Your Weekly Battle Plan on Elevate Springfield

Summary

In this episode, Robert discusses the importance of managing time effectively in relation to money management and Grant Cardone's 12 Building Blocks of Money. He emphasizes the need to focus on revenue-generating hours, protect those hours from distractions, and implement strategic planning to enhance productivity. The conversation also highlights the significance of mindset shifts in overcoming feelings of overwhelm and prioritizing tasks effectively.

Takeaways

• We've got our local first Springfield grant opportunity.
• Time management is crucial for business success.
• Revenue hours should be prioritized over busy work.
• You can earn back money, but not time.
• Protect your best hours for strategic work.
• Idle time often fills with unproductive tasks.
• Assign specific days for tasks to avoid procrastination.
• Borrowed time should be used for productive work only.
• Mindset shifts can help manage feelings of overwhelm.
• Count and increase your revenue hours weekly.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Elevate Springfield, where we will dive into strategies and stories that help you rise to your full potential. Each episode, we'll talk about how you can take intentional steps to elevate your life and your business while making a meaningful impact on those around you. Along the way, we're gonna bring in the change makers from our community that are already elevating. We'll bring the actionable strategies, you bring the discipline and follow through, and together we can elevate Springfield. Alright, let's go, Springfield. Time to 10X your day, 10x your life, 10x all of it. And that includes Springfield, y'all. You are listening to the Elevate Springfield Podcast. Robert Farrell here, certified 10x coach, speaker, and mentor, here to bring you actionable strategies. You bring the discipline and follow through, and together, we're gonna Elevate Springfield. You are listening to your weekly battle plan here on Elevate Springfield, where every Sunday we're gonna give you ways to control time, ways to create time, and some things that we encourage you add to that battle plan. We're gonna get right to it after the break. Looking for expert tree care with hometown integrity, look no further than Sangamon Tree Service. They're your trusted local pros, delivering quality workmanship, exceptional customer service, and fair, honest pricing every time. Whether it's trimming, removal, or storm cleanup, their team brings professionalism and care to every job, big or small. Call the name your neighbors trust, Sangman Tree Service, or visit them today at SangmanTreeService.com. Sangman Tree Service, rooted in quality, built on trust. Alright, and we are back. Hey, for another edition of your weekly battle plan. Before we get started, it's gonna be a great week on Elevate Springfield. But you know what? Hey, it's always a great week on Elevate Springfield. On Monday, we've got Monkey Wrench Auto. You might recall we've got our local first Springfield grant opportunity that was out, and we're down to our top five, and we'll be giving away those two $2,500 grants at our upcoming fall soiree, which we'll talk about in just a minute. But Monkey Wrench Auto was one of the top five. So I wanted to make sure I highlighted all of these top five prior to the events. We've got Monkey Wrench coming in on Monday. Tuesday, of course, Ellie's gonna be in for next Gen Wednesday. We're gonna have our communities grow together segment with UIS. They're gonna talk about the Bloomberg terminals there that they have in their business department. I visited them a little over a week ago and really great facility, so they're gonna come and talk about that. Really great tools for students to be able to use right here in our community. Then on Thursday, we're gonna have another one of those top fives, Fallen and Found wood design is gonna be coming in. They make some really cool furniture. Looking forward to visiting with them, learning more about them and their business. And then, of course, we're gonna have our wellness upgrade and separation Saturdays to close out the week. So before we get into our uh time control training today, a couple of quick things you can add to that battle plan. Like I mentioned a moment ago, we've got our localfirst Springfield event. That's our fall soiree on October 1st, 5 30 to 7 30 p.m. over at the View at Jane Hay Sales and Staging, west side of town, right behind Harvest Market. Hope to see y'all there. You can get your ticket over at localfirstspringfield.com slash events. That $25 ticket includes food, a couple of drink tickets. We've got a talk from Representative Mike Coffey who will be joining us that night. A lot of networking, a lot of fun, and of course, you're gonna be there for us to celebrate and award two $2,500 grants that night. And hey, we might have another surprise up our sleeves for folks out there that night. So if you don't have your ticket yet, make sure you grab that and we'll see you on October 1st. Another event coming up. You know, we've talked about SILSA on the show quite a few times. That's the Central Illinois Customer Service Association. They've got an event on October 8th from 7:30 to 9.30 a.m. over at Cherry Hills Church on Woodside Road. Gonna have John McHugh in. They always bring in a great keynote at these events, so I will be there. Hope to see you guys there as well. You can RSVP for that and learn more about Silsa at Silsa. Then it's a couple months out, but you might have seen the uh Westside Market is having a Christmas market presented by local first Springfield here in a couple of