#20: How To Make More Money In Less Time (A Systematic Framework) w/ Chuck Blakeman

Welcome to episode number 20 of The Growth Booth.

We are building on a series of episodes that we've been doing over the past few weeks, which are related to one another.

We started talking about outsourcing a few weeks ago and I introduced you to freedom mapping, which is something that I learnt from Chuck. Last week on the last episode, we had Brian P. Moran from 12-Week Year, so more planning, more productivity and making sure your goals are aligned. Chuck has written a book called Making Money is Killing Your Business, which is one of my favorite books. I've read it multiple times. I would recommend everyone goes and check that out.

I think it builds nicely on a lot of the concepts that we've been talking about over the past few weeks. I do know Chuck personally. He's been a VIP speaker at a couple of events that we've held in person and virtually. He's a business mentor. He's built multiple businesses on multiple continents all around the world. He's a speaker. He's a columnist in different publications, like Inc magazine. He's an entrepreneur and he's a cyclist as well.

One of the things I learned about Chuck shortly after we met was that he had just been cycling all around New Zealand, which is obviously where I'm from. I found that pretty interesting. 

AIDAN

Chuck, thank you so much for blocking aside a little bit of time to be with us here today. 

CHUCK

Oh, good to be with you.

AIDAN

I think one of the topics that I want to dive into, and I think it's something that many people can relate to, is this idea of the treadmill and people start building a business because they think it's going to give them freedom, and they end up sort of shackled to this treadmill and it's almost like they've built themselves a job.

You've got some really interesting ideas around this and you talk about the tyranny of the urgent versus the priority of the important. I thought we could dive into that a little bit more and we could talk about that.

CHUCK

Yeah. We talk about the seven stages of business ownership, not the seven stages of business. I really don't care about your business. I care about you and how your business is impacting you. Too often we make the assumption, the leading you gave there was that people end up hostages to their businesses.

How did that happen? What happened to me in my first five or six businesses? The reason it happens is because we just assume if we build a good business, something good will happen to me, and it's ludicrous. You get what you intend, not what you hope for. We say this all the time, and what we do is we intend to build a business and we get one and we hope it will all work out for us, and it doesn't. And we need to turn that around.

We need to intend to get a life and use our business to build whatever it is we want as a life so that we can look at this when we're done and say this was a life well lived.

AIDAN

One of the graphs that really stands out from your book for me, is on the y-axis, I guess you've got money, and on the x-axis you've got time, and people start building a business and they're thinking, "I'm going to be making more and more money each year," and they've got this line going up, but something really interesting that you've got in there as well as a graph where as each year goes by, you need to invest less and less time in your business.

I think that's a wake-up call for a lot of entrepreneurs. It's not just about making more money. It's about having more time.

CHUCK

Yeah, it absolutely is a wakeup call, because again, we assume that if we build a great business at some point, magically, we'll have more time. It'll just happen.

It's got to, because Richard Branson lives on an island. So that'll happen to me as well. Well, it doesn't, and Richard Branson lives on an island is very intentional about making sure that he got both time and money.

The American dream, I don't know what the New Zealand dream is, but the American dream is to build a profitable business. That's what we would call a stage four business. Stage four business is not successful. It's stable, but it's the American dream. And we get there, we realize there's something lacking here. What's lacking is I'm a freaking hostage in my own business. 

I just built myself a cage. I built 13 businesses in nine industries on four continents or something like that. My first five or six businesses, every single time I build a business, I became a hostage to it. The faster the business went, the faster I went. I still remember our fulfillment business back before, $2 million to $9 million. We started with five people. I was working 60 hours a week, and three years later we were at $9 million. We had 120 people, and I was still working at 60 hours a week. I thought, how in the world did this happen? We have so many more people.

Why didn't things get distributed off of my plate? It's because I intended to grow a business. I did not intend to intended to make money, and we made bucket loads of money and we grew a business. But what if you intended to do both? That's in my next business is where I resolved, "I don't know how I'm going to do this, but in this next business, I'm going to require that this business produce both time and money so that the more money I make, the less time I spent." That was a radical departure and a radical thought, and it happened in the first try.

AIDAN

In your work that you've done around the different stages of the business, the first four stages are really interesting. That's where someone who was running that business is still very much on the treadmill and it might be exhilarating when you start off with a start-up. That's what you talk about, stage number 1, then you get into the survival mode of stage number 2, then you sort of get into this breakeven mode, stage number 3. That stability is stage number four, but you're still on the treadmill. So you're making money, but you're still on the treadmill, and then something magical happens when you get to stage 5, which is still not finished, and maybe finished for some people, but then you're getting time and money coming in.

