Gain More Time to Scale Your Moving Company

These days, our tech, which has amazing capabilities to help us with our time, seems to be stripping away our time. It's a problem. It's a problem for your productivity, it's a problem for your profits, and it's a problem for your peace of mind. And today I want to talk about how we could stabilize your time so that your focused on the most important, impactful stuff in your business and your life without the distractions and the noise of the outside world. So it's really, really important that you know before you start scaling, you get these two things in line. Today we're talking about stabilizing your time and your tech. And you might say, louis, why are we putting time and tech together? Yesterday we went over people and processes. If you haven't seen that, go watch the replay. But today we're talking about time and tech because these days, our tech, which has amazing capabilities to help us with our time, seems to be stripping away our time, seems to be holding us back from the things that we really want to accomplish in our life. And today I want to talk about how we could stabilize your time so that you're focused on the most important, impactful stuff, you in your business and your life, without the distractions and the noise of the outside world. That has nothing to do with your focus, your agenda, where you want to go in your life. So it's really, really important that you know before you start scaling, you get these two things in line, right? The last thing you want is to take on more, open more offices, get more trucks, whatever that means for you, and not stabilize your time, right? How you manage your time with intention, with focus, with clarity. How you handle your tech as a tool and not a distraction, right? Because I'm a big believer that, you know, we all have the same 24 hours in the day, right? We all know that. But I remind myself of that all the time. Because it's not that you need more time, it's that you need to be more intentional with the time that you have and set up systems and processes and ways and structures around how you manage yourself within the time you have as opposed to trying to manage time. You can't manage time. You can manage yourself within the time you have. You've got to set that stuff up for success, right? You know, a lot of people could say, hey, Louis, I like to be spontaneous, and I like to be, you know, just kind of, you know, go with the flow. Well, that's great. And if you're able to manage your time, you could carve out space for going with the flow. But if you're going to run a business, a successful business, you need to set yourself up for success, right? You know, as a business owner, there's, there's, there's some freedom and then there's perceived freedom. There's this idea that we've got all this additional time, right? We could, you know, choose what we want to do with our schedule. The problem with that is when we don't have anyone telling us where to be and what to do, as if we, you know, we worked for somebody else or we were in school, we're left to figure out, moment by moment what to do. And the key to long term success and sanity is to design that plan in advance so that you're not deciding moment by moment what it is you need to do, right? I mean, I remember when my days consisted of, you know, putting out fires with my team, sitting down, pulling up emails, just going through one, going through the next, going through the next, maybe finishing the email, sitting there and be like, okay, what do I do next? Right, what's next? It's a problem. It's a problem for your productivity, it's a problem for your profits and it's a problem for your peace of mind, right? We want to get to that next level, but we want to do it in a way that is less stressful, right, and less of a grind than how we got to our current level. My first few years in business were chaotic, right? Grind, hustle, grind, hustle. But you know, in order to get to that next level, you've got to go beyond grind and hustle, right? You got to take a step back and say, okay, what do I need to do to set myself up for success, right? If you were a train and you're running through the desert, right, with no tracks, it's like bump, it's a bumpy road, right? You're probably going to tip over a few times. What you have to do is you have to design and lay down those tracks so you can run smooth, right? And that's what, you know, quote unquote time management is all about. It's about setting up structures around yourself so that you could succeed on a day to day basis without constantly going, what's next? All right, I finished that. What do I do now? Because what happens there is we live in the land of reaction. Putting out fires, answering calls, playing ping pong with people, with email, right? Email you, email me back. Email you, email me back. Check off checklist, check off checklist, check off, checklist and it feels productive. But then we look back after a few months, after a few years, and we're like, why haven't I made the progress that I want to make, Right? So, you know, that's why we're talking about your time, and that's why we're also going to talk about your tech. Because, you know, without getting these things in line, you know, it's about setting yourself up for the next phases, right? We're stabilizing right now. Then we're going to move on to systematizing, getting all your systems in place, all right, so that things run smooth, consistently, automatic, predictable. Then we scale it is the only way to go about doing this. All right, so I got a few points here today, a few things I want to give you to think about and to start implementing. So let's talk about stabilizing your time. First thing we're going to talk about is block time. Okay? Block time. What block time is, Is it's taking a look at your calendar, okay? Whether you've got, you