The topic of our podcast episode is the book titled, “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell. Back in another phase of my business, I did blog posts all about different business books that I read, and I did reviews on them as well as give a high-level overview of the content.

Of course, I don’t want to divulge all of the information because I want you to go out and buy the book, but that was sort of my way of holding myself accountable to actually finishing the books that I started. And I found that a lot of people love that. Now that I have the podcast, it is sometimes a little bit easier to listen to those reviews and those overviews, rather than reading a full blog post about them.

In this newest season of The Ali Rae Haney Show, that’s what I am doing! I am doing a book review on “Buy Back Your Time.” This book brought up a lot of really deep things for me. Generally, it’s about hiring and knowing when to hire and how to hire. The reason that I started reading it was because I have an awesome relationship with this woman named Madeleine who is the owner of Succeeding Small, a paid ad and SEO marketing agency. She was so grateful to give me the opportunity to pick her brain. When I did, she gave my a couple of book recommendations during the phone call. This was one of them!

I immediately went and bought the book and started reading it because I was about the point in my business when I was trying to decide – do I want to start a branding and marketing agency or do I want to stay on my path as a solopreneur? Quite honestly, I am still at that transitional decision making point trying to figure out how and if I want to grow. All of that to say, this book was a wealth of knowledge when it came to figuring out what I want to do, how I want to do it, and when I want to do it.

Let’s jump into some of the main topics that Dan discusses in his book. One of the first quotes that stood out to me was, “5% of everything you’re doing is driving 95% of your company’s returns.”

No, I’ve heard of the 80-20 rule before…but 95-5!? That is staggering. This leads us to his first major point in the book:

The DRIP Matrix

I want you to imagine you’re in Algebra class. Remember the X and Y axis? But instead of X and Y, I want you to think of one axis representing things you like to do versus things you don’t like to do. And the other axis represents things that make you money and things that don’t make you money.

Each quadrant is represented by a different letter of the word DRIP.

Quadrant 1 – Delegation

The delegation quadrant is home to tasks we don’t like doing and tasks that don’t make us any money. It’s the quadrant we want to spend the least time in, if any at all.

Quadrant 2 – Replacement

These tasks may make you money, but you don’t like doing them. They don’t bring you any joy.

Quadrant 3 – Investment

These tasks make you little moeny, but you enjoy doing them.

Quadrant 4 – Production

This is where you want to spend most of your time as the owner or founder of your company. In this quadrant, you are focusing your time on things that make you money and bring you joy!

As an entrepreneur, we often get stuck in the delegation quadrant because we feel like we’re the only that can do everything, rather than putting ourselves in the place that we really want to be, which is the production quadrant – where we’re making making money and enjoying every minute of it.

Every tactic he gives, is to pull entrepreneurs out of delegation quadrant and further into the production quadrant because he says, “Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they’ve learned to do what they love and only what they love.”

Throughout the book, he gives multiple celebrity examples, like Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey. He tells us what their ideal day looks like and how to create a roadmap of basically how to get tehre and make it align with your life and business, which is really cool. But this book is just an overall great resource to propel you toward those big goals that you have in life and in business.

Buyback Rate

After Martell explains the DRIP Matrix and points out where we typically spend our time and where we should spend our time, he then talks about how to buy back your time. Imagine that – that’s the title of the book, right? The buy back principle is knowing about your buyback rate – how much you can afford to pay someone to perform tasks, specifically in the delegation quadrant to start. He gives a literal formula to know how much you can pay someone based off of what you are currently making now.

Time & Energy Audit

The third big concept he writes about is the Time and Energy Audit. It is essentially tracking your time every 15 minutes of the day for two weeks. That sounded daunting to me at first! But overall, the goal is to determine whether the task is making you money or not and determine whether the task brings you joy or not. Ultimately, we will separate each task into one of the four quadrants (delegation, replacement, investment, production). Those tasks can be personal or professional tasks. But this way, you know exactly where to start when you go to hire, because remember – you’ll be hiring in the delegation quadrant first.

Your First Hire

He literally walks you through how and who to hire and when, encouraging an assistant first who has two very specific tasks he or she is responsible for: inbox management and calendar.

I am at a growth point in my business where I know I am going to have to hire soon, but it’s hard to spend money to make more money. And for me, having someone manage my inbox and calendar felt so…boujee. Like, gosh, that’s such a simple task to respond to an email or make sure my call calendar is set up correctly so that my meetings don’t overlap – I don’t need someone else to take care of that for me…but it’s one of those “delegation” tasks that’s so easy to get bogged down by. But it’s also easy to turn over to someone else as long as systems are in place, which I will get to in a second.