I guess that's where you could say you are off the treadmill at that point. Do you think that stage 5 is where most people should sort of aim to be?

CHUCK

It's a personal preference. The more craft-oriented your business is, Like my sister was a violist in the San Francisco Symphony, or a painter or an artist of some sort or writer, They're going to tend to go for stage five. I would like to go for stage kind of a stage six, seven business, five, six, seven. I want to be the craftsman in stage five. I want a lot of business running without me.

I want some of the business where I just get reports that's me. I have a business stronger across five, six and seven. I would guess that maybe one out of 25% of business owners ever get to stage five. it's not because stage five, again, is where you're getting both time and money from the business. Stage four is where you're just getting money. You can be a multi-bazillionaire and be in stage four. I would say probably 5% of businesses, business owners, get to stage five. It's not because getting to stage five is for smart people or for lucky people. It's simply for people who change their intention.

When you change your intention from "I'm going to make money" to "I'm going to build a business that makes money," that one simple change begins the journey of you getting to stage five, where you now have a business that the bigger it grows, the more time and money you get. It multiplies both because you simply intended for it to do that.

AIDAN

Yeah, a couple of the tools that I've learned from you around this freedom mapping and understanding this concept of HBUT, highest and best use of time. Maybe you could explain to someone who's listening to this a little bit about what freedom mapping is, and how that can be a useful tool in moving from a stage 4 where you're making money, but you're investing all of your time, to a stage 5, where all of a sudden you've got money and time freedom.

CHUCK

We use the traditional model of process mapping, which everybody's kind of familiar with. It's a linear model of "here's the beginning of the process, here's the middle and the end of the process."

We use that to map your business here from basically your customers experience of your business. What's the first interaction they have with you? It might be advertising, marketing, and then they connect with you, and then you connect with them, and then you talk about money, and then you come up with a proposal, and then you make them a chair. You deliver the chair, you get some money, and you put them in your customer satisfaction process.

That's a map of your business, generically in 10 seconds. Build that map of your business what it looks like today, and then ask yourself this question, "which ones of these steps am I responsible for now? Which ones do I do?" Because that's actually not the place where you get drained as much. You get drained by decision making.

"Which ones of these, if I'm not lording over them, start to fade away or disassemble because I'm not paying attention to them?"

Put the color you hate the most in those boxes because you want to get yourself out of those boxes. What you'll find is that you have 20 steps in your map. You're going to have 17 of them that you're responsible for. That's what woke me up in this fulfillment business.

I gave away a lot of my tasks. I delegated no responsibilities. When you delegate tasks, people feel used. When you delegate responsibilities, they take ownership and you begin to get off the treadmill.

That's part of the process. There's two questions. We call it the business owners’ game to get you to the highest and best use of your time. I memorized these two questions, and it changed my life. The objective of the business owner's game is to make more money in less time. The two questions are very simply, question number one, "Whatever I'm doing right now, driving, mowing the lawn, doing a contract, building a chair, whatever I'm doing, I ask myself, is this the highest and best use of my time? Does this energize me?" Is there other people who could do this as well, or better, is there nobody else who could do this? That might be on me for now, but let's figure out. What is it? 

What you'll find is when you start this game, you'll find out that 90% of the time you're going to say, "Yeah, this is not the highest and best use of my time, but I'm doing it somehow. I got trapped into this." 

You go to question number two, and question number two is "If this is not the highest and best use of my time, then how do I do it for the last time?" You become manic about getting the answer to that question. One of the ways that you will get the answer is to map your processes, map your activities, and ask yourself, who else could I train? What software could I get to do this? How do I do this for the last time?

AIDAN

Yeah, I think what I've been able to do or have learned how to do in my business is put a manager in place in a key part of the business so I can delegate that responsibility, but then also make sure that they are mapping out the processes because that sort of futureproofs it at that point.

Then I can really choose, for me, personally, I can sort of choose more about what I want to do and what I don't want to be involved with. I almost think about, going back to the stages that you mentioned, would you say that a stage seven business is almost like you're an investor at that point?

CHUCK

Stage seven business is one that you really don't have any ongoing, regular responsibilities in. We call that succession stage. Seven is the succession stage, but that doesn't mean that you sell it. That's what most people think about succession is that I sell. Two reasons I sell a business.

One is you're getting overwhelmed by competition or time or technology is moving ahead, and you just need to sell this before the whole thing falls apart or gets eaten. The second reason, the most common reason people sell a business is because they're tired. And the reason they're tired is because they build a business that did not serve them.

