$5 vs $50 An Hour Tasks: Having A Conscious Understanding Of What You’re Doing In Your Business

Foreign. Welcome to the Success School Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Ferre and today we are talking about five versus $50 an hour tasks. And this is one of my favorite lectures or topics to talk about because usually this is pretty mind blowing for people, the simplicity of this. And, and once you realize this and you have a conscious understanding of what you're doing or not doing in your business, things get a lot easier for you. And I did talk about this on a group coaching call this week in the successful program. But business can and gets to be easy if you make it easy. So what to expect on this episode is how to maximize your time because it's the only commodity that you can't get back. Okay. You can't buy back your time. We're also going to talk through focusing on your area of genius in your business. Okay. You're going to be genius at a couple of things in business and it would be wise that you spend most time in them because that's going to give you the biggest ROI or bang for your buck in your business. And lastly, we're going to retrospectively, that is a huge word, look at where you are spending your time. Okay? We're going to analyze that. We're going to gain some consciousness around where you're spending your time working on and in your business. So over the weekend, I bought my first power drill. And just bear with me here, I will relate this back to business. I felt like I was finally becoming a man, 32 years old at the time of recording this, and I bought my first power drill. What an amazing accomplishment. It actually came about because my dad has gone to the age where he can't help me like he used to. My dad was literally like my handyman, literally for my whole life. So I never had to do any handy stuff. But it's time to take the reins and I've had to step into my manliness. So I bought my first power drill. I was in bunnings. I walked past and I said, damn, that power drill looks good. So I bought it. And then next to it was a brush attachment and I bought the brush attachment for a power drill. So if you can imagine, I have this really serious power drill. And then I brought a brush attachment and I went home and started cleaning the house with basically a huge electric toothbrush. Not the most effective use of a power drill, but now I have one. I do plan on doing handyman stuff with it, but the first step was buying a power drill and in becoming a fully fledged houseman for me, and then what I didn't realize is once you buy one tool, you buy many tools. So I bought a bunch of tools. Over the next two days, I bought two more tools, obviously that I didn't need, but future Tim is definitely gonna need them. And I have some really challenging housework tasks coming up like drilling holes and stuff to put handles on, which, you know, all these tools are gonna be hugely useful for. But the main crux of this is buying the right tool for the job and buying quality. So I did buy a quality brand and a drill because I like spending my time and I value spending my time with high quality equipment, which has a better outcome for me. More expensive generally means better quality. So I kind of bought like one of those. I think it's a midline one. It's like in the middle. It's not the fully crazy like trading ones, but it's a good one. Which leads me to talk about the topic today of five $50 an hour tasks just on the topic name. There's one of those things you should be doing and one of those things you should not be doing. You should be focusing on the $50 an hour tasks. Because I've said on this podcast literally hundreds of times by now, you need to be focusing on working on your business, growing your business and moving the needle, not the stuff that doesn't move the needle. Your time is very limited, okay? Especially if you have other comm kids. You know, maybe you're working a job full time or part time. Wherever you're at, you need to be spending your time wisely and doing the most effective things to move the needle in your business. And this is where outsourcing and giving these smaller tasks away to other people in your company or business are key. Because if you're wearing all the hats like I did many times in all of my businesses, it's going to be pretty hard for you to move the needle in your business. So I'm going to give you some examples of $5 an hour tasks just so you really wrap your head around this. Sending an invoice $5 an hour task. Replying to an email $5 an hour task. Scheduling social media content $5 an hour task. Chasing failed payments $5 an hour task. Just so you know, our VA between all that companies handles all of these tasks. And that is a $7.50 USD per hour role. For some people, that is not shocking. For others, that is mind blowing. Okay? Which leaves me and my wife and all the other people in our businesses to do the tasks that really matter to move the needle in the business. As you can agree, sending invoices, replying to emails and social media scheduling is not really moving the needle in a business. The things that are going to move the needle in a business are the big things, okay, like making sales calls, writing copy for landing pages, coming up with