know, a calendar on the wall, whether you've got a calendar on your desk, whether you've got a calendar on your phone or on your computer, I suggest pulling it up on the computer and blocking time in your days to work on the stuff that's truly important. This is our first step of taking control of the 24 hours we have in a day. It's to say, let's look at these 24 hours and let's decide in advance what's going to help our cause and what we're trying to accomplish in life. And let's make sure that there are blocks of time, the calendar, to do that. Right? You know, maybe you haven't had time to review your numbers. And because of that, you know, there's. There's some things that are hurting your business, and there's some opportunities that are being missed. Right? You don't have the clarity of knowing what's truly going on. How do you solve that? You're never gonna wake up. There's never gonna be a day where you wake up and go, you know what? Today I'm just gonna get to reviewing my numbers. It's gotta be a block on the calendar, whether it's weekly, whether it's monthly, and it's gotta be a block that is there. And in that block, you work on that certain thing. Let's call this one my numbers. Right? Metrics and numbers. You should have a block on your calendar for metrics and numbers Marketing. You know, maybe you haven't had time to look into new sources or you need to really kind of review what you've got going on and make some adjustments for it. There needs to be a block for that, right? Because otherwise the whole day is just based on reaction and things that are happening in the outside world or within your organization. Because when you set up a business and now you got this employee, that employee, this employee, and you've got all these people going, it's so easy to just show up to the office. It feels like they kind of hook into you and just. They pull you around. Come on. We got this problem, we got this issue. We got this thing, and you're putting out fires. You're handling it. You're feeling super productive. You're like, yeah, I'm on top of it. Good thing I was here today. But the needle movers, the things that are really gonna, like, permanently solve those problems and create predictability in your revenue and your income. Those requirements, time to sit in a focused manner, right? Your email, if you are still responding to email, meaning if email pings your phone or your desktop every time you get an email, you got to stop that. What I recommend is check your email in the morning. And this is only if for some reason you're in customer service or you're in sales, Meaning there's a complaint that may come through or a customer that has an issue that needs quick response. Okay? I suggest putting that in a different system and not your personal email or a sales request, which should really be going into your CRM. There's no reason to be on email all day long. Okay. And I know this is not popular for a lot of people to hear this, but it's a habit that as business owners, we justify because it's email. Email equals business, right? I'm handling business. I'm not playing games on my phone. I'm not on social media on my phone. I'm handling emails. Right. It feels like it's productive. My recommendation, do a, you know, emergency check first thing in the morning. Right? Not first thing. We'll talk about that in a second. Not first thing, but the minute you actually get your phone and pick it up, it should not be as soon as you get up and then have one time, maybe two a day, okay. Where you process emails, not check them, but actually process them. You know, part of the stress, like, part of being your best self, part of being that moving CEO that can handle more, right. Is being able to get that stress level down. Right? Because otherwise, the more you take on the stress Just rises with you, and then again it goes from scaling to suffering. But so process your email once or twice a day, which means go through it. And every single email, you need to take action on it. Either do it, respond right away, delegate it to somebody else, or if it's something that's going to take more time and you need to schedule a block of time, okay? To work on whatever it is, then put it in a folder, an action folder, and go schedule it on your calendar or in your project management software, right? And then it's done. Your inbox is down. It's to zero. You handled it once a day at your time of choosing. Okay? I'm going on about this because it's so important. I know it's holding a lot of people back. It seems like such a simple thing, but it's holding a lot of people back. So block time. And you know, one of the things that you really want to block is you want to block that you're from the time you wake up till the time you decide to work. You know, for me, my phone stays in airplane mode. I put in airplane mode when I go to sleep. In other words, you're not. There's no disruption. Nobody's texting me, calling me in the middle of the night, okay? And, you know, I wake up, first thing I do is I get on the floor, I stretch, I meditate, I go over what I'm grateful for, right? I read for 30 minutes every day. And, you know, that's my first hour and a half of every day for me to take care of me, to get my mind right. Right? Wherever you're at in your business, in order to go to that next level, you might have 10 offices already. In order to go to that next level, you've got to optimize you, right? You've got to optimize yourself. So give yourself a block in the morning where you do something that's for you to where you're not turning on your phone immediately, checking the news, checking social, checking email, you're not setting it off in the right time, okay? So that's kind of like a little miniature introduction to block time. But you get the idea, right? The stuff that is important needs to have blocks of time on your calendar when you