In this Ask Evan episode, Evan Carmichael answers a Twitter viewer’s question about how to identify the activities that add the most value to a business. He explains that value should be measured by impact, which can come from deep, one‑on‑one help for a single client or from reaching a larger audience with slightly less personal connection. He advises entrepreneurs to constantly evaluate their daily tasks: eliminate unnecessary work, automate what can be automated, and delegate the rest, especially routine admin or accounting tasks. Carmichael stresses the importance of carving out regular “CEO time” each week to focus on growth‑oriented projects rather than day‑to‑day operations. He describes his own workflow of starting new initiatives, testing them, and then handing the running of those systems to his team, allowing him to move on to the next growth idea. Building systems, procedures, and a capable team so the business can operate without the founder is presented as essential, particularly for those who may eventually sell the company. He also shares a practical hiring tip: begin with a part‑time assistant (as little as one hour a day) to offload low‑value work and free up the founder’s time for higher‑impact activities. The video concludes with a call for viewers to like, comment, and submit their own questions.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. Today I'm going to answer a question from one of our Twitter readers. His name is Kyle, Kyle Van Pelt, and he wrote in saying, "How do you determine what adds the most value to your business?" Thanks for the question, Kyle. I think I may have mentioned this before, but on my way to work every day, I try to ask myself, "What can I do to add the most value to my business today?" And I find that if I'm doing things too much that is not adding a lot of value, I try to see, does this still need to be done? And if so, does it have to be me who's doing it? And again, as you're walking to your office, or however you're going in, if you're waking up and you're going off to your chair, if you're working from home, you do want to think, "How can I add the most value to my business?" Now, in terms of how to determine that, For me, what I do is I think about impact. And the two impacts that I can have is one, helping one person or one client and having it in a really meaningful way. And so spending, you know, a lot of time going in depth, adding a lot of value to help one person and hopefully touch them, you know, change their life or change their business and have a really strong impact. The other form of impact I find is hitting more masses. So having a slightly less strong connection, but still being able to help and reach a lot of people. So, an example of the first one, I might help a client or I might help an entrepreneur one-on-one, if it's a coffee meeting, and just try to really dig into their business and give them some advice. The example of the second one is doing videos like this, right? I'm in my house, I'm talking to a whole bunch of people, hi, but I'm never going to meet most of you, but hopefully there's still some kind kind of impact that I can have and give some advice, encouragement, motivation, ideas to help you grow your business. So when I'm walking to the office, I try to think, how can I have the most impact? How can I add the most value? And if I look at some of the things, especially most entrepreneurs, if you're doing a lot of admin work or accounting work, as an example, if you're doing your books, how much impact does that have, right? Are you helping people? Are you helping one person really in-depth, or are you helping a lot of people in a less impactful way, but you're helping more people at the same time? Probably not. So there's a lot of things that you're probably doing that is not helping people, that is not having a big impact, that may still need to get done, you know. So for me, the books have to get done at my company. There's a lot of admin work that has to get done. It doesn't mean that I have to do it. And you want to try to get to the point where you can either eliminate the stuff you don't need automate as much as possible and then delegate the work that still has to get done by somebody but shouldn't always be you. So for these videos, for example, my brand is me, so I'm on the videos. I wanna help answer the question. You know, you tweeted me with a question, so I wanna answer that personally. That's not something I can hand off to somebody and say, "Hey Kyle, great question. Here's my assistant who's gonna answer it for you," right? I wanna try to make that a little more personal. But there are other things that I can hand off that I have a great team and they can manage to do on their own without me. So you gotta play that, you know, I guess that balance and figure out what should be done by you where you're adding a lot of value versus what can be handed off to other people on your team. At the start, you know, you may not have a lot of money to hire somebody. The first person I hired was for 1 hour a day. You don't have to have somebody full-time. You don't have to have somebody come to your office or to your home. It can be part-time, really small, you know, an hour a day, a couple hours a week, just to unload some of the work that you're doing and give you more time to free up working on bigger projects that can help grow your business. Another thing I think about when I'm trying to think about adding value is I like starting projects and not running projects. So I'll get something going, I'll come up with a lot of new ideas. That's my main role at the company now, I guess, is coming up with ways to grow the business, and all long-term. I'll spend a lot of time testing things out, and then once I have the system kind of humming, I'll hand it off to my team to continue to run with, and then I'm off to the new project. If you're thinking about value for your business, especially if you wanna sell it, you wanna have a business that can run without you in it as much as possible. So you have systems, procedures, a team in place, a structure that the business can run without you having to be there. And so, as much as possible, I try to remove myself from the day-to-day operations of the business and focus on new growth. And for me, that's adding a lot of value to the business. So, I don't know what stage you're at with your company at the moment, but you want to try to at least carve out some time every week. I call it CEO time, where you're focusing on projects that will grow the business and not just running the operations of the company. Hopefully that'll help to answer your question. It was a great question, I really enjoyed that one. For those of you watching, if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more of these videos. And I'd love to hear what you have to think. If you want to leave a comment under the video about how you determine value and what tasks add the most value for you. And if you have a question for your own business, I'd love to try to answer it for you if you want to leave it in the comment section below. I love seeing them come in and love to hear your thoughts if you want to leave a comment below. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next episode.
