143. Taking Control of Your Time With Andy Skarda

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U-I-L-E-R-N.com because as soon as our kids lives are on the line, it becomes the priority that it needs to be in that space and then we get it done.

Welcome to Professional Builder's Secrets podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. I'm your host, Will Blunt and today I'm joined by APB's head coach, Andy Scarter. Andy, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Will. Thank you for having me back.

Always love having a chat with you and all the value you can provide the audience.

Today we're talking about a topic which I believe comes up quite regularly in.

The community of builders that we work with and that's about managing time effectively. Why do you think this concept is, is such a common topic in the building industry?

There's a couple of reasons for it, but I think the fundamental reason is that even if we haven't thought it through, we kind of know in our gut that time is our most precious resource. It's the one thing that no matter how good looking we are, how matter, no matter how rich we are, we all get 168 hours in a week and you can't manufacture any more of it, you can't buy more time, you can't make more time. So it's a really, really finite resource. And if you think about it, I mean, we never know, we can, we talk about three year and five year plans, you know, life happens. So it's, it's kind of the reality is that I always tell people you can't manage time. I mean time is an independent thing. As we sitting here talking, the, the clock is ticking and there's nothing we can do to stop that. So it's, it really is a scenario of. That's. I think the fundamental reason, the other reason is that we often end up with people confusing a lack of time with a lack of planning and focus. You know, so what essentially what happens is because we don't do the strategic planning and thinking that we should, we end up gravitating back to our own comfort zones and we can always manufacture enough in that space to make us busy. And, and that then gives us the opportunity to say, I didn't have the time. But the reality, as we all know is we all get exactly the same amount of time, you know, in order to do things. So it's, it's really the movement or the thought process has to move away from how do I manage my time to how do I make sure that I focus what I'm doing in the time that I have available. And generally that'll tend to solve the problem in the long run.

Yeah, I guess what someone's saying when they tell you they don't have didn't have time to get something done is they just didn't prioritize that in their mind.

There you go. I mean, often with my clients, they'll, you know, we'll talk about something that's really important and I will say to them, let's assume that terrorists have added a biological agent to the water supply of your city. It only affects people under the age of 15 and they will die within six months unless you get your targets done in the next week. Do you think you could get your targets done? The answer is always yes, because as soon as our kids lives are on the line, it becomes the priority that it needs to be in that space and then we get it done. So, you know, it's that story of we've got to be in a place. That's why I said we don't do enough planning and strategic thinking. If we can clearly identify what is important and make sure that the things that are important get the attention they deserve, we find that our time management problem goes away.

So when it comes to builders allocating their time then and choosing where they spend their time, what are the high impact activities they should be looking at?

It's a bit difficult to answer in the broad sense, but I'll kind of give it to you this way. There are things in the business that are going to move the needle and there are things that are not. And we can't just limit this to the builder. We've got to literally be looking at it that whatever that builder's team is producing, again, within each subdivision of that team, there will be things that move the needle and things that don't. And what we mean by moving the needle is moving this business towards the outcome that the builder wants for his future. So, you know, we always Talk about this is the podcast for builders that want to grow their business safely and securely. I've started adding the third S, which is sustainably who. Because at the end of the day, I don't want to grow for six months and then stagnate. I want to keep growing and I want to be able to replicate that. So really what we're saying here is we've got to find what it is that if we do that, it will move us towards our goal for the next quarter or half year or year, whatever it is, and then make sure that a suitable amount of time is allocated to doing that thing rather than doing 10 other things that aren't going to make any difference at all. So it's, it's really prioritizing. But you, you see, you can't do the prioritization until you've done the planning because that's where you're going to, that's where you're going to come up with a pile of things that needs to be done and then you can do the prioritization. At that point.

It sounds like you've got to be. Have a really good understanding of what you actually want to achieve in your own life.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if, if my, my favorite example of how you can most effectively waste time is to watch the TV program Tiger Kings. Now I don't know if you've had the pleasure of watching any, any Tiger Kings, but I mean, I'm sure I can get away with saying this on this podcast. That is without doubt the biggest pile of crap that has ever been created cinematically anywhere in the world. And if, if you really just want to waste time, go and watch an episode of Tiger Kings. And really what I, why I brought that into the conversation now is to say that the truth is there are a lot of things that builders are doing in their day to day activity that would be better if they went and watched Tiger Kings because those things that they're doing are in some cases harmful to the business because they're getting in the way of the things that should be done that would make the difference and help that business to grow. So it's, it's, it's really important that if we don't, if we don't get the planning done, then everything else kind of from there goes downhill. It just becomes we just go through the motions on a day to day basis.

