In this solo episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast, host Bradley Hamner walks small business and insurance agency owners through a practical "time and energy audit" inspired by Dan Martell’s book Buy Back Your Time. He explains how to capture every daily task for two weeks, then rate each task on two axes: (1) whether it gives or drains personal energy (green vs red) and (2) its business value, expressed as $‑sign tiers ($1‑$4). The audit reveals that many routine activities are both energy‑draining and low‑value, prompting owners to create playbooks and systems to delegate those tasks. Hamner provides a downloadable Google Sheet/Notion template for listeners, emphasizes the importance of spending more time on green, $4‑sign activities to accelerate growth, and advises delegating the red, $1‑sign tasks. The episode also includes promotional segments for Club Capital’s accounting and advisory services for insurance agencies and Coach P Consulting’s high‑touch coaching program. The overall message is that awareness of how time is spent, combined with strategic delegation, is a fast‑track to scaling a profitable agency.
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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. Hey, before we get into today's episode, did you know that Club Capital is the largest accounting advisory firm for insurance agency owners in the country, providing monthly accounting, CFO services, and tax preparation. Check them out at club.capital.
Hey, what's up everybody? All right, so a couple weeks ago I talked about a time and energy audit. I mentioned it in one of the episodes, and so I wanted to give you some of the details around that. So one of the programs, or one of my coaches, is Dan Martell. He's came out with a great book called Buy Back Your Time. And one of the things he actually recommends in there is doing a time and energy audit. This is something I really wish I had known years ago because I just never thought about it in such a simple way. And so the idea is that we're going to do this cross-section between the things that we love to do that give us energy and also the things that don't give us energy. And I think what's interesting about it is it's not, um, it's one or the other, right? There's no neutral to it. It's either giving you energy or it's taking energy away from you. And we're talking about the task that you do on a daily basis. But the second component to this that you want to be able to think about is, uh, the value of that task in the business. And so whenever you begin to do this, like if you especially if you take, say, 2 weeks of capturing this, that's 10, roughly 10 business days of doing it. I've had a couple of clients do this and within 24 hours they were sending me Voxer messages saying, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea I was actually doing some of the things." It's like an awareness that we don't realize that we have. And so for me, myself, what I did what was really helpful to me is not so much that I realized that these tasks were draining to me, but it was more so for me to be able to add the second layer, which is what is the value of this task to the business? Is it actually moving the business forward? And so once you do this and you begin to see these are the tasks that drain me and they are the lowest value task, you can begin to create some assets. Playbooks, systems— I love to call them playbooks— to delegate that off of you. Now, how do you do that? How do you actually give that to somebody else? I mean, that's all for another episode. But back to the time and energy audit. I think one of the biggest things for me, and it's certainly been true for the clients, is that they just did not have an awareness of the things that they were doing on a daily basis. Paperwork that was making it to their desk because that's the way it's been for 20 years. And so for the first time, because they're aware and they're actually capturing either on paper or into a Google Sheet for the first time, they're actually having to write it down and then say, okay, wait a minute, does this task give me energy or does it take energy away from me? And it became really shocking for a lot of people as they look down over the course. And if you do this right, you're going to end up with, you know, if it's in a sheet or if it's on a piece of paper, you'll end up with several pages, uh, 2 or 3 pages if you're writing down everything that you do. Many things that you do on a rate, uh, do, you're going to do repeatedly on a day-to-day basis. So they're writing this down and they start to see, oh my goodness, there's a lot of red on this. There's not as much green as I thought, and there's a lot of red that are one or $2 sign activities, the ones that are green that you really love to do and they're $3, if not $4 sign activities, if we can get you to be able to spend more of your time in that zone, that's ultimately what's gonna grow the business. That's what's gonna accelerate the business forward. And here's the thing, there's only a handful of those activities that are there. We think that we have to be tied to all of these other things, because that's just the way that we've been doing it for a long time. So the first step, if you want to begin, you know, there's a lot of conversation around how do you delegate better, etc. And I'm not saying that that's not important, but it is so important for you to take the first step of doing a time and energy audit. If you're in our Leadership Podcast community, I'm actually just gonna post in the comments a link to a Google Sheet that, uh, that you can use. We created, uh, did initially did on, on paper, and then I put it into Notion. Some people don't, uh, use Notion, don't have access to Notion, and so we put it into a Google Sheet. So if you're in our Leadership Podcast Community, I'm going to link it in there for you to be able to have. So hopefully this helps, but even if you don't have access to that asset, still take a notebook, have it in one place, it doesn't need to be in multiple places. Go for 2 weeks, do a time and energy audit. Is it red? Is it green? And then is it a $1 sign, $2 sign, $3 sign, or $4 sign activities? The more you can spend in activities that are green and $4 sign, the quicker your business is going to grow. Everything else, especially those $1 sign red activities, let's find a way to get those, uh, get those tasks off of you, transfer it to someone else. All right, everyone. Hope this helps. Till next episode, lead well.
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