a content calendar, doing cold outreach or warm outreach to potential clients, setting up Facebook ads or other revenue generating activities, which are a better spend of your time. You can train someone to do the $5 an hour task and take it off your plate so you don't have to do it ever again. So many business owners that I have seen, especially when they start with us in successful, they're focusing on doing the wrong things, okay? So they are focusing on doing things that really don't matter in the scheme of business because they think they have to. Or a lot of times they, they do get kind of bored and they just want to do something. But in reality they should just be focusing on growing the business and doing the high value tasks. So what you need to do now is you're going to write a list down for me. You're going to make two columns, left and right column, line down the middle. On the left side you're going to write $5 now task. On the right side you're going to write $50 an hour task. And then I want you to write down all your tasks, which would be $5 an hour tasks, which you do in each day. Okay? So write them in the left colum. Right column. I want to write all the $50 an hour tasks. Okay? Then you're going to see very clearly the $5 an hour tasks are going to be a lot more than $50 an hour task in most cases. Usually, you know, the $50 an hour tasks are about 25% of the. A hundred percent of the other ones. So about four times as much generally. So then you need to think to yourself, if I were to only do the $50 an hour tasks, what would my business look like? And you could probably do it better. You could probably do more of it as well. Okay? And then that would increase your revenue, that would increase your profit, that would increase your client satisfaction because you have processed out or outsourced the $5 hour tasks. So I want to give you a little story just so this sinks in. So my entrepreneurial journey so far, I had a personal training business when I was 18 and that led into a sports science company. Funny story that, but that's for another podcast episode. I had a Nutrition company. I've had various coaching programs over the last 15 years. I had a marketing agency which I recently sold. I have a gym, Helix Gym, which is going on nine years now. And now I have success school. So that's seven businesses in each business. I went through this exact process. I started as a technician, I learned how to do and run the business, I created processes and procedures to run it. Then I hired and outsourced every single part of the business and they all ran without me independently. Okay? And that is excluding the PT business because I was literally just trading time for money as a personal trainer at that point. Not really a business is more of a job. But you know, I'll call it a business for the sake of this. So you guys got that. You start out as a technician, you learn it, then you learn how to actually run the business, then you create the processes, then you hire an outsource every single part of the business and then they all or your business can run without you. That is the process and that becomes a valuable asset. The key here is the processes and how to run it. But how you start that is you look at the $5 an hour tasks and then you outsource them to someone that can do them that has a much lower rate than you in business. And what I mean by that is someone that you pay less so you can focus on the other tasks. Not saying they're not worth it. But the point I'm trying to get at here is you could get sick, you could go on holiday, you could take time, you could not show up and the wheels would not fall off your business. This is a big problem when it comes to scanning a business is people don't have their systems and processes and their $5 and $50 an hour tasks processed out. So this is where they fail. So the key concept here guys, is you need to gain consciousness and awareness of where you're spending your time in your business. And if it's fruitful, if your business is not where you want it to be, you probably haven't allocated or outsourced enough $5 an hour tasks which or you're not spending enough time doing the tasks that really matter and growing the business. So the final action items, guys, is you need to list out all tasks you're doing in your business. You need to work out if they're five or 50 an hour tasks and you need to outsource them appropriately. I will be talking about outsourcing soon, so I will teach you a step by step on how to do that, but you need to gain conscious awareness around that. On the next episode, I'm going to be talking to you about the number one thing you need to do to grow a seven figure business. And it's brutally simple. Like every episode on this podcast. And finally, guys, housekeeping. If you got some value from this show, please share it with a friend. This show grows by word of mouth and I need you. I need the listener. If you're not already subscribed or following the show, please do on whichever platform you're on. And lastly, leave a rating. 5 star reviews are greatly appreciated. If you got literally 1 ounce or a small bit of value from this. If you could take the 10 seconds to leave us a review, it would be greatly appreciated. Until next time, guys.