64X Your Productivity and Build a $1M Service Business!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the mike minutes. Mastermind. Today there was no question submitted so we're going to do a little edumacation segment. Let's go.

Some random thoughts I had. Now typically I don't think very deep thoughts generally doesn't happen. However, I did have these thoughts this morning. If you want deep thoughts, there are a few suggestions I could give you. First off, Lee is a deep thinker. Nick is a deep thinker. Max Harwood from up in Canada is deep thinker. Derek Duran. He can also get you down here in the US So we definitely have some deep thinkers in August Nation. I am not one of them. I'm usually pretty surface person. But I did have some of these thoughts I wanted to share today. Hopefully they are helpful. I'm gonna draw it out here on my remarkable and hopefully it kind of gives a framework for how do I get more out of my day. How do I get more out of my work? When I work one hour, there's like we have a finite amount of hours, days, years in our life and so if we can get more out of it, that seemed like a pretty good use of our time. And so I find a lot of people work extremely difficult, work extremely hard and get little in return. And I was trying to think about why that is. Let me share my screen and then we will jump. So what I was thinking about this morning is why is it that some people work crazy amounts of hours and get very little done? And then I. That was the first part of what I'm going to draw out for you. And then I started thinking about how do you compound that even more? How do you get more done for our fine, we all have the same amount of time. So why is it that some people get way more done than other people? They use leverage. And so what are the skills required to increase your leverage? That's what we're going to be talking about today. So I'm going to go over some skills. First skill, draw this out. Hopefully you can see that skill. Beautiful. That is going to be the very first skill I had to learn was effort. Just trying harder, doing more of what I'm currently doing. I find that this leverage, the leverage that I get from this, at first I was like, okay, if I work more hours, I get more done. Um, there's a plenty of studies to, to suggest that the leverage is not a one to one ratio here, but rather I would give it a 1.9x which means if I work an extra hour, I am probably giving up I'm probably getting 54 minutes worth of productivity done simply because there's diminishing returns. If you work 20, 23 hours a day, I can guarantee you those last four or five hours are just gonna be super ineffective. You're gonna make bad decisions. And even though you might get more time, our effort is expended. The return on that time is so low because you have such low levels of focus. And so I would, I would say that for every extra hour I work, I can be 0.9x. I can get 0.9x more done, which is good. I would rather have, you know, some leverage. I would rather, you know, increase my output somewhat, but it's probably about a 90% effective rate if I'm just constantly working more hours. Now, the next skill if I want to leverage up, because again, the way for me to get more done is I increase my leverage, the next thing I would say is efficiency.

Now this is going to be, how do I get more efficient throughout my day? How can I get more work done without working more hours, but get more work done per unit per hour? This is like grade 2.0 here, right? Like, you can just brute force work more. That's effort, all right? And that is a valuable skill.

Efficiency, though, says, okay, I'm going to work the same amount of time, but can I improve the way that I process my email, the way that I check my phone, the way I time block, the way that I schedule my day, the way that I set up my computer, the way I set up my route, the way that all of these other things that you can make your. Your business more efficient, your day more efficient, your time more efficient. How, how can I be healthier? Because just being healthier will allow you to increase your efficiency dramatically. Because now it's a matter of like, okay, I can no longer work more hours. That's effort. What's the next layer level is I get more units of work done per hour. That's my efficiency. The same way we would talk about pay for performance. People getting more budget hours per clocked hour. When I think about efficiency, I think about it in terms of this is the amount of work units per hour. Okay? So I believe that doing a great job and really focusing on efficiency, you will 2 to 3x your output. Okay? So your output could be anything here. It could be revenue, it could be just the amount of jobs you get completed, the amount of budget hours you get completed.

