Ep: 305: How I Evaluate Business Opportunities

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing. This is episode 305, how I evaluate business opportunities. So this is gonna be a little bit different. I'm not gonna talk about ofs. Well, I probably will. I want to talk about living the four hour work week. So I've talked quite a few times about how I've worked about 17 hours a week for a really long time. It's been since 2008, 2010, that I really, really doubled down on working this, living this lifestyle. And I'm good at it. And I've set up my life now that I don't really know if I could work 40 hours a week. But getting there required some specific things. And there are some definite decisions that I have made and some purposeful things that I do to keep me there. And I get people asking me all the time, like, hey, will you talk about this? Talk about how you live this, talk about your decisions, talk about what you do and don't do. And so in the coming weeks and months, I'm gonna have a series that I'm. I won't really call it a series, but I'm gonna talk about how I live this lifestyle. What are the things that to get myself to working 17 hours a week, to where I have full flexibility, full time flexibility, and financial flexibility to do whatever I want. For example, three weeks ago we went on a 10 day trip with my family and when I got back, I was home for a couple days and decided, oh, I'm gonna go float a river, which was a five and a half day trip. I got back a couple days ago and I'm home for a week. And then we go to Powell for 10 days, to Lake Powell for 10 days boating. And that's really just kind of how my summer goes. I'm home a little bit and then I'm on vacation and then and that. And I can do that while not working. I mean, I'm not working while I'm on the river at all. I'm not working while I'm at Powell at all. I didn't work really at all while we were on the 10 day trip. Last year we went to Europe for a month riding our bikes. I didn't take a laptop with me. I did almost no work. And so I want to talk about how I accomplished that. So today I'm going to talk about how I evaluate business opportunities because I feel like this is a foundational piece of what I do because I see so many people, in fact, I see most people going about business in a way that will not allow you to work, to live the four hour work week. So recently I wrote down a list of like, specific things that I do and here's number one of 12 actionable things that you can do to get your working time down. So when I evaluate a business opportunity, I know there's always something bigger, there's something sexier, there's something easier, there's something that's going to make you so much money, you just have to dive in and get it done. And I don't agree. The part that most people miss is that time is more valuable than money. You can't buy time, you can't get more time, you can't make more time, you can't, you can't do more things by having more money if your money is strapping your time. So how do you keep your time free while still making money? Here's what I have done. I have two rules. Number one, never ever sell time for money. And number two, evaluate every business decision based off of the question, who's going to do the work? Who does this require? Is it me or is it someone else? So rule number one, never sell time for money. So selling time for money is any time you're required to do work in order to get paid. And I'm going to name names here, and this is going to be painful for a lot of people, but attorneys, chiropractors, doctors, agencies, service oriented businesses. Anytime you are providing a service to someone that because you're an expert, someone comes to you and says, hey, I want you to do this, and you're like, okay, I'll do that. It's going to cost you this much. Anytime you sell yourself, you're selling your time for money. And the problem here is time's limited. There's only so much time in the day. And it's not just that there's only so much time in the day, there's only so much time that you want to give other people and then there's always someone else willing to do it cheaper. Not that you can't raise your price because you can. I mean, so let's talk about an attorney who makes 500 bucks an hour. That's cool. But I make $5,000 an hour. So just be aware. I'm not saying these businesses are bad. I'm not saying it's bad to be an attorney or a dentist or a chiropractor or a realtor or whatever it is. I'm not saying that's bad. I'm just saying that you're gonna have to make some really big changes in order to get your time down to the four hour work week. As long as you're selling your time, there's only so much time there is to be sold. So now rule number two is evaluate every business opportunity based off of who has to do the work. Is it me or is it someone else? So every time I have this, I have an opportunity to add a feature or to create a business or to pursue a partnership or anything of the sort. The first thing I look at is when it comes down to it, when the rubber meets the road, who's responsible here? Do they want, does it require my time or can it be someone else's time? I always feel like it's okay if it requires my initial time of thinking, of planning, of doing the hard mental work, but no actual physical work. And I'm okay if it requires my initial time and then no ongoing time or no ongoing brain power. But if it requires me to be there to answer, to continue to do things with it, to continue to talk to customers, or to sell customers, or to bring them in, or to make sure they're okay, or to evaluate what they're doing, if it continues to require me, and people want me as the expert, they want an expert. I'm not interested. To me, ongoing, committed time sucks the life out of me. Now maybe you don't feel that way. Maybe you love that commitment, the time commitment to other people. Just recognize that it's really hard to live the four hour work week if you're always time committing. So to me there are two ways where I decide if it requires my time. Number one, if I feel like it's completely automatable with either software or ofs. And then number two, if there are clients involved, if there are clients involved, like anything that's high ticket or you know, if it's expensive, then people expect a really high level of me and I just don't want to do it. I don't care how much money it makes. So there you have my framework for how I make business decisions. I have two things. I won't sell time for money. And I question who has to do the work here. Is it me or is it someone else? Now just recognize, I know I name names in this. I don't feel like those businesses are bad. I don't feel like you need to change your profession. If you're a realtor or whatever, don't do that. Just try and find ways where you can hand as many things off as you can so that you're only doing the super, super high value tasks.