What if you built a business that actually served you where you were like an investor and this thing you continue to get money off this?

My friend Lyric built a staging business in Washington, DC, for five years, she made $30,000 a year on $180,000 business, and then she started to map her way to freedom. Now it's the largest staging business in Washington, DC, $4 million, and she doesn't work in it. She takes them $150,000 a year because she owns it. That's a stage seven succession business. Why would you ever sell that?

Don't get rid of the asset, keep the asset and continue to get the income.

AIDAN

Yeah. I think a way that I've sort of looked at this for a few years now is, and I'll give you an example, we have a couple of e-commerce brands that are sold both online and offline in tens of thousands of shops.

We've got managers in place. We've got a CEO, a chief operations officer as well. I have become almost like a director, which is something I really enjoy. I beam in once a month for the monthly sort of board meeting, like going to have a look at how things are going and I chime in with my two cents and hopefully that's useful, but maybe it's just an annoyance, but I treat that more almost like an investment at this point because I'm not on the ground in the trenches doing a lot of the work.

For me, that's a really nice place to be. It's almost like an end game because I've got this business that keeps ticking over making great money. I've also got an asset that I could sell if I want to, but I don't have to be in the trenches actually doing a lot of the heavy lifting, so it gives me that time freedom and the money and I'm certainly off the treadmill there.

CHUCK

In stage seven, you get the opportunity to do what we call Seagull management. Seagull management is the seagull flies in lands, squats a lot, craps all over the place and flies back out and leaves somebody else.

AIDAN

That sounds like exactly what I do. Yeah, it's a lot of fun though, and it really is a great place to be.

By the way, I would recommend that people hit over to chuckblakeman.com and check out his resources there and there's contact information. Go to Amazon and grab the book. I've got Chuck's book in multiple formats. I've actually got the audiobook which I've been listening to it, 2x speed, and I'm pretty proud of myself for that.

I've got the Kindle book as well, and I've got a hardcover book. I really love this book. It's definitely not just a self-help. For me, it's one that I've actually taken a lot of good content from.

Another concept that I wanted to get to here was this idea of being a producer, and when you move away from being a producer in your business, I guess that's also when you're handing off more of the responsibility. Have I articulated that correctly there, Chuck?

CHUCK

When you move away from being a producer, when you're a producer, you are making the chairs. And if you're not there, chairs don't get made. Ancillary step there is you become one of the four producers. You're one of four dentists, so that when you leave, other people can kind of pick up for you.

But then you get to the point where you're now a leader of producers. And in stage six, you're a leader of producers where you're no longer making the chairs unless you want to. You get to choose to, but you don't have to. 

AIDAN

If someone's got an e-commerce website where they sell physical products online, or maybe they've got an affiliate marketing website and they're managing the operations of that day-to-day, that would put them in that producer role?

CHUCK

Yeah, I would say that they're very close to being the producer. The question, all they have to ask themselves is, how long could I be away with and this thing would be fine without me? We went to New Zealand for a month and the business worked without us. We checked in twice, once to show them we were drinking a Mimosa and the other one to look at the bank account to make sure that it was actually growing. It was better off when we got back than when we left. If you can't do that, you're a producer.

AIDAN

Yeah, that's actually similar to a sort of a definition that I've given myself or I've used a lot over the years around wealth is that when you're truly wealthy, you can step away. You don't need to work and you're not going to run out of money. You've got a really interesting equation for wealth or freedom as well, where you're combining multiple variables, one being time, one being money, one being energy. Could you share with our listeners what that equates, how that sort of equation works?

CHUCK

Sure, yeah.

I have a friend in California. When I first met him, he boasted he was wealthy. We talked a couple of times, maybe for a couple of hours, and he says, "I'm wealthy." I said, "No, you're just rich." And he said, "What do you mean, man? I got this $10 million house and $20 million in the bank and yada, yada."

"Yeah, you're just rich."

"Well, what do you mean?"

"Well, you're not wealthy because you don't have time. See, I'm going to Tuscany for a month and you talked about it and you basically called me an SOB because you couldn't do that. You're not wealthy. I'm wealthy because I have time and I have money and I have energy and we have to have all three in order to live a significant life."

The equation of T plus M plus E equals S. Time plus Money plus Energy equals a Significant Life. If you're missing any one of those three, you're going to have trouble living a significant life. That's the goal is to shoot for those three: time and money is something your business will either take from you or give to you, and energy is something you have to take and grapple for for yourself by eating well and exercising well and living well in your business as well.