are going to handle it on your terms, okay? The second thing we want to do to stabilize our time, micro decisions, okay? Micro decisions. What this means, you know, we need to be optimized ourselves, okay? In the way that we manage ourselves within the time we have. Right? That's why people struggle with time management because they're trying to manage time. You can't manage time, you just manage what you do within the time. So micro decisions, these are the little, little, little, little, little, little decisions that you make on a day to day basis or don't make on a day to day basis that cause stress, that cause indecision on bigger items. Let me give you example of, you know, microdecisions. Waking up every day and like, trying to figure out what do I eat for breakfast. Waking up every day and trying to figure out what do I work on today, right? You know, what do I do the hour after lunch at the office? How do I handle a request that an employee has? In other words, if you start looking at your day, start moving forward in your day and think about how many times a day you've got to make decisions, okay? Which is a lot. If you own a business, you've got a team, there's a lot of decisions coming at you, but there's little decisions along the way that aren't being made, okay? And because you haven't been decisive in those small little decisions, they're different for everybody. Then it causes issues in the company, it causes issues with leadership, it causes issues with time, and it escalates your stress, okay? So make a list of any little decision. Kind of like go through your day and say, okay, what do I have to think through every single day? What am I going to do? Am I going to work out today? Am I not going to work out today? What am I going to eat? If you decide these things in advance what your stance is on all these little micro decisions, it's going to allow you to just move quickly through your day and save your mental bandwidth. You know, if you've ever felt just completely exhausted at the end of the day or after an hour of the day, it's because you've used so much mental bandwidth on decisions and indecisions. You've allowed outside stuff to come at you in the way of emails and messages and notifications and, you know, disruptions. It's because you only got so much here, right? That's why we're depleted at the end of the day. The idea is you want to manage that. You don't want to be depleted in the middle of the day. You want to end the day, be able to come home and still feel good, to be with your family and not be like, oh, just please leave me alone. It's, it's, I'm not mocking you if that's you that was me, okay? And so I was there. I'm trying to show you a better way of doing this, okay? And so if you're like, louis, I don't. I need to know how to scale my business. I'm telling you right now. I see people do it. If you don't get these things stabilized first, you might be off to the races, but chances are it's going to come crashing down or it's just going to be suffering instead of scaling. All right? So next thing is. So make a list of those micro decisions, all right? And slowly, don't feel like you got to make a decision on all of them right away. Slowly. Keep looking at that list. How am I going to handle this? How can I make this one decision once and for all that will eliminate me having to think about it every day? The next one is distractions. You've got to learn to eliminate distractions. Identify the distractions and eliminate them. Let's talk about possible distractions. Number one, I was going to hold my phone up, but I'm using it here for Instagram the phone. Okay, major distraction. We're going to talk about how to make it a tool and. And make it a weapon for your cause, but major distraction, okay, we're on social. Social media is a major distraction. Right? Hopefully they don't kick me off for saying that right now. Right? Alerts on your phone, news, outside information, negative information that has no effect on your life. Your personal day to day, people interrupting you. You don't see anyone. You know, I'm at home right now. Nobody's coming in here and interrupting me because I set that structure up. If I was at my office, nobody would be coming in and interrupting me. They know where there's open windows of time where we could talk, we could discuss. Okay? But I don't believe in the open door policy. If you're gonna have an open door policy, great, it's open. Between this time and this time, my personal belief. You may disagree, okay? But you've got to take a look. I want you to make a list of what your distractions are. Okay? What they are. I mean, it could be an annoying sound that is like deep, deep, deep, deep, deep in your. In your. Where you live, right? Whatever it is, that's a distraction, okay? And a lot of times, it's the stuff that you put in place. A lot of times it's your team. It's your feeling of feeling as if you need to be so dialed in so that you feel that your employees feel that, you know, Everything that's going on. And by knowing everything that's going on, you're taking away from the stuff you really need to be focused on, you really need to be working on, okay? All these little things, setting up your calendar for block time, making the micro decisions, starting to eliminate distractions, okay? Out of your life. Whatever is not helping you is hurting you. The distractions have to go. The notifications have to go. The waking up to a phone full of, you know, stuff on the. On the main screen there, it's gotta go. You have to protect your space, mental and physical, like a warrior guarding a castle. These days, every piece of technology, every piece of media is out for you. They want you. Companies have people called Attention Engineers. I'm going to get kicked off social now. They have people called Attention Engineers. Their whole job is designed to keep you