I just like you to pack up and I’ll get someone else to finish the job. And it frightened me. I didn’t understand why, but I realized as a sort of tied to that because I wasn’t out there for that particular project, what he was expecting and what the guys were doing and that the rate at what they were doing was completely off from what he was expecting. All it would’ve taken was me to come out there and give them an update as to where it was at the time for m. And, a, that wouldn’t have happened. But I had to do a lot of damage control the cell bishop job because we could’ve walked away from it. He was willing to pay what we had done, but the damage on the reputation of my business and you know, that would’ve really hurt my feelings if you forensically on it.

I mean, it was devastating. So, uh, yeah, that was a real learning experience right there. Okay. I can, I need to be first. So then you have time blocked off to return people’s calls, 11 to noon. So not at lunch. The way you can get people to return phone calls before they go to lunch and some people won’t answer the phone. That’s it. Yeah. And, and, and I will forever was answering the phone as soon as it ran, email came in, I’d put my truck over. Oh yeah. Yeah. And the distraction, that time that’s wasted when I could’ve just batched that group of emails and phone calls, Gosh. And spent that time doing it. And then now that, now that I am, it’s, it’s uh, it’s so much more efficient. So then you got the new one block out with lunch and marketing. You don’t, a lot of times I wouldn’t take lunch. I didn’t have time to eat. I’m just cruising around. Maybe I could have something on the way McDonald’s says help.

Right. And, uh, walking out that hour, I can sit down in my office and I can turn on my computer. And it’s quite a, if I want to do work on a marketing campaign, but we need to make some changes to the website and we want to do some social media posts, can I have my lunch, shut the door, clear my head and actually work on that because that’s so important. Then the marketing, and this is one heck of a lot of business owners make this mistake. When they’re busy, they do no marketing when they don’t have work, they’re doing marketing like crazy and you consistently go through these blood, you know these, these peaks and valleys. And so Kevin, if, if your work comes in evenly, you know, can you get more done? Oh, absolutely. If you only have so many guys get right. So just because you have all the projects come in one week, you don’t have twice the staff, like you’ll never be at that, that peak productivity.

So the tendency is, I’m busy. I’m going to stop by marketing. You don’t have to continue on with your marketing initiatives or else you’re going to run into that valley and it’s coming and ultimately you’re going to get a lot less done during the year because now you don’t have the same resources the resources are doing to push off the work. You’ll probably find that they take a while to scale up. So that’s something like that. Side Ra, you need to have that rock in there. You need to have time set aside to do some marketing initiatives. It has to happen. The worst feeling I could tell you guys is when you have employees and your soul busy and Barry in the work that’s in front of you and you get finished and then you realize, holy smokes, I don’t have enough work for my four or five guys for next week.

Who am I going to ask? Who wants to take a couple of days off? Maybe a out, you’ll have that person that doesn’t mind. We’ve all been put food on the tables and it’s very disheartening. So then you have your estimate scheduled up so you have these estimates. Yup. So if a client calls you and say, Hey Kevin, can you come home and take a look at this? How easy is it for you to answer them now? Oh, now it’s so easy. I was, I was, I was the one that would immediately just, I was like, Squirrel, Whoa, give me an announcement. It’s more often asked me. Yeah, you bet. And I would go and do it and forget about everything else because let me get the job right. But I was doing estimates, everybody all over the date. Now, the beauty of this is, this is, Edmonton Accounting Firm, I mean, I, I’m the type of guy, draw me a picture and I’ll understand what you’re talking about.

So this picture is ingrained in my mind. So I want to get the phone call. I know that, okay, I’m blocked in Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for estimates. Um, I’m willing to make some flexibility into the evenings, but you don’t want to, uh, for the most part, those are the days. So you let the customer know this is one of, I’m available. I, I had very few people that have said absolutely no, none of your time work. I’m going to call the next guy. So you got your administration time for your business card belt. So what, what happened if you didn’t have these carbs up? I’ll tell you what happens. I have learned to live so well on three hours of sleep. Oh my gosh. Ask by customers for years past. Why are they getting a quote at two 30 in the morning? Cause I emailed them on, they’re like, well it must’ve been some, it’s weird.

