The Freedom Flywheel - Blog , Growth

Next Level Business Strategy: Buy Back Your Time

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 15:30:00 +0000

There are 2 things you need to do to take your business to the next level.

Make more money.
Invest less of your time.

One of the biggest misconceptions in business is that the key to business growth lies in spending more time. Spending more time leads to Owner Overload. And Owner Overload blocks growth and scale. It limits the amount of money you can make. Instead, you want to initiate a “growth spiral.” Spend your time doing the right things. This will make you money. Spend the money buying back your time so that you can do the next right things. This will make you more money. Rinse and repeat. Let’s dive into this concept of “buying back your time.” We’ll start here:

Time is More Valuable than Money

You can always make more money. You can never make more time. Until you truly believe this, you’ll continue to spend your time on low value tasks. As a business owner, you’re busy. You have a million things competing for your time and attention. The challenge is to focus your limited and valuable time and energy on the things that will really move the dial – and to offload everything else. Essentially, you’re buying back your time.

What is Buying Back Your Time?

The first level of business calls for rolling up your sleeves and getting things done. You put in the time getting it off the ground. But at some point, you have to start paying other people to tackle some of what’s on your plate. Otherwise, you’ll never scale, never grow – and probably never feel sane. As with so many business habits, what got you here won’t get you there. In the early stages, it can be tempting to try to hang onto every dollar. You might cringe when you think of “spending” – you might think it sounds frivolous or wasteful and that you should be conserving every dollar instead. But that simply isn’t the case. At any given point in your life, you’ll have more time than money – and vice versa.

When you have more money than time, you should spend some of that money buying yourself more time.

When you buy back your time, you can do the things that grow your business – and, in turn, earn you more money. Here are 3 places to start:

Get Help at Home

When I was spending long days at the racetrack, building my business and making money, I paid for help at home. I hired a nanny – who came to work with me so that I could be close to my kids. I hired a cleaning lady. I had my groceries delivered. I had meal kits delivered. I paid for a laundry service. This is the low-hanging fruit of buying back time. Household duties can consume a lot of your time without adding value.

Drop the "DIY Mindset" and Outsource Tasks to the Experts

Instead of struggling with DIY projects like fixing leaks or assembling furniture or building a website, hire professionals to get the job done efficiently and expertly. Even if you have the expertise to do something, outsource tasks that are important, but no longer fit into your schedule or don’t play to your strengths. Why would you spend your valuable time doing things you can pay others to do – often better and more efficiently? Let the experts do the tasks that require their expertise, while you remain the strategic visionary.

Hire Support for Business Growth

Get an executive assistant, virtual assistant, or additional staff to handle administrative tasks. Hire the staff you need to market, sell, and deliver the products or services your business offers. Speed up your business growth by hiring an advisor to help you implement advanced strategies and avoid mistakes that come from lack of perspective. Automate processes wherever possible to streamline operations.

Make Good Use of the Time You Buy Back

Spending money reclaiming your time isn't just a short-term expense - it's an investment with significant returns. When you have more time, you can focus on planning, growth, and building relationships with potential partners. You’ll have time to think. Time to thoughtfully guide your business to the next level. More time allows for better sleep, increased productivity, and better strategic thinking. You only have 24 hours in each day. Use them wisely.

How to Create an Annual Strategic Plan for Your Business

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 15:48:56 +0000

If you’re leading a business, you should also be leading an annual strategic planning process. It’s not enough to stay on top of the daily whirlwind that your business faces – you also must look ahead and look inside to determine how your business can meet the demands of the future. A solid strategic plan will provide you and your team with clarity, and with a roadmap to success.

What is strategic planning and why is it so important?

Strategic planning is a systematic process that helps your business set priorities, focus your team’s energy and resources, ensure that employees and other stakeholders work toward common goals, and assess and adjust your direction in response to changes in the business environment. In addition, strategic planning helps you ensure that your business goals are backed by data and sound reasoning. This matters. Without the strategic planning process, you and your team are left to simply respond to the immediate challenges of your business environment. This often results in people working according to different, sometimes competing, agendas, with no one having a clear idea of where they are headed. It’s confusing, and it’s bad for your business.

In contrast to operating in reactive mode, strategic planning provides you and your team with a clear direction.

Everyone knows where they’re going, so they also know how to measure whether they’re making progress. This, in turn, increases internal alignment around goals, while boosting team morale and collaboration. When you know where you’re going, you also can more effectively allocate your resources – from financial to talent-related. And finally, having a clear strategic plan allows you and your team to more effectively respond to unexpected challenges.