I didn't mind that show actually. I thought it was quite enthralling.

Okay, well, I mean, look, there's some, there's some Stuff in there that you just. You just shake your head and go, you know, really? But, but the point I'm trying to make is there's nothing good gonna come out of that show for anybody involved.

You know, so it's a conversation point.

I think that's probably the main thing, but.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Okay, so a builder comes to you for advice on how they can, you know, better assign their activities to the most important things that they're doing in their business. Where do you start? How do you advise them?

Well, we start with that first piece. We start with the strategic thinking. And I always, you know, people talk about strategic planning. I kind of break that into two pieces. We need strategic thinking, and then we need resource planning. And essentially every builder has the same three resources. They've got people, money, and time, which is the one we're talking about now. And they need to apply those three resources as effectively as they can to resolve the things that have come from their strategic thinking exercise. Once we've got an idea of where the builder wants to go, then I go back to their meeting rhythm, which essentially is a breakdown of the year into got our annual goal that breaks down into four quarterly goals. Each of those breaks down into three, into three monthly goals. Each of those monthlies breaks down into at least four weeklies. Each of the four weeklies breaks down into five dailies. And the reason why that is important is it's through that communication and meeting process that the same message is shared throughout the business. And at the same time, in the same way that you don't get duplication, because duplication is a waste of time. If you, if you have to do, do overs or redos and say the same thing six times rather than saying it once, everybody gets it. Obviously that's part of the way that we've got to look at it. Once we've got that. That meeting rhythm, right, essentially what that's going to do is win us back time. Because this is the other thing that we always have to keep in mind, particularly with people that come into our business coaching program. They're adding another thing to an already busy schedule. So essentially what we've got to do is one of the first things the coaches work to do is to carve out the time they need to work on the business rather than in the business. You know, some of the guys listening to this are working on the tools eight, nine hours a day, going home, grabbing a quick meal, and then doing three to four hours of office work and quoting and stuff in the evenings. It's really hard, you know, to work that out. But the point is, if we can get two things going, one, focus and priority during the day and then start to add some people to help, that probably means we don't need to be doing those four hours in the evening because we can actually get those done during our working day. So it's, it's really, you know, we talk in, in the action plan that we'll probably talk about later about the dad process, which essentially means delete, automate and delegate. And really what that's looking at is when we look at everything that's gotta be done, there's a bunch of it that actually doesn't have to be done, doesn't make any difference. Then there's a bunch of it that using software and tools, we can get that done a lot quicker and more efficiently. And then the final piece is the delegate. And that's as I say there, we have to bring in some people to help us and then get those tasks to those people so that we can focus on other things at the same time.

Talk to me more about that delegation piece. It sounds like it's very important for the owner of the company to, as you mentioned, buy back some of their time by bringing in human resources. So how do they go about that in the right way to actually give themselves more time?