I’ve got it so late. Yeah, well that’s actually when I did it. So it’s not blocking in that admin time. Actually run work on the business was killing me and now yeah, set aside three hours a couple of days a week. It’s amazing what you can get done uninterrupted in that time. Then you have returned calls at the end, you got another blind. I did that because you know, calls come in all day and I try not to let it go 24 hours. But I mean, if we can do some followup calls at the end of the day, plus you can set the tone for the next couple of days by being able to do that. And one thing Josh, I did put in some time for lunch with a client.

You got the, he’s got networking. So this goes, so he has time blocked off for his networking. We had a question on networking to networks. You can be a time suck, really cancel that. Maybe the other part is you got to go deeper in them and you also can’t let it be a time stuff. So you’re going to have a specific time blocked out where that’s actually available to do it. And if you can justify it in your calendar now you’ve, you feel it’s there. So Kevin Judicious with this because this can easily be all the time, right? This is a tower. I love this. I know that there to go with it there. Well I tried to make my Friday my networking, meet with a client, do some sales calls. That’s the end of the week. I love Fridays. Um, it doesn’t mean that Saturdays I’ve got my kid’s soccer game for example, on Saturday there’s a lot more going on, right?

But I tried to block this and do a five day, but you’re right, we weren’t successful. So yeah, go ahead. Like that sales call like that, that is huge. Here’s the, what a lot of business owners get. They get a, uh, I’m going to an estimate or a project or proposal or whatever you’re going to do and it’s, and I was like, oh great. Um, can I call you at Tuesday at one o’clock? And you got an assessment? It can I call you up? You want to call me back at Wednesday at three o’clock and you go in the accident and can you call me back at Monday night? You are not going to make those phone calls, not when you get busy. You might think you can do it when you first start that that is possible. But you can do this and you can knock off, you know, in a different construction field.

You could knock off 20 estimates in a week and sit there on Friday, call one call to call three Oh four oh five [inaudible] six and you can just be doing that. But if you promise all of these people that you’re going to call them all that, I said, there’s big time. If you something, you’re gonna call them here, you’re not visiting the job site, right? Um, if you promised them you’re doing it here, you’re not doing your marketing right. That can be a bit of a time suck too. And you’re, you’re gonna lose a job because you have to be, you just have to take that trade off, right? So you have to take that, okay, I can’t do these follow up calls all the time, but you can do so many more if you do them in a block. So that’s kind of what you have to get that one power block.

And you can call up all of your pending contracts, all of your, your leads and all the people didn’t call you back back. Just knock them all up. You can probably eat, how many of you got two hours. Then on that one, oh three two and a half, two and a half, you can make 40 calls. Well and not only that, it’s also there be as the deed that to in that time where I want to stop in and do some prospecting from your client and if on the way to go that’s fine for that as well. So that’s an absolute power move and that, you know, it’s not just an electrician, no matter what business you’re in, if you have any sort of pending contracts or proposals out to people or leads that you go to follow up with, if you can block them at once and hit them all at once, you know, you can now call them every week of the year for 52 weeks a whereas you’re trying to schedule that time to call each individual one back to us and enormous undertaking and not, not all that efficient.

Right. So that was kinda blues one gained 10 with that. Um, it’s kind of the way to go. Anyway. Any other wisdom on this? The scallion switch over to, well, let me just see. One thing, you know I used to work off a to do, I would make it to do list in the morning and it’s very, it’s ironic how old when you make a to do list for the day, your brain says, oh, you don’t need to do this. Doesn’t work that way. Wait to do less work than absolute failure because if I put 10 things on them but didn’t actually allocate any time before it, like maybe get three things done. So what I’ve really learned is this calendar is a way to take your, to do list. You put it against your calendar and now you create a time walking in

real productive time to to not be staying spot. Yup. Cool.