Output without working any more hours. This is a very valuable jump. And usually the person that can make over six figures will go from effort to efficiency. They are able to be efficient enough to be able to do the work equivalent to two to three other people simply because they know how to manage themselves. So you have to manage yourself here. Okay, we're gonna come back to a couple other aspects of how to unlock each of these levels. But the next one I was thinking about, and again, these are like, these are my thoughts. So, like, they're probably. Could be better. This is me in five minutes trying to like, think about this. Okay, so the next E. These are all E's. All the skills start with an E. So the next one is employ. So now I have maxed my efficiency. Now I'm going to go employ other people so that I can improve my leverage. I can get more done if I hire more employees. I can get more jobs, I can get more accomplished throughout my day. I can have more sales, I can get more customers if I employ people to do the work for me. Now, as a rule of thumb, people say that you can effectively manage about six to eight people. So I would say that the leverage at employ is six to eight. Some people say I have 50 employees. Right, just hold on. You're jumping ahead. I would say you can effectively manage six to eight people as direct reports. Your leverage on your time is now six to eight, because you having a meeting with your direct reports then allows them to all them be more efficient and them allows, allow. Allows them to have more effort. So this works up this chain. So if you employ people and they make them more efficient and they have more effort, this is why it's multiplicative. All right, so 6 to 8x is the leverage here. I can manage 6 to 8 people effectively. I can take what I would get done in a day and multiply by six or eight very efficiently. This is also why, when it comes to what we've talked about a lot about recently, this year is like keeping the business at under 800,000 in annual revenue allows me to keep my employee count usually around 8 to 10 or less. That's where the leverage starts to break apart. If for one manager to have to manage 15, 20 employees, it starts to become very difficult. You have to get two managers. Why? Because the employee phase only has a leverage of six to eight. So therefore, if I have 15 people, I will have to get two managers. All right, so we've talked about this in length before. All right, the fourth stage. And this is the one I'll stop at, because the one beyond this, I have not enough experience to speak On So the next stage I would say is executive. So at the executive level now I can have my six to eight direct reports managing six to eight other people. Inherently from a math perspective, I then have a 36 to 64x leverage. Because if my 6 to 8 reports up here that I employed, they also have then 6 to 8 people underneath them that would inherently be 6 times 6 and 8 times 8. I would have a 36 to 64x multiplicative effect on my time. Now if you go one step beyond this, this is why, you know, an average CEO inside of like a Fortune 500 company is going to make 4 to 500 times their the level of compensation as someone that is up here as an entry level position. The reason for that is because they go one more level. Okay, we're not going to go into that. What I do want to talk about is what is the thing that allow you to unlock? So if I did do this little lock thing here, Boom, that's a great lock. Look at that. Okay, so if I have a lock, how do I unlock each of these levels? So I want to graduate from effort to efficiency. I want to graduate from efficiency to employee. I want to graduate from employee to executive. What do I do? Okay, so then I started thinking, what is this? What is the thing that I can work on to unlock each of these? All right, first one, I'm going to change the color here. Let me change this to red. Because this is actually the big takeaway. This is just like theory. This is the part you can actually do. So I think that discipline.

No. 1, everyone tries to get around this one, but this is ultimately the biggest life hack is you can essentially double your productivity just by working. Double. Sorry, you can double your output by simply working twice as hard. And so this is. It doesn't cost you anything. It doesn't take any more skill to work more hours. It is simply a function of time. And so if you worked eight hours in the past, if you work 16, you will effectively, with some diminishing returns, get almost a doubling of output. You can grow the business twice as much. You can get twice as many jobs done almost. Now there's a diminishing return because I would, I would argue that you're not going to double your, your output. You might get like a 80% return because you have less efficiency, less leverage or less output as you work so many hours. But this one people fail at honestly, like, look, everyone wants to talk about how hard they work until you see someone who really knows how to work well, and that's where the efficiency part comes into play. And I think at this stage, this is where.

A lot of people also trip up humility.

In order to be able to realize that the work and the effort that you have put in is actually completely inefficient requires humility. And someone who lacks humility will not be able to go from effort to efficiency and they will not be able to double or triple their output simply because they have pride in how hard they work and the amount of hours that they put in instead of the actual output. And so if you're, if you're, if you're proud of your inputs, that is, how hard you work, how many hours you put in, it will keep you from actually diligently looking at how efficient you are with the time that you are actually putting in and whether or not there are ways to be able to make it more efficient. Like can you lose weight? Can you cut out habits out of your life? Can you sleep better? Can you do all of these aspects of your life which make you more efficient? But no one wants to address this because it requires change. It's much more difficult than simply brute forcing more effort. So there are people that will stop at effort and they will, you'll see a cap in their income many times or the growth of their business because they can work crazy amounts of hours. But they are unwilling to have the humility to say, I don't know how to schedule my day correctly, I don't know how to be healthy. I don't know how to be able to control the demons inside of my life in order to be able to get 2-3x more out of my, out of my productivity. And this requires a huge amount of humility. This is why sometimes having coaching is important. This is why having honest friends that will tell you the truth to your face is important.