months. That's December 12th and 13th. Seems a ways off, but you know how it always goes in the fall and into the winter, it goes super quick from here to the end of the year. So put that on the calendar. Make sure you visit us over on December 12th and 13th at the Christmas market, the West Side Market is putting on over at the Crafted Stag. Hope you see y'all there to help us support all these great local businesses. If you're a local first Springfield member, part of our partnership with them on that event, we do have free booths for you. So have a few of those left. If you're still interested in getting in there, make sure you put in that application, put that you're a local first Springfield member, and we can get you taken care of. So add those things to your battle plan for these next uh couple of weeks and out into the next few months. But for today, you know, yesterday on Separation Saturdays, I gave you the 12 building blocks of money in uh Cardone University. That's Grant Cardone's 12 building blocks of money. And I gave you a three-part challenge. I said, hey, find your next 10% increment. That's on the income side. Open the hard-to-reach account, that's on the savings side, and then hold one money meeting. Some of you guys may have already done that, and some of you, like a lot of things, when things get added to your plate, you may have said, hey, I just don't have the time. So let's talk about that today. We talk all about time on Sundays, right? Because I went through these 12 blocks again and I noticed something. Every single one of them works on your calendar the exact same way it works on your account. You have two currencies that we're talking about here: money and time. Money you can earn back, right? You can lose all of it and simply rebuild it. Time you cannot. It's the only account you own where there are no deposits, only withdrawals. We're only withdrawing out of that time account, right? And most of us manage it worse than we manage our checking or savings accounts. So today we're gonna take those money blocks and run them on the clock. We're gonna do 15 minutes or less, y'all. So let's go. Block one from yesterday was income is king. Not saving, not cutting, income. So here's the time version. Revenue hours are king. If you've been listening to me for a while, you remember the four buckets of work we talk about on one of the episodes. We said every hour you spend in your business lands in one of these four places. So revenue work, that could be selling, quoting, following up, serving the customer who pays you. Could be strategic work, planning, hiring, building the systems. You got operational work, that's the stuff that keeps the doors open and keeps everything flowing, right? And then the fourth bucket, we can just call that garbage work. That's the scrolling, the meeting that should have been an email or a text, reorganizing the shop for the third time because quite frankly, you don't want to make any more calls or reach outs. Now remember the 95-5 rule from the money episode? We also talked about it with Ellie a couple weeks ago. 95% of your attention on income, 5% on expenses, and most people have it backwards. Most people have their calendars backwards as well. I've had owners run time audits with me, and the number that comes back is pretty brutal, really. Out of a 50-hour week, the hours that directly produce revenue are often, you know, a fifth of that, or even maybe eight, maybe ten, right? Maybe that full fifth. The rest is operations and garbage that masquerades as saying you're busy. Busy is the expense side of your calendar. It's long, it can go on for many, many pages on that calendar, right? It feels productive to comb through it, but it's never really gonna move the needle like you want it to. So I'm not saying you need to hit 95% of your hours on revenue hours necessarily. It'd be nice to get to that point, right? If you run a small shop, it's only you, somebody still has to order the materials, has to clean up, has to do some stuff, right? But ask yourself the honest question, is that number eight? And what would your business look like if it were two or three times more than that? Which brings me back to block number two, which was increments. Yesterday we talked, we said uh you don't go from four thousand a month to a millionaire in one leap. You go from four thousand to four four hundred and keep going up incrementally. Time can work the same way. You're not going to reinvent your whole week by Monday, right? By tomorrow. Anybody who tries that typically quits by Wednesday. So here's the increment you can do. One hour. Find one more revenue hour this week than you had last week. One more hour of calls, estimates, follow-ups that did not exist before. Next week, one more. Do that for 10 weeks, and you've added 10 revenue hours to your week without a dramatic life overhaul. And the same warning applies that we talked about yesterday. There is no staying the same. If you are not deliberately adding revenue hours, the garbage bucket is going to quietly take them. Same always slides to less. We talked about that with money targets. It's the same here. So this week, count your revenue hours from last week, the actual number, and then add one. Pretty simple, right? Bucket two yesterday was keeping what you make, essentially, right? Pay yourself first, the 40% rule, stay broke. This is how these can translate. Pay yourself first. Remember the point about the IRS? They take theirs off the top before the check ever reaches you. Because they know if they wait until the end of the month or the end of the year, there's not gonna be anything left for them. Your