Those are the three things. The problem is when you're young, you got time and energy and you got no money. When you're middle aged, you got a lot of money and a lot of energy and you got no time. When you get to be old, you got all the energy or all the money and all the time and you got no energy to do anything about it. Get all three of those when you can.

AIDAN

Yeah, something I've always thought about with regards to freedom is having this geographic freedom, time freedom, and financial freedom, but I think I've been missing the energy component and I've just kind of taken it for granted. That could be because I'm fortunate to be in good health in my life. But I think it's a really important one because to your point, what is the point in having money and time if you don't have any energy to be able to enjoy it? 

I think online business is truly remarkable in this search for freedom because it can give you that geographic freedom in most cases. You can sort of work from anywhere. You can use the likes of your process mapping, your freedom mapping, and figuring out what is the highest and best use of your time to sort of engineer that time freedom into what you're doing? Also by the very nature of being a web business, many web businesses are very, very, very scalable, so they can give you that money, financial side of it as well. I really liked the way you sort of mapped out that freedom or significance there as being that combination of time, money and energy. 

One of the things that I'm sure you've come up against or seen often in your mentoring and working with different clients, some people might get to the point where they are just completely overwhelmed. They've got so much, so many things happening. They've got like this mind clutter and when someone's in that situation and they realize that they're well and truly shackled to the treadmill, what is the first thing that they can do to unshackle themselves and to free up some bandwidth to be able to start working through this process?

CHUCK

Maybe a little bit of an unexpected answer: Put all of that stuff aside. Don't deal with any of it first. The first thing you need to do is Steven Covey, "Start with the end in mind." What are you doing this for? What do you want out of this at the end of this year? In five years, ten years of your life, what's your lifetime goals? We can get into a whole different conversation of those.

But he who aims at nothing hits it every time. One of the reasons you possibly are on the treadmill is because you don't have anywhere to go. I know it sounds stupid, but it's really true. My friend in California, he was busier than any I mean, heroically busy, working 70 hours a week. It's because he had no idea where he was going. 

You can't solve that until you know where you're going. Start with that in mind. Get a clear picture. Write down here's what my life looks like 15 years from now, 20 years or four years from now, and here's how much time, money and energy I have. Here's the significant life I'm living with those tools.

Then you back into, "Okay, what's the first one of these 47 things or 200 things on my plate that I can begin to give to somebody else that will help me begin to move in that direction?" and you eat the elephant one bite at a time based on getting to that place.

AIDAN

I think that's great. I think one thing that I've done in the past and it's a little bit cyclical when you get into the trenches, and especially I think it's the entrepreneurial spirit, is that you tend, at least in my case, to do more and more and more.

"Oh, yeah, I can do that. I would love to do another project." "Oh, that sounds exciting. I'll do that." But if you're not careful, you can slip into that trap of all of a sudden doing too much. When I've slipped into that trap, something that's helped me get out of it is to make a task inventory where I basically note down everything I'm doing throughout the day and how long I'm doing it for, and I might have three columns.

The first column might be, "Okay from 8:45 until 9 a.m. in the morning. I was checking some statistics. From 9 a.m. in the morning until 9:45, I was doing something else," itemized what those tasks are, how long it took me, and in the third column, I'll put whether or not I'm the only person that could actually do that, or if someone else could do it. Then that gives me a really good visual representation of where I'm spending my time.

One of the best things I've done, one of the best hires I've had in the past couple of years is hiring a personal assistant who can do many of those types of tasks that I was just shouldering myself and doing myself. I think your task inventory is a really interesting starting point as well.

CHUCK

I would recommend that everybody do that. That's part of what we recommend when we teach people the business owners game is have those columns, yes or no. Is this the highest and best use of my time? Yes. No. Then what can I do about it as a third column and do that for a week and then six months later, do it again for another week and ask yourselves, "Here's the 27 things that need to come off my plate." That sounds overwhelming.

Let me give you two questions for how to deal with that. Very simply, question number one is which one of these 27 things, if I dealt with it first, would have the most impact on the other 26? That's question number one, circle that, and then a completely unrelated question, which one of these 27 things?

If I did, it would give me the most energy and circle that one. You are now down to two things, and they might even be the same thing. But at least now you only have two to pick from. Throw a dart and off you go. So that's a good way to get that list paired down.

AIDAN

Yeah. I think also coming back to really thinking about what is important, is it mission critical that you do something, or is that just some sort of like they're nice to do? Maybe that relates back to that tyranny of the urgent versus the priority of the important there.