Well, yeah, the right way makes the question interesting because you can abdicate, which is going to bite you in the bum very quickly. So really when we talk about delegation, again, it's an intentional planned process, it can't be off the cuff. And essentially what that means is we want to make sure that the owner of the business is, is honest enough, first of all, about everything he's doing once he's listed. And I recommend that people actually write down a list of every task that they do. We actually run with our business coaching clients a 14 day time audit where they basically summarize their calendar over a 14 day period. And what that allows us to do is to go back and look at the things they're actually doing in that time. Then we want to analyze which of those things they really love doing and are good at and put those off to one side. And then we want to come up with the things that they hate doing and they suck at. And we often find that those two are the same because they suck at them, they hate them. Because they hate them, they suck at them. And really that's what we want to get off their plates. Because forget the pure time reality of those things, they're an emotional and mental drain on people as well. If you, if you know there's something, you, you've got to do it, but you hate doing it, you procrastinate and it, it just sits on your shoulder because of that. It drains the energy out of you to be doing the other thing. So once we know what we want to get rid of, then we need to first of all write a job description for whatever that bundle of tasks is going to be. We need to set KPIs, as in, why are we bringing somebody in to help us? It's to produce this outcome. Well, okay, that outcome needs to be measurable and that would then be the KPI for that. And then this is the piece that gets interesting. Then we have to work out a training plan. Because the reality is, for the builder, he doesn't want to be in a place where he's got to go and redo everything that he's paid somebody else to do. There's no point owning a dog and barking yourself. It's crazy. If you bring somebody on board, you must take the time to set them up to succeed. And essentially what that means is, for the training period, which for most people is going to be six to eight weeks, depending on what they're doing, the builder has to understand that they've now got extra work. But the point is, if they were doing that work anyway, if they work that training plan around, demonstrating, working with and then confirming competency of the person they've brought on board, what they'll find is at the end of week one, they can offload one task and then at the end of week two, it's another one, and week three, it's another one. And what's happening there is that they are sequentially getting back more and more time as they work through that training plan. If it's properly worked out and if it's properly executed. And the reality is you don't move to the next step until that person has demonstrated their competency in what you've taught them this week. And then you can move on to the next one and build on that. It's, it's that again, it's that planning and setup process that most people end up in a place of going, I need help. And they employ somebody, they abdicate, chuck them into the deep end, they fail and then they go, ah, I might as well just do it myself. And then they, they back to where they started in that they, they basically are no bit. They're now worse off because now they've spent money to end up back in that place where they've got to do it themselves anyway. So getting that planning right, obviously is going to help. And then, you know, when we talk about delegation, there's really two directions you can delegate internally to a team member that you employ. But a really good stepping stone, if you can do it, is to use a virtual assistant or an outsourced resource where you only pay for what you get out of it, rather than paying for time. Now, that's not possible if we're talking about a carpenter or a, you know, somebody that's, that's on site for you. But certainly in a lot of the admin type things, you can do that as a stepping stone. And then when the capacity of that role gets to the point that it makes sense to bring it in house, bring it in house and go from there.

What time frame are we looking at here for the efficiency improvements from hiring new resources, say an admin role, to actually improving the bottom line, Bottom line of the building company? Because I imagine there's a lot of builders out there going, you know what, I just don't have the cash to hire someone right now. I know that if I could get someone in to do all these tasks, maybe I could refocus on sales or something like that. But it's a tough, tough scenario.

Well, and again, you've just done exactly the exercise that I'm talking about when I talk about strategic thinking. And I don't know whether you did it deliberately or not, but you answered your own question. So you can't bring another resource on until you have the spare cash to be able to cover that without it negatively affecting your bottom line. Which means you must start with marketing and sales. So you actually need to have the work in place. You might not have had to earn the money yet because you could be doing that at the same time, but you need to up the production or more importantly for most builders, the margin. You know, most builders sit under this misconception that the only way to make more money is to do more jobs. Well, we find that with a lot of people, particularly those that are quoting at low margins, you can actually do less work at a higher margin and be better off. So it's really making sure that, that we're able to deliver the profit margins that allow us to have the extra cash and then we can turn that extra cash into those resources. Again, go back to what we said earlier. We've all got the same three resources. If we want more cash, we can manufacture more cash. And that allows Us to manufacture more people, as in we can hire more people. But we still sit with the reason for this podcast and that is we can't make any more time. But by doing the planning, doing the thinking, doing the recruitment, we can get more out of the same time. I mean, you asked me a question earlier which I didn't really fully answer. Why do we even talk about delegation? Well, quite simply because no one human being, no builder on his own can achieve what needs to be done in order to get his business to where he wants it to go on his own. The, the limitations of one human being just make it completely impossible. So that, that's really the reason for the delegation thing. And you know, there's always this pushback on, ah, it's quicker and easier for me to do it myself. The first time, yes. The 16th time, no. And that's the problem is you want to get it off your plate as quickly as possible. Your question was when will they see the advantage in the bottom line at phase two? So if what I've done is I've employed somebody to take over from me on the tools to allow me to sell more, I'm not going to see an improvement until I sell more. But the fact that I've now got better capacity on site to execute more work means I can sell more. And as soon as that work rolls through the system, I will see the impact in the bottom line. And if I've trained that person properly, I, I'll see an even better impact than what I could have achieved on my own. And that's often the scary thing with delegation. We've got to get comfortable not being the cleverest person in the room. The really good delegators actually employ people who do it better than they could do it. Which is nirvana.