Okay. We’ll switch over. I’m construction or an accountant. You’re going to see how similar my calendar.

Okay.

Slightly different here. What’s that? You want me to hang up here? I know that’s right. Yeah. So I have on Mondays and Wednesdays I have that time to work on three businesses that I work on. So I work on scrolling associates and I’m working on the business in that time. So I’m creating checklists, creating templates, creating content. Um, that’s what I’m doing on, on Mondays and Wednesdays I’m making the business better. Okay, I can go put out a fire, but chances are that fire happened because my systems aren’t as good as they should be. I don’t have enough training available for one of my staffs to uh, respond to that query themselves. And I can go deal with that on Monday or I can block that out, but I can get better at it. But the client would never have that issue in the first place where they did have the issue of the staff would be trained to do that.

So I have those blocked out on Mondays and Wednesdays and all only interrupted or an outsource accounting initial meetings. So we have in our business have 15 ounce sorts of condoms, 15 outsource clients who are functioning as their accounting department and their CFO. Um, these are, we only have 15 of them, most of them. Some of them been with us for the entire seven years been open. So, um, you know, it doesn’t happen that often. So, uh, but that’s when we have, I work on the bookkeeping brand on Tuesdays and again, I’m working on the business. Um, and then I worked on the marketing graph on Thursdays. That’s what I do in the morning and I’m uninterrupted in the morning, um, to the point where you know, that those distractions mattered. You know, as your team gets bigger, we have a bigger team. We have, uh, uh, uh, kind of, uh, office silence, uh, policy in the mornings.

If you talk to someone in the mortgage, you owe them $1, you’re interrupting them. Like literally you’d have to have the Maloney or they’ll just walk away and not talk to you. Um, so, uh, but that’s because we need time to do that soak as voluntary work. We need that time to be a creator in the morning and the manager in the afternoon type of thing. Um, then you’re more likely just the way the human brain is wired, you know, that work is harder to do it first. Um, so that’s how I, I’ve logged that. Then on Mondays we have a staff meeting and then we deal with any HR issues. So HR would be open to have any concerns on staff as well as, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re trying to build them up, trying to coach them up, make sure they’re on the right career path. So you do that first hour is a team meeting. Kevin had it as well and I missed it on his, and we, we both have that. We have that weekly team meeting. So, and that might be a thing we were like, how many of you been in a business and they have monthly staff meetings?

Um, can you change the culture of an organization would be people once a month, you know, just can’t do it. Monthly is the threshold to maintain it. It’s like the minimum threshold to make Canada, and I’ve been guilty of it. When I first started my business, I thought, well, we, we, we don’t understand that. Why, why do we need to meet every, uh, you know, uh, even every month I couldn’t understand. You have to remember that most entrepreneurs are wired different than most employees, entrepreneurs or are task oriented. They’ll, they’ll work on a task for a long period of time and employees need a little more direction. They need to hear, you know, what’s important to note that they’re actually doing it according to what you want. For Real. They lose motivation too. So, uh, weekly, if you’re trying to make any improvements in your staff and you’re trying to build up your team, you need that rock in your calendar.

It just has to be there. And then I have two client meetings. Oh, I actually have a, an open or pm on Monday at five. It’s unusual. So normally I’m like two or three weeks booked out on my appointments. Um, so at three and five, those are the times I meet with clients and I strategically meet with them in the afternoon. Um, and the reason why I meet with them in the afternoon is because the meetings actually required the least amount of intellectual capacity, believe it or not. So I had to been done the work before I got to the meeting. That was the hard part. Really. Now I just have to explain what we did. So if I do the meetings in the morning, now I’m exhausted by meetings and now I got to do the hardest part of my day after. So if you have something hard, put that in the morning and whatever is the hardest thing you have to do, put that in the morning.