Because.

You require usually outside forces to tell you what you're doing wrong. Because you've been head down effort for so long, you need someone else usually say, hey, like you're doing this, like if you just had this piece, this tool, like this piece of software, or if you just changed your habits here, if you were able to have way more energy and you'd be able to expend more effort. If you're able to be, you know, lose 50 pounds, for example.

This comes down to relationships, this comes down to habits, this comes down to time blocking, this comes down to, okay, do you actually use your calendar? Do you use tasks? Like I see people with tasks and calendars and you can very quickly look at someone's calendar and know how efficient they are. And someone can like there are people that will take eight hours on a task that is, that can absolutely be done by someone that's more efficient in 30, 30 to 60 minutes, no problem. And so the amount of time you work is actually inconsequential. Once you pass about $100,000 in revenue or $100,000 in revenue or$100,000 as an employee, take home pay. Once you cross that, your effort is actually meaningless because there are people that are so much more efficient. And I'm being very gracious the 2 to 3x. Cause I think there are some people that are 10x more efficient than other people. And what one person was like, I'm work crazy amounts of hours and they're going to make three days working on this project. Someone else will literally pick it up and do it in three hours. Three hours instead of three days. Because they are more efficient. They know how to time block, they know how to answer email, they know how to do text, they know how to manage their calendar, manage tasks. They don't get overwhelmed. Everything is organized. That is the ultimate humility is to be able to take your process and then diagnose and refine it and let other people pick it apart. All right, employee, so this one is organization.

All right, so you might be really disciplined, you might be really humble enough to be able to be super efficient. But now once you start employing other people, if you're not organized, things will fall apart. You will not be able to capture the full 6 to 8x leverage. If you can't organize, if you can't have good meetings, if you can't have come organized to those meetings, if you don't have an agenda, if you don't actually have a plan for every single week, if you don't sit on a Sunday evening and look over your entire schedule for the week and figure out what I'm doing with 15 minute blocks between my meetings, what I'm doing between no. 3, why am I doing three estimates in a day that are all spread out? How can I get this more organized? How can I time block this? How can I make sure that things are more efficient between my routes, how can I make sure that my crews are more efficient, how can I make sure that I organize my shop, organize my trucks, Keep things systemized, SOPs, standard operating procedures for every single department. Organization is a huge unlock for me to know who graduates to the next level. Executive is if you're organized if you can't. If you can't organize, you can never take. You can never fully utilize or tap into the leverage that comes with delegation and employing other people, because you will not be able to give them the inputs they need to be able to be efficient. And so if you come to a meeting and you're not organized, you don't have data, you don't have any sort of agenda that then affects them. And so you will not get the 6 to 8x multiple unemployment. You might get a 1 to 2x. And this is why a lot of times people will go get employees. And because they lack the ability to organize their team and they lack the ability to organize their schedule, it then trickles down to where when they get four or five, six employees, the business makes less money than if they just went by themselves. Why? Because they did not. They never graduated from the skill of efficiency to employment to employ the third level here. And why? Because they couldn't organize. All right? So a disorganized individual will never be able to graduate to the fourth level of being an executive. So that's the fourth level. And at this level, you actually don't need to do work. You have to be a visionary. Now, some people, this is very, very dangerous. It's like, I want to be an executive, or I want to have 40, 50 employees, I want to have five, 10 locations, et cetera. I must therefore have vision. Be very careful, because you will lose every single multiplicative effect above this if you're constantly thinking about vision, but yet you don't put in the effort. You're not efficient, you don't know how to organize people. You're not humble enough to be able to pick apart your organizational structure. And so many times people will jump to this vision thing, like, I need to be a visionary. No, like right now, you're solo. You should be focused on being disciplined and putting in more time, just working harder, more hours. That is your leverage. And so if you try to jump these levels, I do feel like there is a.