Absolutely. So diving into the prioritization a little bit further, you kind of touched on that in terms of like doing the two week time audit. Can you go into more details on how builders can really prioritize? Because I feel like that's a bit of a sticking point.

Sure. I mean it, it, it's a hard one to answer again, generally because everybody listening to this will be at a different point in their journey. But you know, if you look at the fact that we have some really, really excellent, award winning builders who are members of the apb, which says that for most builders, actually building a home is not a problem. But what they get tripped up on is the fact that if your marketing doesn't bring you leads that you can put through your sales process you can be the greatest builder in the world, you've got nobody to build for. And the only way that we can generate the revenue that we need to, from which to get the profit we need and generate the cash we need is if we sell stuff. So essentially what you've got to understand is if we're going to be a safe and secure and sustainable building business, we've got to have the process running all the time. Enough leads of the right quality coming into a professional sales process that works people through a series of micro commitments to contract, and then we want to execute that contract in the same way as we estimated it so that it delivers the outcome that we're looking for from a margin perspective. So if I, if I simply take that kind of linear progression, the first priority is always going to be do I have enough leads coming into my funnel. And in the absence of anything else, there's priority number one, make sure that I've got people wanting me to build for them. And when I've got that taken care of, then I've got to make sure that from the time I find them, I walk them through my sales process. So developing my sales process would be the second piece of that puzzle. And then obviously we've got to have the capacity in the construction side to be able to execute what we've sold. And then from an admin perspective, in our financial management side, we want to be able to report on what we've done. So again, let's just look at that. I'm not going to go and build the most amazing financial management system first. If I don't have any leads, there's no point. That financial management system is going to get dust on it and go rusty because there's no work coming through. So that, that is the fundamental prioritization that every builder must go through. Within each of those discipline priorities, there are going to be sub priorities based on where they're at. Have they defined their avatar, have they defined their niche? You know, in other words, all of those steps that we teach in our action plans to make sure that not only have you prioritized the correct discipline, but you've prioritized the right activity within that discipline. So to make sure that you're going to get the outcome that you're after, and if you can, again in your strategic thinking time, you've got to be honest enough with yourself to admit where the, the weaknesses and then really what you want to do is to be aiming your focused time on solving that weakness.

Where does pricing and margins come into this equation because you mentioned financial management. There's no point in doing that before you've got the sales and marketing in order. But in order to get the right type of leads through that system, you need to know how much you're charging.

Right? Are we back to planning? Okay, so in other words, I know what I'm doing today. I know I want to employ two people. I can plan what that wage or salary bill will be. I can plan whether they're in my fixed expense or my overhead structure, or are they in my cost of sales structure. In other words, are they covered by the cost of the build? That will determine how much revenue I need. If I know how much revenue I need and I've defined my niche now I know how many contracts at my average contract value I need to build in order to hit that revenue target. Well, if I know how many I need to build, I also know how many I need to sell. So it's again, this reverse cascade of when you are doing that planning. You can see I can get jobs easily at 10%, but at a 10% margin, I've got to do 20 jobs. If I can push that margin up to 20%, I only have to do six jobs. And don't check my math on this. I'm just pulling numbers out of the sky. But the point I'm trying to make is in that planning stage is where you can run the scenarios. And essentially what that'll show you is you can stay in the space where everybody is competing and the margins are small and, and we're all fighting for a bit of that pie. Or we can move over here, where it may be your sales cycle is going to be a bit longer, but there's less competition. And that is where your particular expertise and specialties will shine. Well, that's the place where you really want to be putting your effort, and that's where you're going to get the highest margin. And the higher the margin you get, the sooner you can invest back into the business to actually make those changes.

For the listeners out there that aren't familiar with all of our education around pricing and margins and things like that, are you referring to gross margin and what's the target gross margin that they should be going for?

If we're talking new builds, new custom homes, we'd be looking at a minimum of 25% gross margin. So that's a 33 and a third percent markup. If we talking renovation or remodeling, we'd be talking about a 35% mark. Margin, which is a 54% mark up. And the only reason that we add that extra margin on the renovation and remodeling side is that often, well, not often, you are exposing yourself to a greater degree of risk working with an existing building that you have no historical knowledge of than what you are if you are building a new, you know, a new build on, on a clean slate kind of deal.

