228: Return on Time: The Mindset Shift That Changed My Business

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast, your go to resource for mastering the art and science of Digital Product Entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks, constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there Destiny here. Welcome back to the Creators MBA Podcast and today I want to walk you through one of my biggest mindset shifts that have helped me build a business I can actually sustain without that burnout, without constantly starting over, and without chasing those shiny objects every single week, which is very difficult for me. And if you have ever looked around and wondered how do some entrepreneurs seem to do it all while I am stuck in the figuring it out phase, let me tell you, it is not just about systems or better, time management. It really comes down to how you think about your time and what you expect in return. And I'm going to walk you through all of this today. So most of us are told to focus on roi, meaning our return on investment. And I would say absolutely yes, that matters. But here's the truth. No one tells you about the early stages of business. That ROI is terrible at first. You're spending time setting up funnels that may not be converting yet. You are publishing content that barely gets any views. You're sending those emails that may be going ignored. And that is completely normal. So I started asking a different question. Not what will give me the biggest roi, but what gives me the best return on time. So now when I look at a project or task that I need to work on, I kind of run it through three simple filters. Number one, does this actually move the business forward? Number two, do I really want to do it? Number three, am I good at it? Or is it something that I am forcing? And this shift has saved me from from wasting months on things that feel productive but don't actually create momentum. And it's one of the reasons why I have paused social media for my personal brand, said no to launching on Product Hunt for our newsletter Profit Club collaboration app. Even though I really wanted to do that and really focused on things that I knew were really driving results in my business. Like for the most part skipping bundles and only saying yes to certain summits that bring in the right people. Because time is a resource for me and unlike money, you can't get that back. So I built both of my businesses hobby school and my personal brand, which is my destiny brand, around what I call rinse and repeat system that Runs off of one core tool and that is my promotional calendar. That calendar tells me what I'm selling, when I'm promoting it. And it also help drives the content that supports all of that. So instead of reinventing the wheel every single month, I anchor everything around these core promotions and the rest of the content and everything that I do basically flows out from there. So here's what that looks like in real practice. So for hobby school, we run five live summits this year. Each one of them promotes a VIP pass and it ties into one of our memberships. I have weekly newsletter, podcasts, blog posts, and all are created to support that particular summit topic. For example, if we are running the Monetize youe Craft Summit, then the newsletter that week, it is focused on how to make money from your creative work. The podcast the same topic, the blog the same. And here's the kicker. I am not creating new content just for fun. I'm doing it because it directly supports what we are selling. And then for my personal brand, I host live webinars almost every single month to promote my memberships, which are the Digital Product Growth Lab and the Newsletter Profit Club. And in between these webinars, I also drive traffic to tripwire funnels or promote the workshops. I should say that we're doing in these memberships and people can either buy them separately, which is a lot higher price, or they can join the membership and get that content for free. So all of the content that I'm producing, whether it's my podcast content, my newsletter content, it is always aligning with what I am doing that particular month. And if something works like I run a particular webinar, I don't reinvent it, I repeat it and I optimize it. So I really try to do those 1% tweaks every single month. And as I've gone through everything and looked at what I was doing this time last year to now, and looking at all the improvements I have made, they have really added up over time. So here's what I do. I do a weekly time audit and really every Friday I sit down and I ask myself what moved the needle this week? What drained my time but didn't deliver any results and what is worth doubling down on. And then I break my time into four different buckets. One would be revenue generating activities, then the next bucket would be admin type stuff. The third bucket would be learning and planning. And then the fourth bucket would be busy work that is disguised as progress. And once you see that breakdown, I think the decisions become much Clearer. For example, do I build out another 15 digital product for my Shopify store or do I double down on a summit that's already brought in over $20,000 in VIP pass cells alone? So that's not even a question anymore. And here's where it gets even more powerful. One thing I've started doing this year is evergreening our events. We put so much work into these events. Lining up speakers, writing the emails, building the funnels. So I wanted a way to get more mileage out of them, basically that rinse and repeat model that I've been talking about. So here's what we did after the live summit ended. We are repurposing that into an evergreen version. So everything basically stays the same. So we're not having to reinvent the wheel, but in the months where we are not running an event for the first time, like for instance last month we reran the monetize your craft summit that we did earlier this year. And in fact it was in January of this year. We re ran it in June so everything was done. We didn't have to do very much to set it up. And we ran it like a live event. I ran Facebook ads to the event. We had all of the speaker presentations set up. So the day one expert speaker presentations go live on day one, people have 24 hours to watch them for free. Did that the same for day two and day three. So we ran it like we would a typical live event, but it was evergreen, right? We have already done all that work. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel there. And then we use that summit to guide people into our part time passion club which is our membership for people who want to monetize. So that one week of live work now becomes a lead generator in a revenue stream that we can use over and over and over again. So if you want to start applying this to your own business, here is what I recommend for you. Number one is audit your time. I want you to track how you actually spend your work hours this week. Not how you wish you would spend them, how you really do. And then I would rate your activities. You can use a simple like 1 to 10 scale. So 8 to 10 might be high ROI type activities where you are working on maybe sales, working on your offers, working on your marketing medium. ROI return on time might be 5 to 10 where you're working on admin support type stuff that just has to get done supporting your clients, your students. And then low return on time might be something that you would rate between 1 and 4 which might be scrolling on social media focusing on perfection. I definitely had to let that go for sure. And really overthinking and over researching sometimes you just got to put a stake in the ground and move on, test it and see if it works. And then what I would encourage you to do is to make one shift trade 30 minutes of these low return on time type activities for 30 minutes of high return on time type work. So maybe do some less inbox time and more pitch emails, less canva tweaking and more client conversations, less new project planning and more repeating what already works. And then every single week on Friday is when I do it, do a review and ask yourself what gave me the biggest return this week, what drained me for no reason and what gets my best hours next week. And I think when you are shifting just 1% of your time, you will make a noticeable difference over the next 30 to 60 days. And I would say that the hardest part about return on time thinking isn't the math, it's omitting that half the things we do every single day don't really matter. They're not moving the needle for you in your business. So we're focused on this busy work because it feels productive. But your business doesn't care how busy you are, it only cares about results. And the rinse and repeat system absolutely works because it protects my time from everything that doesn't move the needle. It also gives me space to rest and that is so important and it helps me stay profitable even when I am teaching, maybe full time or traveling. I'm doing a lot of travel in July here, so if you want help building your own rinse and repeat model, come and join us inside of the Digital Product Growth Lab. I'd love to help you map out your calendar, your core offers, and exactly what content you need to support them all without overwhelming you. Thank you so much for listening today and I just want everybody to remember you have the same 24 hours as everyone else but how you spend them, that is what will set your business apart. Talk with you next week and bye for now. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you like the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.