calendar has an IRS. It's everybody else. The customer who calls at 715, the employee with a quick question, the vendor, the inbox, they all take theirs first. And whatever is left at the end of the day, which a lot of times can be nothing, that's when you planned to work on the thing that actually grows your business. You are paying yourself last with your time. So flip it. Your best hours. And for most of us, that's a couple hours close to the start of the day, right? Get it blocked before anyone else can touch them. Revenue work or strategic work only. Even put that phone on do not disturb if you need to. Close the door. That block goes on the calendar the same way the automatic transfer goes into the savings account that we talked about yesterday. It happens first, and everybody else gets what's left. The 40% target. The 40% rule was a number so big that it's certainly going to force you to change how you operate, right? So, same idea here. Aim to protect 40% of your working week for revenue and strategic work. If you work 50 hours, that's 20 hours protected, blocked in advance. Can you do that this week? Maybe not, if you're not anywhere close to that right now. And that's the point. A target that big forces a different question. Not how do I squeeze this in, but what do I have to stop doing? What do I have to hand off, or what do I have to automate so this is possible? And hold on to that because we're going to talk about that here in just a few minutes in the next segment. Stay broke. Remember, that's the one yesterday that might have caught you off guard. Stay broke. The idea was that idle money sitting around always finds an emergency. So you move it somewhere, has a job before you waste it. Idle time is exactly the same. You know, Grant always says, you want to meet the devil, leave some white space in your calendar. So this is what we're talking a little bit about here. An open afternoon with nothing assigned to it does not stay open. It finds an emergency, could be somebody else's emergency, really, or it fills up with garbage bucket work and you get to five o'clock, six o'clock, seven o'clock wondering where the day went. So keep your calendar broke. Give every block of your working day a job before the day starts. Yeah, we talked a little bit about this. Time block it in 15 minute chunks. No white space on the calendar. The point is you decide where that hour goes instead of that hour just wasting away. This is also where someday, quote unquote someday, goes to die. I've said it on this show before, someday is not a day of the week. If the thing you keep saying you'll get to doesn't have a block on the calendar, it don't exist. Assign it a day. And maybe that's Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever. Assign it a day. So this week, block your first couple of hours tomorrow. Revenue or strategic work only. Treat it like an appointment with your number one client. So next bucket, the tools. Tools yesterday we talked about were credit cards, debt, and money meetings. Each one of those has a parallel right here with time. Your calendar is your statement. The credit card lesson was really about records. Put everything on the card, pay it off monthly, and at the end of the month you have a complete statement of where every dollar went. No guessing, and you can confront it. Your calendar should do that for your time. Most owners use a calendar only for appointments, so at the end of the week, there's no record of where 40 of the 50 hours went. That's spending cash. There's no trail. For one week, log it. Every block, what you actually did, and which of those four buckets it fell in. Is tedious, of course, but I've asked you to do a time study before, and I'm asking again. Let's do it anyway. At the end of the week, you'll have a statement, and I promise you, you'll find we've all done this, the subscription we forgot we had. Oh, that's still coming out. You're gonna find out where your time is wasted in the same manner. Borrowed time, same as debt, right? The rule was simple. Debt is for production, never for consumption. You can borrow when it makes you money. You can borrow time too. When you hire someone, you're borrowing their hours. When you hand a task to a VA, a bookkeeper, a subcontractor, you're borrowing hours. When you use AI to draft an email, summarize a meeting, or build the first version of a proposal, you're borrowing hours, quite frankly, at a rate that didn't exist a few years ago if you're utilizing AI for these. We did two full episodes on that when we talked about Claude, right? Two full episodes. So go back and check those out and see how they can help you control time. But the production rule still applies. Borrowed time only pays off if you spend the hours you freed up on revenue work. If you hand ten hours off to somebody else and then you just spend those on the garbage bucket, you really didn't leverage anything. You just bought yourself a more expensive way to sit and scroll Instagram, right? So before you delegate, decide what the freed up hours are for. Put it on the calendar first, then hand off the task. And one caution, same as I gave you with debt, delegation can have a cost. It takes time to train someone, and it takes time to check their work before you're comfortable giving them everything, right? So run the numbers honestly, but stop treating every handoff like a risk and every hour of your own labor like it's free, because it isn't. Last one, the money meeting. And the parallel here is the weekly reset. So once a week, sit down, look at your numbers, nobody gets hammered. That was the money meeting, right? You already know the time version because I gave it to you before on the 90-minute weekly reset. Brain dump, calendar audit, week build, delegation pass. That was one of those clawed segments that we did. Oh, it's been a few weeks now. Here's my suggestion. Stack them, same sitting. 