Cool.

Thanks for clarifying. Back to time management, are there any easy wins out there? I know it's hard to generalize, but what are some common tasks that builders can just eliminate out of their daily routine, do you think?

Well, I mean, one that comes up often is email. And you know, the reality is that if you are going to be in control of your future, then you are going to tell your time what happens in that time, not the other way around. And the danger with email is that it's very, very easy to get sucked into external forces running your day. So, you know, just being disciplined enough to say, I'm going to allocate twice a day or three times a day where I'm going to do an email sprint and essentially I've got 50 minutes. I will go through it, I'll triage it, I'll find the most important things, I'll clear them out, as many of them as I can in that first 50 minute sprint. And if I don't get through all of them, that's okay because I've got another one coming later. And then when I come back later, I'll double check that nothing is more important, get through the rest and away we go. You know, we, we work, as you know, on a 24 hour a day clean inbox scenario. I won't pretend I always get that right. But what I do find is that when it goes over, I'll often go back and look at things and go, I've got email here that really is of, it might be of some vague interest to me, but it does nothing in terms of affecting the realities of what I'm doing every day. So email is a big one. The other one is to try and reduce your, your interruptions. The science on this says that if you busy with something, particularly if it's deep thinking stuff, which if we're talking strategic thinking and so on, that's going to be what that is. The numbers are that it takes you 23 minutes to get back to where you were after an interruption, excluding the time of the interruption. So if we can get to a place where we are not being interrupted during the day, that's going to win us back time. And that goes back to what I said earlier about our meeting rhythms. You know, we, we talk a lot about daily huddles and weekly huddles. And the reason for that is if I can spend 20 minutes or 30 minutes in a focused communication time with my team in the morning and that sets everybody up to be able to run their day on their own, well that means nobody's getting interrupted. And I think a lot of people listening to this podcast are going to be nodding at this point because they know they're getting text messages and phone calls from site six times a day. This hasn't arrived. What do I do about this? Do I need to do this today? Et cetera, et cetera. Get that taken care of at 7am on the phone or on a zoom call or whatever and then everybody gets on with their day. And obviously you don't have those interruptions happening. The other side we spoke about earlier, automate as much as you can. Now again, you can't automate until you've systemized, right? There's no piece of software that can create the system for you. What the, what the software does for you is it takes your system and it automates it. So you've again got to do the planning work to work out the system. And then I mean there's a bunch of software out there on every conceivable piece of a business that you can think of that can help you in that space once you've got the system worked out. So that's, that's kind of the top of mind things that I think would apply to everybody.

In terms of the email inbox, are there any rules that you have in terms of priority of looking at emails or dealing with things for a builder?

Well, I mean, I think this would apply probably to builders listening to this. Anyway, I prioritize everything from clients first. So if it's a client interaction and I can generally by just skim reading it, see from a client, is it urgent or is it something that can wait? And obviously if it's urgent, I'm going to get into that as quickly as I can. Cascading from clients would be prospective clients would be the next piece as in sales related activity. Then it's going to go back to probably financial management type activity, then to human resources and then to kind of general knowledge. You know, I keep, I keep getting invited to things that I don't want to go to. You know, again I've got to deal with that email in some way. I've got to open it, I've got to check that I've understood it and then get rid of it or whatever, file it. But if, if, if that has to wait a week, it makes no difference. Nothing changes if I don't resolve that email. But a client with a problem that they desperately need help in, that I must get onto as quickly as I possibly can.

Yep, makes a lot of sense. You touched on software and technology helping builders be more productive. Can you give any examples of ones that maybe you're seeing builders use to help with some of their systems?