My First Hiring Story & Why SOPs are Important

I previously hired an intern to manage my social media, specifically to plan, create, and post content to my Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and potentially my blog.

The way that I generally do my content creation is that I create one piece of pillar content. This is the big kahuna, and at that point in my business that was my blog. From there, I break it down into smaller, channel-appropriate pieces and spread it across all platforms. So I wanted to relinquish that responsibility to someone else, but because I didn’t have it defined…it all fell apaprt.

For me, it came down to control. I think I am coming to the realization that I am a micro-manager, and I am a micro-manager because I don’t have standard operating procedures I can seamlessly hand off to someone…thus, I don’t know exactly how I would perform the task, and therefore, I can’t confidently hand off the task and know it’s going to be performed the way I want it to be – what a humbling realization.

What I was needing was not only help with social media…I was needing help to create the systems themselves.

Standard Operating Procedures

Imagine that – Dan anticipated that’s probably why many people struggle to hire and he has a solution baked directly within the book. He gives a recommendation on how to start recording your SOPs or standard operating procedures. I have since started to do this and realize that I do, in fact, have some structure to my tasks, but it also allows me to realize where I need to button up my systems even more.

The Hiring Process

One of the most intimidating things about hiring for me was that I didn’t want to mess up. I didn’t want to hire and onboard a person, just to have it not work out and then take another blow to productivity having to start the whole process over. Lo and behold, Dan also gives a framework on exactly how to do that as well. I love that he gave specific pointers on how to weed out uncommitted candidates. And now it’s interesting to me, because I can almost pick out peers who have read this book because I can see his principles in their hiring processes, which is pretty cool.

One of the specific thing he encouraged using throughout the hiring process was to require a video submission of the potential candidate to weed out who wasn’t that committed to the application process. I saw one of my peers include that in her hiring process, and it made me wonder if she had read Dan’s book.

Define Your Perfect Week

The final principle that I am going to discuss from the book is defining your perfect week. When you work best, when you don’t. When you want to have meetings, so that you can make your day as productive as possible without the dreaded small gaps throughout your day that kill productivity. It’s just so crazy how quickly time can get away from me!

A while back, like before we had kids, I read this book called “A Simplified Life” by Emily Ley. This book was about creating routines and habits in your life to simplify it. Three things about that book I can remember, to this day. The first is that I should always wash the dishes in the sink at night so that when I wake up the next day, I can wake up to a clean kitchen slate. The second is that once I had kids, I needed to do one load of laundry completely everyday so that I don’t feel vastly overwhelmed with a laundry mountain on the weekends. And the third is that every item needs to have a home in your house. That way, when it is time to clean up, everyone will know where that object goes to be tidied.

Now that I am a mom, I try to follow those rules, but more importantly, the concept of the perfect week allows me to essentially execute on the same concept that Emily mentioned, except…with my time. So if every part of my life has time devoted to it during the perfect week – my husband, my kids, my businesses, etc – then I can be sure that time is protected and honored. And that is a beautiful thing. I love that throughout the book, he uses different examples, both from his personal life and professional life, because as entrepreneurs, our time bleeds over so much.

But if you have time allotted that you know you’re only going to focus on your business, and you know that you’re only going to focus on your family, you’re more able to be more present within those allotted amounts of time.

After reading his book, I have really been focusing internally to ask myself what I want for the future of my business. Do I want to really go for it and build a larger team? Do I want it to be me with 3-5 contractors? Or do I want to keep it just me and an assistant? How is this going to affect my family? Will I still be able to make them a priority if I grow and scale?

Honestly, this book gave me hope that I absolutely could grow and scale while still holding adequate space for them.

If you are feeling like you’re at that point where you want to hire someone, but don’t know where to start or how…this book is exactly what you need! It has really brought a lot of clarity to me in a season that feels very chaotic and like everything is on my shoulders. We weren’t meant to operate on an entrepreneurial island and this book has helped me realize that after nearly seven years of running a business totally by myself.

I am going to link “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell here. One of the cool things about this book is that he includes so many free resources, including the Time & Energy Audit template, which was really helpful for me.

Until next time – keep dreaming, keep creating, and remember…your brand is your story. Let’s tell it together!