CHUCK

Yeah, it's very simple, the difference between the two. What's the difference? The difference is when you're working with the tyranny of the urgent, you know you're working with the tyranny of the urgent because when you're done, your business is no farther along and probably looks just like you did when you started. A tyrant thing would be you have ten people, one of them quits. "Oh, no, I have to hire another person," and you do and you end up back at ten. That is a tyranny of the urgent exercise. Nothing changed. Your business is exactly like it was before the crisis.

You know you're dealing with the priority of the important when after you've dealt with it, your business is forever different, in maybe some small way. It doesn't have to be giant. Before you hired that 10th person back, you ask yourself, why did that 10th person quit? And you found out that either your pay wasn't high enough or the training wasn't good enough or the ad wasn't good enough, or you have a lousy culture, and now you have something you can fix, you can tweak something.

You might just raise the pay by $50 or $2, and that's a permanent change to your business. You dealt with something that will cause the next person to be less likely to lead.

The priority of important, the more you deal with business on that angle, the fewer turning the urgent problems you'll have. It'll reduce and reduce and reduce those.

AIDAN

I think also talking about just having being overwhelmed with a lot of different things to do, I think it's an easy way out for people to be busy, for people to be finding things like planning and "Oh, I've got a reply to that email," and in reality, if you just didn't do those things, nothing would change in your business. Your business wouldn't fall to pieces. Just nothing would change. I think really understanding what are the things that move the business forward and what are the things that just take up your time, and then looking for opportunities to eliminate these things that take up your time but don't really add much value.

An example of this is my family is going on a vacation in a couple of months' time to Italy. Normally, because I enjoy it, I enjoy the planning, I would get in there and I'd look for flights and this, that, and the other. But I've gone back to having an assistant do all of that for me because there are so many different options and places we could go and flights we could book and different ways to get there, and just by doing that, it seems trivial, but there's one hour of my time that I've now got that I can be investing in something else like playing with my kids or working on something that's genuinely important in my business or something that I really enjoy.

I think that's the kind of thing that comes out of that task inventory, or even process mapping, and all of a sudden, you can say, "Hey, you know, I don't have to be the one that's steering this part of the ship."

CHUCK

When you answer the question, how do I do this? For the last time, one of the answers will be, stop it. Just don't do it somewhere. Probably 25% to 50% of what we do is irrelevant. Netflix pause their meetings for two weeks. No meetings company wide. The only question you can answer when your meeting was coming up was, "Will I miss this meeting or will I not?" After two weeks, 50% of their meetings were gone forever. 

AIDAN

Yeah, I think you mentioned that as well. When you went away or cycling around New Zealand, your business was actually growing because you had delegated that responsibility. I think you mentioned this earlier as well, that delegation of responsibility is really important. It's probably one of the harder things to do though, I would imagine, for a lot of people.

CHUCK

One of the best ways to do it is to leave. Go away, get out of the way. We cast such big shadows. Even in small people with very conservative personalities who own businesses, they cast huge shadows. Get the heck out of the way. Lyric, the person I just told you about, the reason her business grew to 4 million was because she moved. She moved from Washington, DC to Denver, 2000 miles away, and she had to figure out how to run this thing from Denver, and it became a $4 million business. She told me if she was still in DC. She'd still be hanging pictures and driving trucks and it'd still be a tiny little business.

We got to figure out how to delegate. One of the best ways to do is leave on Friday. See what happens, then leave Thursday and Friday. Then leave Wednesday through Friday. You get the picture. Just keep leaving.

AIDAN

Yeah, yeah, I really like that. I think getting out of your own way is certainly one of the most important things that people need to do. When you realize that the ship is not going to sink without you, then get out of the way even more. I loved what you said there about the Netflix meetings.

Chuck, we could keep talking about this for hours and hours and hours, but I am conscious of your time. I want to thank you for being here today. I think we've sort of whet people's appetite a little bit. All of the topics that we're talking about, you can find out more by grabbing the book Making Money is Killing Your Business, which is one of my favorite books. It's in all the different formats that you are used to. Go and check that out. You can find that on Amazon. It's an absolute steal.

Also, head over to Chuckblakeman.com and find out what Chuck's doing and where he's writing articles. He's a columnist in lots of different places I mentioned earlier.

Any final thoughts you want to leave with people here, Chuck?

CHUCK

Yeah, you get what you intend, not what you hope for. Stop hoping that you'll a great life out of this stuff. Be very intentional and use your business to build your ideal lifestyle.

AIDAN

There you have it guys. This is episode number 20 of The Growth Booth. Thank you for tuning and make sure you head over to thegrowthbooth.com, episode number 20, and you'll be able to download transcript of this. You'll see links to all the different things that we've mentioned and so much more.

I will see you on the next episode. Bye for now.