Well, I mean, the one that is such a wonderful example of everything we've been talking about is that a lot of our builders will use project management software for the build. Now, you know, we have builders that come to us and say, oh, I lack systems. And I always just shake my head because the complexity in building a home, it's not possible to build a home without a system. You know what I mean? So builders who say, oh, I can't work out systems, that's absolute nonsense. You are far better at it than you give yourself credit for merely by the fact that you managed to build a home or remodel a home. So essentially what we're saying there and why it's such a good example is we, whether you're using co construct or BuilderTrend or, you know, WonderBuild or any of those, what they're effectively doing is taking the system you have worked out and automating that for you, giving you the checklists, giving you the reminders, those kind of things so that you don't have to do it yourself. So that's that project management software. And of course what we preach is that you get your clients involved with their project as early as possible because that builds the excitement as they see that project starting to come together and their kitchen numbers going in and the design happening. And it, it, it's exciting for them obviously to see it happen. So that's the easy one. But I mean, really, we, we, we've done many discussions on things like AI. The amount of stuff that AI can now do for you in the marketing space, for example, even in answering emails, creating templates, you creating standard operating procedures, I mean, it, it, it's phenomenal. And again, not that our members or, or the people listening to this podcast couldn't do that themselves, but there's nothing worse than that blank screen syndrome of I know I've got to create an SOP4 fill in the dots. Where do I start? Now that Is where, where AI and particularly the chat GPT, the generative stuff is really good because, because I can just ask that what should an SOP for setting up a building site look like? And it'll spit something out which maybe I can only use 40% of it, but it gets me past that white screen syndrome and I can then get into it and actually get it resolved. So using those kind of things to save time is, is, is huge. And then I mean, obviously accounting software is a, an absolute must in our industry. Absolutely critical. There's some really, really good scheduling tools in the marketing space for getting your, your content onto social media, those kind of things. Again, anything we can do that is do once and forget and you know, the automation will take care of it. That's buying us back part of that limited resource that we can then use for other things. And you know, one thing just popped into my head while we're talking about that. When we're talking about delegation, the rule of thumb is if you have somebody in your organization other than you who can do the task, they should. So we're going to have different people, people at different stages of evolution listening to this. Some of them are doing everything themselves. In which case, sorry, you are the best option because you are the only option. Yeah, but, but if, if I'm in a situation where I've got two or three people on my team and somebody else on my team can do the thing that is in front of me now, I should be pushing it to them and, and I should stay focused on those higher priority things that are going to move the needle more.

It's a good way to think about it. I guess that that makes you question every task you're doing as you do.

Absolutely. And I mean that, that's the other thing. There, there's, there's a lot of stuff, I mean the, the eight words that, that sync so many businesses are. That's the way we've always done it. You know, again, your strategic thinking process needs to be on at least an annual basis, if not a quarterly review basis. Is this even still necessary? You know, like, is this adding anything, any value while we're doing this? And we find often, particularly if you're in the stage where you've got a team, there was something that was important two years ago that you asked a team member to start doing. It's no longer important, they're still doing it. And that's getting in the way of them being able to do the things that are important now because they're so Busy working. Well, we've got to be going back and looking at what are we busy doing? And really, in this space, the question should never be, is somebody busy? The question should always be, are they effective? Are they delivering on the KPIs that we've allocated to that role? And if they not, I don't care how busy they are. We need to stop them being busy and get them to be effective. And, and that in a lot of cases will solve the old time management problem. I think Peter Drucker is quoted as saying, there's nothing worse than doing something really well that doesn't need to be done in the first place. And that's the danger. We can, we can be really, really good at things that don't move the needle, in which case just stop. And we talk about this in our, in our time management training, we talk about having a stop doing list. What. What are you going to stop doing that's not moving the needle to give you the time to do the things that will move the needle, which is another critical side of this, this whole discussion.

That's the way we've always done it. I had to count on my fingers whether that got to eight words. I was stuck at seven for a while. But I think if you don't use apostrophes, you're good.

There we go. That is the way we've always done it. Well, that gets to nine, actually. So there you go.

Maybe one.

Fact checking me on the podcast. There we go. Oh, very good.

You couldn't see my fingers. I was counting underneath the camera. Andy, you've delivered so much value on this podcast about improving productivity and better managing time. But what's the best way for builders to continuously improve in this space?

