What Are You Worth? - Episode 96

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Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to raise your income, investments and life to the Next level with your host, Chris Larson. Get your free copy of his book@nextlevelincome.com book. Also, if you're an accredited investor, check out the Invest link to learn how to gain access to institutional quality real estate opportunities.

On today's show, I'm going to be talking about what are you worth? And this is really talking about how you can increase the amount of money you're making. The first step in doing this is to figure out how much money you make per year. So look, there's two ways you can determine what your time is worth. Number one, how much did you earn last year? Let's say you earned $200,000 last year. The easy way is to divide 200,000 by 50 weeks, assuming you took two weeks off by 40 weeks in 40 hours in a week. So 200,000 divided by 2,000 is $100 an hour. Also, it's pretty easy. If you make $50 an hour, you double that. That's $100 and you add 1,000 to it. So 40 times 50 after you double it. So that's two ways to figure that out. Second way is to decide what you are worth. And this is really a corollary of that. So if you're making $200,000 an hour. So let's take an example of a young investor that I spoke with yesterday. He's a medical device sales rep. He's actually making a little bit more than that. He's making about $250,000 an hour. So is he making 100, $125 an hour? No, he's actually making probably a lot more than that. And the reason I say that is because he's doing a lot of things that aren't worth $125 an hour. He's a sales rep. He makes his money selling and servicing the products, building those relationships. So what you really need to do is you need to write down all the things you do, take an inventory of a week. Chances are if he sells, he's probably only selling about 10 hours a week. He's driving his car, he's, he's talking on the phone, maybe he's inputting orders or he's doing expense reports. All these things are not really high value areas. One of my coaching clients, we went through making a lot of money, $750,000 a year. We stripped out all the time he was doing other activities and he was actually making $1,500 an hour performing the activities that actually drove revenue. $1,500 an hour. So the key, after you figure out how much money you make, is to figure out what are the revenue generating activities that are actually contributing to the amount that you make, and then you start stripping away those activities that aren't actually generating revenue. So why is this so important? This is so you can focus on those tasks that generate money and, and don't do the things that aren't really making you that. I call these $15 an hour tasks. So if you look at something called the Eisenhower matrix, this is something I used to train the sales reps that I used to work with, you have urgent and important tasks. Okay, they're either important or they're urgent. Maybe they're urgent and not important, maybe they're not important and non urgent, but they're some sort of combination. Typically your highest value tasks are going to be non urgent but important tasks. So these are things like researching investment. These are things like hiring a new person versus an urgent task. Maybe a phone call that comes in and says, hey, Chris, you got to take this call because you have this person that's upset, or you got to be here for this surgery at this specific time. That is an urgent and an important task. Those things are naturally going to schedule themselves. What you need to do is you need to make time to do more of these non urgent but important tasks. So what are some things that are examples of $15 an hour tasks that you probably shouldn't be doing? Answering incoming phone calls, Scheduling. Sending weekly or monthly emails, cleaning your house, cleaning your car, mowing your grass, grocery shopping, all these things. Can you hand those off to somebody else today? Podcast production. Okay, what about my taxes? If you're doing your own taxes, can you outsource that to somebody else? One of the number one things I hear when I talk about the next level income strategy of make more Money, Keep more money and grow your money. When I say you need to save 50%, people say it's impossible. Chris, I just don't have the time to make more money. You need to figure out ways to, to make more time in your day. So if you've already eliminated things like social media incessantly reading the news, or God forbid, watching the news, that is just going to. Not only is that going to suck your time, it's also going to suck your mood. It is not going to make you feel good watching the news. There's even been studies done that have shown that people, the more they're on social media, the less happy they are because everybody puts their best selves on social media. So we compare ourselves to those people. So if you've already gotten rid of those things and built your not to do list of things that you don't need to be doing so you can focus on the more important things in your life. Let's start to look at some of these items and how we can outsource them. So, for instance, today, if it costs me less than $50 an hour to hire somebody, I'm going to seriously consider outsourcing that. So think things like washing my car. The gentleman that comes and details my car, he comes to my house. He does a phenomenal job. He has all the equipment that would cost me thousands of dollars to buy. He has the right cleaners and right polishes and ceramic coatings that help keep my car looking good and end up saving me money in the long run. And it would probably actually cost me more if I went out and, and did that myself. This could be somebody to mow your lawn. This could be somebody to do landscaping. You know, in our personal lives, we just hired a nanny. This was a big, big step for my wife and I. We resisted this for a long time. But in the amount that we pay her for a week, we can make that back in an afternoon of doing things like having more coaching calls