How to create an annual strategic plan for your business

First, keep in mind that the process of strategic planning is more important than the plan itself. During the process, your team will have the opportunity to think about and discuss your comprehensive, long-term vision – which doesn’t happen much in the day-to-day whirlwind. Here’s a quick snapshot of the process.

Start with your vision

Where do you want to go long term? What's next for you and your business? How do you intend to exit? (Most owners don't think about this until it's too late. Don't be one of them!) Having a clear vision is the MOST important part of your planning process. Once you stop and decide what you really want, the rest is just logistics.

Look back to look forward

You have to understand where you’ve been before you can choose the best path forward. Review any current or previous goals and how your business historically has performed against them. Define the challenges you’ve faced and how you might approach them differently.

Analyze the situation

With your team, conduct a SWOT analysis to provide some clarity. Think about where you stand regarding your internal strengths and weaknesses, along with the external opportunities and threats you’re facing.

Vet and Set your goals

Once you’ve reviewed past successes and articulated your current situation, it’s time to start setting goals for the strategic planning period. For your goals to serve you best, they must be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. In other words, a good objective outlines who will do what, by when, at what level. You can prioritize your goals for the planning period based on their expected return on investment. And as I always say, VET your goals before you set your goals, making sure they align with your Values, Energy and Talent.

Develop a reverse-engineered action plan

This part of the planning process sketches your roadmap for achieving your goals. Work backwards from where you want to go. What do you need to do to get you there? This section of your plan will assign specific roles and responsibilities, making sure everyone on your team fully understands how they contribute to overall success. During this phase, you’ll also decide on timelines and necessary resources. You’ll need to estimate the level of resources required for each step in the plan, constantly balancing investment with potential returns. But remember – keep your plan agile: you can't predict the future, so expect that you'll need to adjust your plan over time.

Define metrics and create a dashboard

You won’t know if you’re successful if you don’t develop a way to keep score. With your team, define the key metrics and performance indicators you’ll use to measure progress toward your larger goals. Use these to develop a visual progress dashboard to keep you on track. Also articulate how often you’ll check progress and what kind of feedback loops you’ll create.

Seek alignment

Once you have a draft of your plan, it’s time to share it. First, you’ll want to share with all the team members who were involved in providing information, forecasts, calculations, and insight. When the team is satisfied that the plan is sound, it’s time to share with broader stakeholders. It’s not always easy to create a roadmap for where your business is going, but the good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. You’ll have your team to support you.

Pilot Your Business: Why Every Professional Business Needs a Progress Dashboard and How to Build One

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 17:16:39 +0000

Imagine for a moment that your business is an airplane, and you are sitting in the cockpit. You have a visual screen in front of you – showing you exactly how each of the areas of your business is performing. You can see your goals and your progress towards them. You know your direction and your speed. You have a gauge for sales and revenue. Another gauge for customer satisfaction. Yet another one to measure the strength of your team. You’ve got warning lights designed to go on if there’s a problem. You know where to adjust and where to stay the course. You feel confident and in control. This is what having a progress dashboard gives you. It’s a key component of CLARITY. Clarity in your business comes from these 3 things:

A clear and compelling vision of where you’re headed.
A roadmap of the steps you need to take to get there.
A dashboard to show how far you’ve come and to let you know when you’ve strayed off course.

Today we’re going to talk about dashboards. Let’s start with where you are now.

Which of the following best describes your relationship with numbers, data, and financial reporting?

You don’t do a lot of tracking beyond financial data for your yearly tax returns. You judge how your business is going primarily by your bank balance and gut feel. You may even feel afraid to “check your numbers.”
You have some tracking in place, you may not review it regularly, you may not have all the data you need to make good decisions – you may feel “in the dark” about some things.
You feel like you know what’s happening in your business and you’re confident about it because it’s backed with data. You’ve identified meaningful leading and trailing indicators, your tracking data is current and accurate, you review this data regularly and use it to make decisions and course corrections.

Unless you have an accounting business, you probably didn’t start your business because you “love looking at numbers.” This is why so many business owners struggle. Numbers and data aren’t their forte. It’s my goal with this article to inspire you to implement dashboards – because having this information can change everything in your business. (Picture that airplane cockpit!) As a numbers-loving person, I will try to contain my enthusiasm. :) Just know that I would be delighted to help you get all of this set up in your business. You can read the rest of this post, or just take the shortcut and set up a consultation here: Book a Call with Dawn.

Why you need a dashboard

Business management expert Peter Drucker famously said:

"You can't manage what you don't measure."

