Episode 159: The Bottom Line - Show Me Your Calendar

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business.

I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it. Just get what you need and go. So with that, let's get into today's episode.

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Hey team, so last week we started part 1 of a 5-part series that I'm calling 5 Key Questions That Every Business Owner Needs to Ask Themselves. Last week was question number 1, and that question was, what are your priorities? And I shared with you all this idea that it's, in my experience, for me personally, and then working with other business owners, is that people have trouble being able to share what their priorities are. Now, it's not necessarily trouble for them to be able to share what it is that they want, but they end up not being able to define exactly what their priorities are. And if you make everything a priority, then nothing is a priority. And I shared with you, I think, that there are two main periods of time that you want to begin to think about your priorities. Number one is over the next year, so the next 12 months. And then number two is over the course of the next 3 years. Furthermore, I think if you're going to add a third, uh, running the business on a quarterly cycle is a great way to do that. But that's not for today's conversation. I've done that in the past on a Bottom Line episode called Quarterly. And so I want to pick up today on question number 2, which is show me your calendar. And that really builds off of the first thing, which is what are your priorities? And then today, show me your calendar. And so when you begin to think about whatever calendar system you use, if you're 100% a paper person, if you use like a Michael Hyatt Full Focus Planner I personally love the Best Self journals. They're called journals, but they're really planners. If you primarily use Google or if you use Outlook, it doesn't really matter. All of you are using some sort of calendar and maybe a hybrid system of a digital calendar and a paper calendar, which is actually what I do. And so if you look back over the last 90 days, How often would your priorities show up in your calendar? And then furthermore, if you looked forward to the next 90 days, how often would your priorities that you said, the things that you said, this is what I want to get accomplished, how often would those show up on your calendar? Now, what I mean is, is if you have certain targets or outcomes that you're looking for in your business, what, what amount of time have you set aside for you to begin to plan, think, assess, reflect on those things that you said are priorities in the business. Now, I did a whole episode back when I did a series called, uh, The Most Important Thing, and I said, what's the most important thing you can do for the business? And the most important thing I think you can do for the business is to think about the business. So it's a little bit around this But we're now actually getting down into your calendar specifically. At some point in a few weeks, I'm going to do one after this series. I'll do an episode called Sunday Night Planning and the value of Sunday night planning and how you go about it and why Sunday seems to be the, the right time to do that, etc. So we'll talk about that again at a future episode. But if you really think about doing an audit of your calendar, and you say, yeah, these are the things that I want out of my business. How much time, how much personal calendar time am I allocating to actually make that happen? So when you think about resources, I think there are 3 allocations of resources: time, money, and then your team. Okay. Your personal time. How much calendar time are you going to dedicate to actually hitting these priorities. Talk more about that in a second. Number 2, uh, money. Okay, so how much are you investing? Maybe it's in marketing dollars, uh, incentive for your team. And then lastly, your actual team. So who— the capacity of your current team to be involved to hit whatever the priorities you have in your business. So those are— when I think about allocation of resources, I think about 3 things: time, money, and team. Okay, So when you think about allocating of your personal calendar time, it does not necessarily mean that the responsibility for hitting those targets that you have set forth, hitting those priorities in the business, all weighs on your shoulder. As a matter of fact, I think it really should not. It should be you coming up with what the vision is, what the priorities are. What our strategy is going to be, what our standards of performance, what are the activities we're going to do, and then the standards associated with that performance has got to be. And the choosing of all of those things really does come down to your ability, or at least the leader's ability and their responsibility. So again, number one, what are your priorities? And number two, show me your calendar. What are you doing to allocate time to reflect? So some of that is, okay, is this the right strategy? Is this working? This is what I said that we were going to do to be able to hit this priority. Is it working? You know, reflect. There are times that you'll have second-order consequences, something that you really thought was a great idea, and then come to find out, oh man, something popped up you didn't expect at all. I call those second-order consequences or unknown unknowns. If you've read the book— oh gosh, Chris Voss wrote the book Never Split the Difference— he talks about unknown unknowns, things that you didn't even know that you wouldn't even be able to know, you wouldn't be able to plan for. That happens in business. COVID was obviously an unknown unknown. I mean, there was no way going into 2020 that any of us could have put, you know, plan for a 2-year, 2-and-a-half-year global pandemic that's going to wreck my business. I mean, that was a complete unknown unknown, even though we had started to begin to hear about it sometime in January of that year. So that was an unknown unknown. And other times it happens. Maybe it's something in your personal life. Maybe it's something with somebody who's a key team member. But anyway, back to calendar time. I think I've told this story before, but one of the very first executive coaches that I hired, and I'm not going to necessarily say who it is because what I'm going to share is not necessarily a glowing recommendation, but they certainly— I did learn some things from them, and I'm grateful for that experience. I have learned so much from the people that I've personally worked with. Hey, by the way, never trust a coach who doesn't have a coach, right? I really believe that. Never trust a coach who doesn't have a coach because they need to be embodying what it is that they're sharing, which is that they're going to continue to grow. If they're helping you, they need to continue to grow themselves. And they— and in order for them to be able to help other people, to be able to listen to them, they need to be able to show that they can listen and learn from others anyway. All right. I digress. So I'm working with this— I'm working with this company or this business coach. And we're going through and we're looking at my calendar or creating a calendar, really. And we were creating it on an Excel spreadsheet. And the biggest philosophy that she shared with me that I bought