A damaging effect.

So a couple things I wanted to note on this. Let me change out my color again.

Okay. All right, so first off, I wanted to say is there is a multiplicative effect. Multiplic. This is probably gonna be spelt wrong. Multiplicative effect. The reason I say this is because everyone wants to jump to these ones down below. They'll. And boom. I need to employ people better. I need to be a better executive. I need to be more organized. I need to have vision. When in here's the hack. It takes absolutely no more skill to work more time. And everyone wants to beg on this 0.9x when in reality it's the easiest thing to do. Just put in more time.

And what's cool, if you are in this employee stage at the 6 to 8, and if you apply more effort, you will get the same doubling of results. Because now if you increase your effort while you have six to eight people, you will. You increase their efficiency, you will increase their organization, you will be able to have the multiplicative effects trickle down. And so forgetting thinking that you graduate from level to level to level, like, oh, I don't have to do effort now because I am now organized and employ people. Wrong. Like, the fastest way to be able to increase your output is to be able to constantly keep pumping above the funnel. So I look at this as a funnel that goes down. I. If I can always double this, if I can always increase my effort, if I can always increase my efficiency, the downstream effects on all of this is so much greater. Okay, let's keep moving on. I could get in a more philosophical. But let's not do that. Start at the top of the funnel. Start at the top.

I generally believe the vast majority of content books, et cetera, focus on these bottom ones. And for that reason, we lose out on the multiplicative effects of the ones on the top. And that is simply, do you put in more time and are you efficient doing it? If you do that, you will have a downstream effect of everything down here below becoming more efficient. It's also the easiest. It's. It's difficult, it's difficult. It's a skill to organize, get more efficient, have a vision. But if you just put in more time, it's a pretty simple way to just like, double your output. All right, next one. All right. Another thing I would say as an unlock is.

Study winners.

At each level. All right. Why? Because they know what good looks like.

All right, good looks like.

Sweet. So I would, I would be trying to find some, like, who's really, really disciplined and puts in huge amounts of effort. Because that's at the stage I'm at. All right now, you get more efficient. All right. Instead of jumping from effort to employing people when you haven't got efficient, like, have the humility to be able to get more efficient with your schedule, get more done per unit of time. I'm going to go, I'm going to try finding someone that's humble and is extremely efficient. The type of person that just knocks stuff out on Their schedule. Okay, great. Now I'm trying to employ people. I'm going to go find someone super organized, and they've employed people a lot. I'm going to follow them. I'm going to watch their stuff. I'm going to listen to their content. I'm going to get around them. When you go to a conference, I'd be like, looking at this and be like, okay, which is the next level I need to get to and who do I go talk to? And then at the fourth level, if you have, like, you're going to multiple locations specifically, okay, I'm going to talk to someone that has experience having 20, 30, 40 employees, and I'm going to find someone who has a vision that can attract great talent, because that's what's going to be required at this stage. So studying those winners, what do they do that makes them different is a big unlock for me that I've had to figure out. So that was your little education corner. Let's see what we got here today.

Corey from Bellingham, you mentioned. Oh, this is a little different. Okay, Corey, I think you come off of this one. Okay. You mentioned federal salary increases. Where do you. And how do you get this information to stay on top of important changes? I would have missed this if you did not mention it.

How do I.

Keep in mind, I talked to a lot of business owners, so, like, I don't know where this one specifically came from. This was mentioned. It was in legislation earlier this year, and then it got passed in some states. There's some states that we're going to try to go against. The same with the BOI thing, as you have heard me talk about a lot about it. I think Texas is going to strike this down. I think it'll cascade across the whole us the whole boi thing. We have to all report by January 1st, and I recommend you do it. But I think it's going to get struck down in most states. But then it's just a matter of just talking to a lot of people and they bring stuff up and I go research it. So I've been tracking both of these throughout the whole year. I'm really just making sure it actually passes. If I would have mentioned it the other day, for example, I would have just told everyone, January 1st, hey, you have to do this now. Because I'm very careful with, like, things that are on the. On the docket. Things have been passed, things that could be completely changed by the new administration. So I try not to, like, share every little thing that comes across because only half of it usually gets passed or becomes like long term ingrained into policy. Corey from Bellingham, I have a question about what you said on picking apart your organizational structure. What methods do you use to compare your current structure with a potential improvement? It's like the same way that we look at like software and as like we split test things. I would be doing the same thing. Like what happens if you wake up an hour earlier? What happens if you work out before work versus after work? What happens if you use Tasks? Google Tasks vs Apple Reminders? What happens if I split up my tasks versus.