15 minutes on the money, then roll straight into the rest. The money meeting tells you what your next income increment is, and the reset is where you decide which hours next week are gonna go get it. One without the other is just wishing. So get it on the calendar. So this week, put both of these on the calendar, back to back, same day, same time, every week. Bucket four. Three mindset blocks we talked about yesterday. Shortage, the price myth, and worry. So I don't have time. That's a big one that people talk about, and that's right alongside the money shortage mindset. Says there's not enough to go around. The time version is I don't have enough time. We all know that we have 168 hours this week. I do, you do, we all do. So does the person who's competing against you in your industry, who may be doing three times your revenue. Nobody got extra time. I don't have time is almost never a statement about hours. It's a statement about priorities. Try replacing it with, hey, that's not a priority for me. We've talked about that before, right? And see how that feels. Sometimes that's true and fine, and sometimes you don't feel too good about saying that about what you're saying it about, right? Know what your hour is worth. The price myth said if you're obsessing over the price tag, your attention is on the wrong thing. For time, let's look at a different tag, the price of your own hour. Quick math. Say you want to take home $150,000 a year. Let's just say that. $150,000 a year and you work 50 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. That's $2,500 hours. Your hour needs to be worth $60 minimum across every hour you work. Now look at your week. How many hours did you spend on work you could have paid someone $20 an hour to do? Every one of those hours, you paid $60 to save $20. Last one, worry. The lesson was that worry is a signal you don't have a plan. Remember, we talked about the professional driver that doesn't panic in the rain because they know what they're doing. The time version of worry is overwhelm. That buried behind on everything, can't catch my breath feeling. We've all been there at some point, right? It's not a sign that you have too much to do. Everyone has too much to do. It's a sign that you don't have a plan for the hours. The owners I know who run the biggest operations are often some of the calmest people in the room. And it's not because they have less on their plate. They know what they're doing each and every hour of every day. Overwhelm goes down when control goes up. And control is simply deciding in advance what you're going to do with each hour. Or more specifically, each 15-minute block if you've been listening for a while. So let's run it back. Revenue hours are king. Add them in increments one hour at a time. Pay yourself first with your best two hours. Aim to protect 40% of your week. Keep your calendar broke by giving every hour a job. Use your calendar as your statement. Borrow time only for production. Stack your money meeting in your weekly reset. Drop I don't have time from your vocabulary. Know what your hour is worth. And when you feel overwhelmed, don't work faster. Make a plan. But you might have to work a little faster too until you get to that point. Money and time are the same game, played, I guess, on two different scoreboards, you could say. Last episode, the one-sentence summary was put your attention on income, then protect what you earn from yourself. Today's is the same sentence with one word changed. Put your attention on revenue hours, then protect them from everybody else, including you. So your challenge for the next seven days, three things again. So you got three things from yesterday, three things from today. One, count last week's revenue hours and add one this week. Two, block your first two hours every workday and defend them. Three, stack the money meeting and the weekly reset into one sitting and actually run it each and every week. And as always, if you want help building this into your business, we'd be happy to help you out over at Big Dog Business Coaching. Just reach out. Hope this helps today. We'll be back after the break. Hey Springfield, when it comes to reliable, high-quality roofing, you don't want to leave things to chance. That's why you should reach out to Acosta Angeli Ruffing, your local roughing expert serving Springfield and surrounding communities, from quick dependable repairs to full replacement, from residential to commercial. They are your trusted pros. Call them today at 217-993-2748 or visit their website to book your free quote and inspection. Don't wait. A little leak now could lead to major damage later. Trust the local experts, protect your home, and get peace of mind with Acosta Angeli Roofing. Well, thank you for joining us today, everybody. Appreciate you making us the part of your day. Hey, don't forget while you're out on social, check ours out. You can check my personal one out at RobertFarrell at everywhere. Check out those Elevate Springfield pages, those big dog business coaching pages as well. Check us out over on YouTube. Give us a subscribe, give us a like or a follow on any of those channels. We would certainly appreciate it. So hey, take what you learned today. You bring the discipline and follow through and together. That's right, y'all. We're gonna elevate Springfield. Be great. 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