Plan and then review daily. I mean, I have a habit that I shared with our elite clients at, not our most recent strategic retreat, but the previous one, which is called the One Hour Solution. And essentially what it means is I allocate 30 minutes, first thing on a Monday to to plan my week. And I plan all of my week. I plan how many times I want to go to the gym. I plan whether I'm taking my wife out for a date. I plan what I'm doing with my kids in terms of sport and recreation and extracurricular stuff. I plan anything in my spiritual life that needs attention that week. Notice the order. And I plan what is important in my business. That order is deliberate. That's not. Oh, I got to the business last by mistake. No, no, no. I got to the business last because in that list of priorities, it is last. But what I do is in each of those areas, I will set up two or three priorities for the week. So there's 30 minutes of my one hour solution, then I go every day and I take five or six minutes to review that, to make sure that I achieved yesterday what I needed to and to make sure that I know clearly what I need to achieve today. And then I prioritize the most important thing for the earliest time in the day that I can get it done. So in my weekly prioritization, I prioritize to the beginning of the week. And in my daily prioritization, I prioritize to as early in the day as possible. And if you've got that cascade from annual planning to quarterly to monthly to weekly to daily, that process will make sure that, that you stay. It's, it's literally revisiting it on a daily and weekly basis to make sure that you're on track. And I mean, the other final hack that I would talk about is make sure you give yourself some flexibility. You know, nothing is going to run exactly to plan. You know, we're talking about life here. Life happens and it's unpredictable. So I, for example, don't ever give myself five days worth of priority. I give myself four days worth. I don't give myself 13 weeks of rocks in a, in a quarter, I give myself 10. Okay. And that just gives you that little bit of wiggle room, weather, sickness, vacation, whatever. It, it still means that you can stay on track and get achieved. I mean, you think about it, even if it's a small thing, if you set yourself one thing a week to improve in your business and you stuck to that, where would your building business be in a year's time? It's that, that's the process that you really want to, want to get on. So it's take the time to plan, which everybody goes, oh, I've got no time. Okay, if we ate bad shrimp last night and you were on the toilet all morning because of that bad shrimp, what would happen? Your business would carry on, take a morning, pretend you had bad shrimp, take a morning, do the planning, and then break that down into those bite sized chunks and Nike it, just do it.

I love the concept of creating flexibility as well, because inevitably you're going to need it.

Absolutely. I mean, granny didn't teach us to save for a rainy day. You know, without a reason, it's going to rain. I mean, things are going to happen. That's just, that's life. Let's Let, let's plan for those unplanned eventualities. That's essentially what we, what we say, and that's really, that's what it is. We're being proactive. We, we are happening to our week instead of sitting there and taking what our week throws at us.

I think the other big takeaway for me there is, is you have to stick to the process, though. If you've got those things daily, you can't skip it one week or skip it one day because then it just breaks the whole system down.

Correct. And that's. And the flexibility will give you if something comes up and you have to, you're not going to be overwrought because you've actually got, you know, you've got some time built in where you can catch up.

Perfect. Well, a ton of value there. Andy, on managing time more efficiently for builders, you mentioned an action plan earlier. Is that the best place for people to go next?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good starting place. We have an action plan for our members called how to manage your time and, and efficiency. And really a lot of the concept we've spoken about that, you know, the, the dad principle, prioritization, all of those kind of things is in there. To be honest, I'm not 100% certain whether that's one of the free downloads that we offer, but certainly all of our members that are listening, if, if this has resonated, you know, that's, that's where I would go. And of course, I always get into trouble for it. But if you're not yet a member of the apb, you should be. And if you were a member of the apb, you could then go to that action plan and obviously it could change your life, literally.

Well, I think the big difference from a podcast episode to what they would get in there is like, it steps it out, step at a time and actually implement this system in your company.

So, yeah, I mean, we've spoken about the broad concepts. What that's going to give them is an actual game plan to get it done, which, which is always helpful.

Perfect. Well, we'll include a link to that.

Action plan in the show notes. But Andy, thanks once again for coming on Professional Builder Secrets.

Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure.

Also, a big thank you to our listeners wherever you are in the world. If you like the show today, please subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your platform of choice. And if you're feeling generous, leave us a review.

But until next time, have a great day.

Today's episode of Professional Builder Secrets is brought to you by Build Earn Construction Management Software. Build Earn isn't just another software. It's a comprehensive or all in one solution designed to make every step of the construction process as smooth as possible. Whether you're estimating to win proposals, focusing on project management, or tracking financials, Build Earn has you covered with Xero and QuickBooks, two way integrations, invoicing, takeoff, client communication, and many other features. Build Earn ensures that every project runs efficiently. Learn more about build earn@buildurn.com that's B-U-I-L--E-R-N.com.