Okay, now I have a three o’clock or five o’clock appointment. If a client calls up our for and asked for a 4:00 PM meeting is they get it. Okay. Because if I give them a 4:00 PM meeting, who can understand what happens in this calendar and all those, they get two blocks. That means I set a meeting with one person and I’m a instead of B, you have to, I’m going to meet with one. And some people say it doesn’t work. I’ll lose someone because it doesn’t work. Um, they’re only get three or five. So, um, but if I gave him that, you know, two weeks out the admin or I’m booking two weeks out here, I gave him that four o’clock slot, now I’m only going to have one bullet in the chamber instead of two. Right. Or as I’m using those for new clients or existing clients. So again, it’s, it’s a little more highly regimented. Like, yeah. Um, I also am meeting with my managers at 1:00 PM

and

this sometimes actually might be the hardest part of my day really. But we do it at 1:00 PM, um, because they are bringing me all the questions that they couldn’t solve them. They’re really smart. So if they’re bringing it to me, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s usually kind of a doozy, but we deal with those at 1:00 PM. Uh, and we do that on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. So that gives enough time that I can answer the higher level queries. Then on Fridays, you know, I have time to cut out for networking to, um, no, I’m in the same networking group that, uh, Chris and Kevin Matt are too. Um, how available am I for networking outside of Fridays? That’d be nice. I’d like to think of it. It’s not gonna happen. Um,

man, on Saturdays I’m taking appointments, eight, ten one, three and Fridays I have a one o’clock appointment to cause the three, the three managers meetings, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are usually enough to rectify any of the, the burning fires or the problems that you know, made it a little bit of a consult on. So it’s extremely, extremely intentional that way where I’ve laid out my day, not that just I have enough time, but I’m doing the things, you know, in the, in the, in an order that makes sense, in very intentional about it. So I have a time lock on there, not just, you know, they have a time block on there, but it’s the time block actually makes sense. So like for example, if I met with the managers after the client meetings, can anybody see the obvious disadvantage of that?

So pretend that I’ve got a client meeting, I got to present a financial plan or a business behind it, someone at three o’clock or five o’clock. But I don’t have a chance to meet with a mentor until after the meeting. Here’s what you’ve done there. You gotta be, it gives me one more opportunity to meet with them. So you’re being very intentional about that. Now this is where you, you can’t blow off these meetings with yourself. You know, they’re my staff. Like I said, yeah, I’m, uh, I’m taking the afternoon off, but I won’t be ready. Right. And they don’t know when they can get ahold of me either. So if you think that you’re operating your business so that you can work whenever you want camp, you would have to be regimen. Now, you could eventually pare down your calendar. You can 100%. I compare it on my calendar now, but I want to grow three different brands, the different, uh, expectations of what I want to accomplish. Um, but you just can’t do that. I just can’t not be ready for these meetings. Okay. And you can kind of see as your team gets bigger, you know, I don’t have the flexibility to blow that off. Right. I have the flexibility to change it. Don’t get me wrong, you can set up the schedule so it works for you, but you don’t have the flexibility to change it on a whim, especially when you have team. Does that point make sense to everybody?

Okay.

Um, the reason why I go monthly is there some things that I’ll do a little bit different. Like on the third week of every month I have a standing meetings. You know, these are longterm clients that I meet with all the time. So I have my block set up into, you know, what happens on week one, week two, week three, week four if you want to do one week, like what Kevin does it cause the same thing over again, just sending like one weekend, one calendar we, but you need those blocks and they occur. Kevin, you’re using Google calendar? Yeah, mine just sitting in icon or it pulls it in. So I see on my phone. So when saw belt, do I have that? I know what blocks are available, you know, I’m saying okay. We were looking for a meeting. Okay Great. We’re looking for. I got a meeting time available on February 22nd at 1:00 PM okay. Can’t do that. How about February 22nd at 3:00 PM yeah. And they said, I can’t do that. How about can you do to, nope. Can I do to do, to do that? Um, but I can do Saturday, Saturday at 10 course or what? I don’t understand what you have like four things in one. Unbelievable.