Having one big rolling to do list? What happens if I time block my email instead of just answering my email as they come in? What happens if I turn off all notifications on my phone so there's no alerts, there's no dings, there's no buzzes and there's no numbers that show up on all the apps. It's all possible. What happens if I turn my phone into grayscale in terms of my time spent on that device and am I actually getting return on that? And if I'm not, maybe switching it to grayscale or putting caps on time on certain apps would actually help me be more efficient. So it's split tests. So I'm not a huge fan. Like let's change everything. And some people just pause, went back and wrote all the things I just mentioned down. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't change like 10 things at the same time. I would do like one thing. It's like, okay, so for example, like a year and a half ago I started getting up earlier. I was always late. Now 1, 2, 3 o' clock in the morning and then you know you're waking up to an alarm at 6 to 7.

A year and a half ago, getting ready for Louisville, I was like, okay, I'm going to start getting up at between 3 and 3:30 in order to be able to get ready for the Eastern Standard Time, knowing that I would be on stage at Wood otherwise be like 5am our time, which I had never done before. So I'm like that's not good. So I started changing my sleeping habits. Well, I started working out before work. All of a sudden I was like, oh this is way better. I feel better throughout the day. I don't. It gets done regardless. Like it's just a part of the schedule instead of like working later and then it gets pushed off or you're tired, et cetera. So you just start split testing stuff. Okay, I did Google I did Apple reminders for ages. Okay, I'm switching to Google Tasks. Integrates Google Calendar better. Using the Trello thing I talked about a couple weeks ago. Like you're constantly looking for ways to refine it and then I'm always listening for like what are the people that are at the next level ahead of me? What are they doing? So like the Trello thing came as a result of a interview I heard from a public CEO talking about how he uses in software, which I was very conscious of how he uses six week sprints in his personal life. Like genius. This totally makes sense. And that even he made the plan. So that sort of thing, you just keep split testing and seeing if it works and something's down. Like I've split test before. It's like, okay, it's more headache than it actually saves me time. Um, but like this whole like having two computer thing definitely probably makes me 4 to 5% more efficient throughout the day because this one can still get all my my notifications and it's right here. But it doesn't distract me from what I'm might be trying to do. And this one has nothing but literally Google Chrome. So little stuff like that, you just keep split testing it.

Augusta longer. Londonberry Quick question about Copilot texting feature. My mass text to my plowing customers in the middle of a snowtorm is always being throttled and sent much later. Any fix this.

It'S sending out 20 texts per minute. So that's the only throttling that's happening. So I test this every day because I send out messages to everyone here.

Mike Minutes Mastermind. So I know it's working well on this because I just use it right now. So if it's doing it more than that. For example, if you had 2200 or 300 people you're sending to, that would take 10 to 15 minutes. So just expect that. But if it's like throttling an hour, please let us know. We can look at your account, see what's going on with your Twilio account. But it shouldn't be. I haven't seen that happen for ages inside Copilot, like early the spring 2024. So. All right everyone, I think that's all the questions we have coming today. If you have any regular questions, go to the form in the description and we will get to those tomorrow. All right everyone, love you all. Take care. This video is actually a segment of what we call Mike Minutes Mastermind. It's a daily Mastermind video that I do with all the owners inside of Augusta Nation, and those are the franchisees of Augusta Lawn Care. So if you're interested in joining the franchise, if you'd like to take your business to the next level, if you're in the lawn care and landscaping industry Already, go to AugustaLawCareServices.com franchise and see if it'd be a good fit. Only about one out of eight owners that apply and want to get into Augusta get through our screening process. But you can book a call with Lee, see if you'd be a good fit and if it can help you take your business to the next level.