or. My wife's an architect. If she can work for those extra three or four hours every day, she's going to make that money back very quickly. But the big part is, what we have gained back is our quality time with our family. Instead of shuttling my kids from school to study hall to practice to another school to home, back to practice to pick up one child and maybe grabbing some food on the way home, spending money there, I get to work and be more effective for a couple more hours each day, get a workout in. And I also get to do something That I love to do, which is make dinner for my family. We have really quality time instead of trying to get away from each other. And after my kids have been bickering in the backseat of the car, poking at each other or whatever that may be. So how can you get rid of some of these $15 an hour tasks, aside from what I just mentioned, that are really low cost? What about using a grocery delivery service? Going grocery shopping, that could take five hours a week. You can outsource that, let the groceries deliver themselves. Typically, it's pretty inexpensive. You could also use a meal planning service. So we've used a couple of these over the years, like Apron, for instance, where the meals come prepackaged. They just need to be cooked. It's great. You don't have to go shopping, you don't have to prepare the food to cook. It comes in the right proportions. And a side benefit is you end up eating healthier. You could hire a cleaner to help clean your house. One of the things that I use today is a scheduling app called Calendly. And what that allows is it allows my clients they can go on, they can schedule a time that's convenient for them. I have set hours each week that they can get in there. That saves a lot of time going back and forth with emails. You can also train somebody on your staff to do that. They can go ahead and schedule time specifically. If you have that, they can also schedule in person meetings for you as well. If we roll back to when I was managing a sales territory and a distributorship, a sales distributorship in the medical device industry, you know, people are like, Chris, how do you, how do you generate the sales that you do? And the short answer is you need to basically replicate yourself. You need to replace yourself. So for instance, if I was in a surgery, there's multiple members that are part of that surgical team. One of those members is called a surgical tech. And the surgical tech, if you've ever watched Scrubs or TV show, if you're not familiar with the inner workings of an or, that's the person that gets all the equipment ready and helps prepare the surgeon. So they're handing the surgeon the equipment. So if I was participating in one of those surgeries, part of my job was not only to supply the equipment, make sure the right implants are there and in the room, and provide the technical support, but also help to train those surgical assistants, those surgical techs, to make sure that they're ready. So what I would do is actually had like kind of a mini academy that myself and my company built. So all the surgical techs, we had a partnership with the school, they would get trained on our equipment. So we would train all of them at once. They would become more familiar with it. It would save us a ton of time. And then for some reason, I couldn't be in the room where I had two rooms where I had surgeries, knowing at the same time, those surgical techs were very well prepared. And the surgeons loved it because the surgeries went a lot smoother. We also provided all the paperwork, everything for the staff, and we also set up an automated system so the POS could get processed and they automatically went through there. So if you have somebody within your company, if you're like, but Chris, I can't hire people. You don't always have to hire somebody to do these tasks. You can find somebody within the company whose job it is with technology. You can sometimes even put these technological pieces together, like email, like scheduling, and do that. And the big thing I learned from this is that people like to be empowered, they like to be relevant, they like to be good at their jobs. This is very humbling. If you're really good at what you do, you have to empower people to basically take over from you. And that's what leaders do. Leaders help others be their best selves so that they can take their skills and their talents and help spread them to more people and provide more value to more people. And having gone through it, this isn't always flawless. Takes a lot of communication, takes a lot of effort. When people do make mistakes, as they're, as they're becoming trained, as they're getting up to that portion, you have to be very supportive and you have to communicate to both parties that are, that are handling that or all the parties involved that are in that relationship to make sure that everybody stays happy. Ken Blanchard has a great book out called the One Minute Manager. And the One Minute Manager talks about exactly how to go through this process. And what happens is you empower people, you make them better. When you free up your time, when you're not doing these $15 an hour tasks, you can spend more time doing what it is that you're talented at that gives you energy the world needs more of, and that's how you're going to create maximum value. So if you've been listening, if you're struggling to find out how to make more money, how to keep more of your money, how to grow your capital so you can make that first investment, buy your first business, buy your first piece of real estate. Go back through this. Walk through the steps. Identify how much money you make, those tasks that actually are creating the true value in your profession or your business. Identify those tasks that you shouldn't be doing that you can outsource to other people. Identify the people or the technology that can help out with those tasks and then empower them and create the systems around that to give you more time to do what it is that you do that creates value in this world. Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.