glued in, okay? And if that's you, it's okay. It's not your fault. The AI, the artificial intelligence, it's smarter than a lot of us, most of us. It knows how we think, right? The idea is to just recognize it. Wow, look at these distractions. Look how much time I'm spending doing this, and look how much time I'm spending doing that. And then look how much time I tell people I don't have time for that, and I don't have time for that. The stuff that's actually going to get me where I want to go, eliminate the distractions, guys, I'm telling you, it will be one of the best things you could do for yourself, right? It's not. It's one thing to learn, and you don't always have to implement everything you learn all at once. It's taking a piece here, taking a piece there. Does that work for me right now in my life? Right. Is this something that would really give me that leverage that I need to start handling the other things? Because, you know, that's what we're doing right now is we're getting you leverage to be able to scale your business with this stuff in the way, the stuff that needs to get stabilized. It makes it challenging, if not impossible, to really scale a business. Right? So when you learn stuff, never get overwhelmed by what you learn. I've got notebooks and files and books and, you know, every full of information. I pick and choose what I'm ready to apply. I go back through it, you know, periodically, and I pick and choose things to work on at any given time, right? Same thing with everything you want to do in your business. Everything you want to do in your business. You should really be thinking about what's going to make the biggest impact. Now let me work on those things and let me take that forward. And you know what? Everything else, I have to put it to the side for now. I know it's important, but I've got to choose what's really important and which piece of knowledge I'm going to choose to apply. All right, so now let's talk about your tech. We're talking about taming your time. I'm sorry, Stabilizing your time and stabilizing your tech. And they go hand in hand. You know what? We've talked about a lot of this block time, a lot of this micro decisions, a lot of this eliminating distractions. Tech was involved right, in those conversations. And so we need to stabilize the tech. And the first thing we want to do is tame our tech, put it in check. Use your tech as a tool. Use your tech as a weapon for your cause. Do not be the puppet to your tech. Be the puppet master of your tech. And I'm passionate about this. So if I'm coming at you like, you know, it's because I care, right? I'm not like, trying to tell you what to do. I'm, you know, trying to get through you how important this is, right? Because I know what you guys want, right? I talk to a lot of you. A lot of you are private clients. A lot of you are in our moving CEO business program. I meet a lot of you at the events, connect with you on social, and I know what you're trying to accomplish. And it's. We're just in an error. And in a, in a time where the tech is unruly, Think about it like a garden, okay? This, your tech, your computer, your phone, okay? Your tech is constantly developing new ways to send notifications, you know, get you on some other platform. Let you know about this, let you know about that breaking news. I want you to think about this. Take a little bit of time, block a little bit of time on your calendar and take your phone out and just look through it and say, like, what apps really need to be on here? What's really helping me move forward? What notifications should I just completely shut off, right, and tame it? You know, I. And I'll tell you a story. I started to really have this, you know, when I realized the impact that my phone and technology was having on my productivity, my happiness, my well being, my advancement in business, I started to almost resent my phone, right? You know, like, you know, leave the phone here. I'm gonna leave the phone, right? That was my first stage of getting past this stuff. I'm like, I'm gonna leave the phone because I don't want, you know, I want some time, some peace, some quiet. And, you know, over time I started to realize, you know, there's so much good that this phone provides. There's so many apps that enrich my life. You know, there's so many tools on there that really help my business, that really help my day to day life, that really help my communication. Let me turn this into something that I truly, like, I don't know, adore now, like, I feel really, really good about my phone now. It took me a while to get there. It took a few rounds of going through and getting rid of apps, going through and shutting off notifications, going through and learning how certain things work so I could decide, you know, what's really necessary and figuring out my workflow of what tools I actually need. Learning to simplify, learning to, you know, realize that just because an app can do something useful doesn't mean that it's not causing any type of harm or disruption or distraction in my life. And starting to weigh that stuff out. Change the game for me. Right now, my phone is a tool that I just used. You know, we. I use the technology. The technology is not using me. If you haven't done this, do this. I'm telling you, it's such a big deal. Okay? It's such a big deal. Be the weirdo. It's okay, right? Like people might. Look, Louis, you're a weirdo. You're not on this, you're not on that. That's okay, because my sanity's there and I'm focused on building the life that I want to build and being able to also do this. I couldn't do this. Plus build the life I want to build, plus have a happy home life, plus have a happy personal mental well being if I didn't do this stuff. So tame your tech, all right? Now you've also got to learn and optimize your software. Learn and optimize your software. When I say