Having a simple and clear dashboard allows you to do exactly that. Measure and monitor what you want to manage. Your dashboard will help you:

Make Better Decisions.

When you have complete, up-to-date, and accurate information in front of you, you can make decisions based on comprehensive information (rather than just gut feel – or worse – putting the decision off.) You’ll also be able to spot trends and patterns so that you can pre-emptively do something about a situation before it becomes a real problem. For example, you may notice that your sales have been trending downward. Now that this has been brought to your attention, you might decide to increase your marketing.

Identify Areas for Improvement

When you’re stuck in Owner Overload, it can feel like everything is wrong with the business! The key word here is “feel” – and that’s all it is – feelings. Your dashboard will show you the objective truth. Which might be that sales are good, profit is high, customers are happy, but employee turnover is through the roof. Now you know where you need to focus. Not only is this clarifying – it can also help you reduce those feelings of overwhelm and despair.

Get Objective Performance Information and Feedback

By quantifying performance metrics, you can objectively assess how well the business is doing against its benchmarks and goals. These metrics also give you a feedback loop. Did the changes you made to your talent management program reduce turnover? Is the new marketing initiative working? In essence, your dashboard shows you whether you’re on the right track. So now that you know why you need one, let’s look at what goes into creating one.

How to create a management dashboard for your business

A good management dashboard will track both leading and trailing indicators. Trailing indicators tell you what has already happened. You can think of these as the rear-view mirror. Examples of trailing indicators include things like revenue, profit, business value, and employee turnover. Your year-end accounting reports are full of trailing indicators. While trailing indicators are useful, they often provide the information after the window to do something about it has passed. This is why you also need to track leading indicators. Leading indicators predict what will happen in the future. These allow you to measure your progress in real time. Leading indicators are the things that impact the trailing indicators. For example, a leading indicator for employee turnover might be employee training hours. More training should lead to employees feeling confident in the job and happy because they are getting professional development – resulting in them staying longer.

What do you need on your dashboard?

Your dashboard should be simple. Only track what you need to. The specific elements on the dashboard will vary depending on the nature of your professional business, but here are some general categories and metrics to consider:

Operational Metrics

New Client Acquisition: Number of new clients or cases added during a specific period.
Open vs. Closed Cases or Projects: Track active engagements against those completed.
Appointment or Consultation Volume: If the business involves consultations or appointments, monitor the frequency and volume.
Response Time: Measure how quickly inquiries or issues are addressed.

Financial Metrics

Revenue: Breakdown by month, quarter, or year.
Expenses: Categorized by major cost areas.
Profit Margin: Difference between revenue and expenses.
Accounts Receivable: Monitor outstanding payments.
Billing Efficiency: Percentage of billable hours vs. non-billable hours.

Client Satisfaction

Client Feedback Scores: Use tools like NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score).
Client Testimonials: Showcase positive feedback.
Issues or Complaints: Track and address any negative feedback.

Employee Metrics

Employee Satisfaction: Regular check-ins or surveys can be helpful.
Turnover Rate: Monitor retention and attrition rates.
Training & Development: Track ongoing education or professional development.

Strategic Goals

Goal Tracking: Break down overarching goals into measurable chunks and track progress.
Key Initiatives: Highlight major projects or initiatives and their status.

Marketing and Outreach

Website Analytics: Page views, session duration, bounce rate, etc.
Social Media Engagement: Track followers, engagement rates, and content performance.
Lead Sources: Identify where new inquiries or clients are coming from.

Operational Efficiency

Process Bottlenecks: Identify areas that might be slowing down operations or service delivery.
Resource Utilization: How well resources (human or otherwise) are being used.

Compliance and Risk Management

Audit Findings: Any issues or commendations from audits.
Regulatory Updates: Track and stay updated on industry-specific regulations or standards.

Technology & Tools

System Uptime: Monitor if your IT systems are running smoothly.
Tool Adoption Rate: If new tools or software are introduced, track how well they are being integrated and used.

Industry-Specific Metrics

Depending on the type of business you run, there may be specific metrics that are critical. For instance, a medical business might monitor patient outcomes, while a law business might track case win rates.

A useful dashboard will provide a visual cockpit for your business: visually appealing, easy to interpret, and updated regularly.

Use graphs, charts, and color-coding to provide a quick snapshot of performance. The goal is to have a concise view that can drive decision-making and course correction. Just like a cockpit in an airplane.