Oh, these are different people. Oh, just look at the blue as lose me. I’m just mentally aware of what people are doing about it that loses the bet. That’s a little confusing. The Justin’s been itself up into four different people. I just had this learn to ability to ignore any other cloth of blue and I’m almost, the kind of the joke is if you ever want me to do something, just get my calendar and I’ll just do it. Because if it appears they’re all literally just do that. That’s what I’m going to do today. I’m going to do whatever this calendar says and that’s it. It’s a question like what is the purpose of the other colors? Just like, yeah, I know if I’m very lucky, team members are doing, oh, I see. Okay. That time. Military available initials. Joshua, your your team, right? Yeah. GPS. That’s me. Yeah. So I’m only responsible for the stuff in the blue there,

up to blue.

It doesn’t really matter what system you use that’s not gonna make or break it. You could use Google again, is I calendar and you’ve got an exchange server that’s not going to make or break the difference. What makes or breaks the difference that you’ve been intentional about your time blocks and you laid them out. So in terms of laying them out or to have a little test right now, I don’t know if this is done.

Yeah,

this is December 18th, 2019

I have all my slots are booked out and some of my key clients, the one that they’re my outsource five, they’re already on my calendar for December. Let’s say. It just happens the third week of every month we meet. When you’ve reviewed the numbers, that’s what we’re going to do. Um, we probably have to go into 20, 20 where it’s no longer blocked unless it’s a repeating event. So I’ve actually paid someone to go through and populate everything. Something that you have for PD events that don’t work so well depending on what calendar systems usually with. That’s what you have to have. You want to run your business now, you just need to pick it. You’re not going to know what the best outcome is when you first start this. Okay. You just need to pick it, try it. And if it doesn’t work you with Justin, I very rarely adjust this now. Like I, it’s little tiny increments. Um, but for you, you might rip it up after one week and start again. That’s okay. That’s what’s going to happen. You’re just going to change a less and less over time because you’re going to figure out what worked, what didn’t work and you know, how should I be?

Yeah. I want to call it on this opinion cause I try regimen. But what happens is, and this happens to me frequently, I had my Comstock cough. I’m already on a task. I could not the initiative within the two hour slot, but I know that I need in an hour and then it’s finished and it’s completed. So I do give myself that flexibility. What do you think of that? And a slippery slope. So then if you say it’s better to then cut that out, come back next day for another slot.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s how you don’t get works now. And once you get your, is it take a while to get the recipe and now you’ve got the recipe and it works. I’ve got enough a, and then you literally go home every night and knowing that none, I don’t to worry about anything else, but everything else seemed to worry about that. It’s on the calendar. Perfection is hard. Again, going back that the fashion, like if you’re, if you’re deviating from your calendar once or twice a week, okay. If you’re dealing from your calendar once a twice a day, it’s the wrong calendar that you just kind of that litmus test, right? If you go for 100% you know, there’ll be some times we would probably miss out on something. You still gonna use a little bit of a professional judgment in there, but if you’re deviating from your calendar once a twice a day, you just have the wrong calendar. You need to rework it.

Threshold Alex blocks of time. But let’s say you’re not getting calls from Tony that you deal with the time that’s available at that time. Now I do more marketing content, do more content. So there’s never a point where you just like kicking your feet up.

Yeah, I’ll call her answer. I still have a half hour call. Answer time.

How about what

first reason why businesses fail? Don’t generate enough customers. Yeah. So you probably have a marketing initiative that you can work on. You. You have a goal, you’re going to put up two pieces of content a week. Okay. You don’t have enough sales calls. You did. People didn’t look those estimates. Hello? Or, yeah, that’s probably what you’re going to use in place of that didn’t have to work for you. Okay. Uh, break time again. Again, if you have any more questions on this, right. I’m on the board. We’ll, we’ll ask her all the way back.