software, I'm talking about your business CRM. I'm talking about your accounting software, I'm talking about your GPS for your trucks, talking about any, anything that you're using, any email services for marketing purposes for your business. Learn and optimize this. Because, you know, those of you, most of you know that I've also co founded Smart Moving Software, okay? And so the reason this comes up is because now, you know, I see That a lot of people will, you know, get in to a software program and kind of pawn it off to their team. And I'm here to tell you that over the years, every time I introduced a new software for lead management and I had a lot of them, which was the reason that, the reason that I, you know, co founded Smart Moving is because I used to use so much stuff to run my moving company, right? It was like something to estimate move something to schedule the move, something to text message customers, phone systems and dialers, gps, accounting software, emailing. I know I'm forgetting something. And then tons and tons of spreadsheets, right? And what I realized is that I used to try to like get these softwares and then have a manager and a team. You know, I had over 250 employees at one point, right? And when I implemented new systems, I would kind of delegate that off to somebody on my team. And what I realized was that I wasn't optimizing it because I didn't learn it. I didn't, I didn't know it. I didn't know what it was capable of. You know, the difference is when you delegate something to someone on your team, a lot of times, you know, what separates the visionary you, the moving CEO from maybe people on your team is the people on your team are about like execution and you're about like. I could see the possibilities of what happens here. So when you learn a software, okay, any tool that you're using that your team is going to use and you learn it personally, it allows you to see what's possible, what it could do. You know, there's so many tools. I mean, I couldn't even. My bill for tech every month is insane, right? The amount of recurring software charges, it's insane. So like all this stuff does so much more than we realize. So the point here is that once you understand what your tool is capable of, your mind goes, ooh, I could do that, right? You know, until the, you know, until the, the electric saw was invented or the drill or the weed whacker, I hear the landscaper out here with people couldn't envision the things that could get done in the quickness and the efficiency that it could get done until they knew how to use the tool. So I hope that makes sense. So what I'm saying is whatever you've got, whatever tool you've got, whatever CRM you've got, whatever you're using currently, just make it a habit to learn it and optimize it, learn it and optimize it, you know, I had one of our members private client who asked a question in one of our moving CEO live cast that we do every month. It was about smart move. And I'm not trying to plug it, I'm just using as an example. And it really is the best. So if you guys want to check it out, go get a demo for yourself@smartmoving.com but he said, you know, and he's got multiple franchises, and he said, you know, should I be spending time learning the new module that just came out, the new storage module for, you know, handling all your storage? And I'm like, absolutely, right? And, you know, those of you that have, you know, been with me for a while, you know, I'm very big on delegation. I'm very big on empowering your team. But this is one of those things that until you know what it's capable of, you don't know what you're capable of using it for. Right? So, guys, let me just go through this again, okay? Real quick. Block time. If there's something you're needing to do that you're not getting done, okay, don't worry about. Just don't worry about blocking your whole calendar yet. There's something really important that you've just been like, I can't get to it. I haven't been able to get to it. Go on your calendar this weekend, okay? And next week, put a block of time on there that says, I'm going to work on that thing. Okay? Simple. We don't have to make this over complicated micro decisions. What small decisions do you need to make? You know, for me, I used to wake up every day, what do I have for breakfast today? What should I eat? What should I eat now? Every day I have a shake. The same shake every single day. When I get to tired of it, I'll change it up a little bit. But until I get tired of it, every single day. Not saying that's for you. You might want variety. Good. Decide, say, you know what? Mondays I'm gonna have eggs. Tuesdays, I'm gonna have oatmeal. Whatever the case might be, right? Make those micro decisions so that you're not making them every moment of every day. Eliminate those distractions. Make a list of the distractions in your life. Eliminate them, okay? It'll be hard. This is. You've got to fight for this. You've got to fight for your time. But it's so worth it, okay? It's so worth it. Tame your tech, right? Just next time you pull out your phone and you're like, I don't even. You pull it out, not even knowing where you're gonna go. You just want to click on something and click on something else. Good. Start clicking on stuff, get it off there that you don't need. You could always download it again later. Turn off the notifications from the stuff that you don't need notifications on. You're not going to miss out on anything that's happening. You can schedule time to look at the news, you can schedule time to look at your emails. You can schedule time to be on social and then learn and optimize the software that you have. Hey, my friend, before you go, you've got to hurry and watch these next few videos over here. They will absolutely help you take your moving company to the next level. Go watch them now, and I'll see you over here. There.