Turn Your Vision into Action: How to Reverse Engineer a Roadmap for Your Business

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 17:33:20 +0000

Ready to escape owner overload? The first thing you need is CLARITY. Clarity arises at the intersection of 3 things:

A clear and compelling vision of where you’re headed.
A roadmap of the steps you need to take to get there.
A dashboard to show how far you’ve come and to let you know when you’ve strayed off course.

In this article, we’re going to dive into #2 – creating a roadmap. Let’s start with a pop quiz.

Which of the following best describes your current business strategy/plan/roadmap?

You’re winging it without a plan – just getting through things day to day. You’re not certain that the actions you’re taking will ultimately lead to your vision. (Or you may be aware that they will NOT get you where you want to go.)
You have plans but they’re not actionable enough to translate into progress – or they’re out of date – or you just don’t follow them.
You’ve mapped your path from where you are today to where you want to be in 3 years. You’ve broken the journey into milestones of 3, 2, 1 years – and you have quarterly plans for year 1 – you work this plan daily, confident that your daily actions are leading you to where you want to go.

Most of the owners I work with are so bogged down with day-to-day survival that they don’t have time to plan – so if that’s you, don’t beat yourself up! That said, here’s why you need to make the time to make a plan.

7 Reasons Why You Need a Roadmap

1. Direction

Your vision shows you where you’re going. Your plan shows you how to get there. We call it a roadmap because it plots out your path step by step, guiding you towards your goals. Even if your business is already successful, you need to know where it's heading to sustain that success and adapt to changing market conditions.

2. Adaptability

Markets, industries, and consumer preferences evolve over time. A well-thought-out plan allows a business to be adaptable and responsive to changing circumstances. It helps the company anticipate potential challenges and capitalize on new opportunities.

3. Resource Allocation

When you have a plan, you can allocate resources effectively. Your roadmap provides insights into where to invest time, money, and efforts for maximum returns. Resources are always limited, so it's essential to use them wisely to maintain competitiveness.

4. Risk Management

If you’re a worrier like me, this reason is probably the most compelling! Creating a plan allows a business to assess potential risks and develop strategies to mitigate them. This makes the business more resilient to unforeseen events. It may also help you sleep better at night. :)

5. Communication and Alignment

Your roadmap serves as a communication tool, helping to align employees, partners, and stakeholders towards a common vision. It keeps everyone on the same page and headed in the same direction. It also fosters a shared sense of purpose, which is crucial if you want to create a high-performance team.

6. Decision Making

As the leader of your busines, you need to make decisions every day. Your roadmap provides a framework to help you make good ones. Whenever a significant opportunity or challenge arises, you can refer to the plan to assess how it aligns with your business's overall strategy.

7. Attracting Investors or Financing

You may need to secure capital for expansion or other projects. Banks and investors want to see a plan. So do buyers, should you decide to sell one day. Even a well-established business needs a plan to stay on course, remain competitive, make informed decisions, manage risks, and ensure sustainable growth. It is an essential tool for success, regardless of a company's size or longevity. So, let’s look at how to make one.

How to reverse-engineer your roadmap

Reverse-engineering means you start with where you want to go and design your roadmap working backwards from that point. Planning this way keeps you focused on the end results you want and makes it more likely you will get there.

Begin with the end in mind.

Get clear about where you're going (your vision) and develop a plan to take you there. Consider your eventual exit from your business: what happens to the company? Who will succeed you? What's your plan for retirement?

Take financial snapshots of both your business and your personal life.

This will give you context as you make assumptions about the future. Business: Compile and review your Profit & Loss Statement and Balance Sheet for the past 2-3 years. Personal: what does it cost for you to live comfortably? What does Financial Independence look like to you?

Set milestones.

I advise my clients to begin at 3 years, then work backward from there - 2 years, 1 year, quarterly, weekly. When you get granular, you take the guesswork out of what you need to do next to accelerate your progress. Develop a future timeline spreadsheet to map out various anticipated personal milestones against your business targets.

A final word of advice: keep your plans agile

I could end this article with a million motivational, pithy quotes about planning. Like: “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” or “a goal without a plan is just a wish.” But, there is really only one quote for you to bear in mind. It comes from former US president Dwight Eisenhower:

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”

We can't predict the future, so expect that you'll need to adjust your plan over time. The important part about planning is the process. When you plan, you think things through. You figure out what resources you need. You anticipate future problems. You spot opportunities. You see how the decisions you make today can get you closer to where you want to go. When I work with my clients, we work in 90-day sprints and create a new plan every 90 days. This ensures that we keep the longer-term goals in mind, while intensely focusing on what’s immediately actionable and in front of us.