into was that no white space. That's what she said. No white space. Can't have any white space Monday through Friday. I was like, okay, that makes sense, you know? So there was a specific time for me to check emails. There was a specific, specific time for me to call people back. There was a specific time to do all these things. In my week. It was color-coded and it was beautiful. I've actually still got a screenshot of it now, going back at it. And I bought into that philosophy that I was going to go from one thing to the next to the next. I now completely disagree with that philosophy. I think if you go back to, uh, we're going to release here pretty soon an episode, uh, with Mark Miller, who's, um, unbelievable guest. I mean, you're really going to want to tune into that episode. It's probably one of the best episodes I've ever been a part of with a guest, and he's Vice President of High Performance at Chick-fil-A. And so for those of you that know Chick-fil-A, I mean, what an amazing culture. And so interviewed Mark on the podcast, and we had a really great discussion around margin and margin being a leadership discipline. And that really comes down to looking at your calendar. If you are overscheduled, if there is no white space, there is no time for you to begin to think and plan and assess and reflect. And I think you need that. I think you need the flex time. That doesn't mean that you're going to have time where you're just kind of distracted and, and, you know, you're wasting time. I don't mean that at all. I mean dedicated time on a weekly basis that you're going to spend time out of the office. And I do think you got to do this out of the office. Thinking about the business, planning, reflecting. I love to go to Starbucks. I'm a Starbucks person. I love to— I love coffee. And so I enjoy having my AirPods in and having my journal with me and doing thinking time and reflecting with and writing. Of course, I'll have my computer there to do some stuff afterwards. But what I'm actually doing, reflecting, planning, thinking it's with a pad and a pen and a piece of paper. And I think that, that I'll listen to some thinking time music that helps me to kind of get into the zone. But that is some of the best quality time. And so I look at that on a weekly basis. And we've actually— I'm just coming out of a season, not this week, the time I'm recording this, but a couple of weeks ago, it was really busy. We had just finished a retreat with some business owners. And so, leading up to that, there was a lot of planning that had to be done and had to move a lot of things in my schedule. And so, then the 2 weeks post that, they were hectic. They were really, really busy. In fact, they were too busy. They were too overscheduled. And we learned from that. I talked to Courtney about it and went in and created a lot more margin between now and the rest of the year. And so, a lot of times, you're not going to get this perfect by no stretch of the imagination. You got a lot of balls in the air. You're you're leading a team, maybe even multiple companies, um, it can— things can get out of whack. And that was almost a little bit of a wake-up call for me. And, and I realized I knew that that couple weeks, um, after that was going to be busy, uh, but I was— I was— it was too much, and I didn't have any white space to think and plan. And, and I really needed that time and, and realized how much that I needed to commit to only doing a certain amount of time in the business work on a daily and on a weekly basis. And so now we've got a really good rhythm, and if something can't happen, instead of me kind of squeezing it in saying, yeah, I can make that happen, now I'm just going to give myself a lot more flex time. And I think it's a leadership discipline. And when I think about that on a weekly basis, I then want to look at what are the priorities I have in the business And am I spending time on those priorities? And so I will look at— I write out every single week what the targets are. I've shared with you all about just my thoughts around goals. I think goals become a little synonymous with wishes. And so I think for me personally, also goals, just using the word goal makes where you are today not good. And where you want to be in the future good. And that's good. Where I'm at today is bad. And that's not been healthy for me. And so that's why I specifically use, hey, these are the targets we have, these are the outcomes that we're working towards. If goals is good for you, continue to use goals. There's no problem with that at all. That's just my personal belief. And also, for whatever reason, targets and outcomes also make me think, okay, what's the plan to hit the targets and outcomes? Versus there's been so many times in my life I've just said, well, I don't want to be here, I want to be there. So I would have set that as a goal and actually not actually build a plan to get there. I'll maybe do an episode at some point in the future on, well, what does it mean to actually build a plan? So on a weekly basis, when I'm looking at the targets and the outcomes that we have, especially for the next 90 days and for the, for the next year. And then I will take a look at— I have a one-page document that has 90-day targets, critical numbers, my one-year plan, and my three-year vision all on one piece of paper. So it's not hard to keep track of this. It's not like I'm going to multiple places. I look at those things and then I'll say, well, what am I doing this week on my calendar that's going to help me move the needle towards that. And often it's not in the business stuff. Sometimes it is. Most of the time it's on the business activities. It's thinking, planning, assessing, reflecting. Is this strategy working? Is our plan working? What are the gaps and the obstacles that are in that, that we're facing that's not actually moving the needle forward? That is real. That's what, to me, that's what working on the business is. So, hopefully, that helps. I love the book E-Myth. I know a lot of you, we've tried to get Mark Gerber to come on the podcast many times. I think he's an amazing author. And he's one that really kind of introduced us initially to that concept of on versus in. But a lot of times, it's like, what does that actually mean? You know, what is on the business versus in the business? And how do I actually, I get it theoretically, but like, in the, in the weeds, what does it mean? So hopefully that serves you. And again, we go back last week, we shared what are your priorities? Where are the priorities for the next 90 days? What's the priorities for the next year? What's the priorities for the next, for the next 3 years? What's my 90-day critical numbers? What's my 1-year plan? What's my 3-year vision? And then today we talked about, well, show me your calendar. Are those things on your calendar? Are you doing things and allocating what is really the most important thing for you, and that's your personal time to move the needle forward, to get there, to actually accomplish the priorities that you've set forth in the business. Next week, we go to question number 3, question number 3 in this 5-part series. I hope this has served you. I hope all of our episodes have served you and you've gotten a good return on your time and on your attention. Grateful for you all. All right, till next episode, lead well.

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