Are you wanting to take your business to greater heights, but too many factors just seem to be holding you back?
In this episode of Dadpreneurs Rising, Carl Taylor addresses a common challenge faced by many entrepreneurs, particularly those who are also dads: the struggle to find time for sales and revenue-generating activities while being consumed by the day-to-day operations of their business.
Carl shares insights from a member of the King’s Council who expressed his desire to sell more but felt constrained by the bustle of running his business. Carl unpacks the underlying issue, which is not necessarily a lack of time but rather a misalignment between the activities he is spending time on and those that generate the highest return on investment.
He emphasises the importance of identifying and prioritising high-leverage, high-impact activities that directly contribute to increasing cash flow and profits. This could involve transitioning from hands-on delivery work to high-profit, low-time consulting services or focusing on sales and promotion efforts that can reach multiple potential clients simultaneously.
Using the analogy of a skilled technician who charges not for their time but for their expertise in identifying and resolving a specific issue, Carl encourages entrepreneurs to position themselves as experts who offer valuable knowledge and solutions rather than selling their time.
This episode provides actionable advice for entrepreneurs so they can evaluate their weekly activities, identify time-consuming tasks that do not significantly contribute to revenue generation, and reallocate their efforts towards high-leverage, revenue-driving initiatives.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL DISCOVER…
- What you could be doing wrong if you’re unsuccessfully trying to grow and scale your business (00:55)
- How to “get out of the weeds” by pulling the right levers and making critical changes in running your business (03:24)
QUOTES
- “We want to get you out of those weeds so that you can focus your time on the things that actually pull the right levers, the things that are going to increase your owner’s hourly rate. So you can take more money out of the business, and have less time involvement in the business, which ultimately will give you a more valuable business as well.” – Carl Taylor
- “You will make a lot more money selling a business that doesn’t require you, even if you are involved, doesn’t require you as the owner, versus what you’re actually selling them is a job.” – Carl Taylor
- “You’re wanting to be able to position you as the person who delivers a service where the service price is high, but it’s not linked to the hours you put in.” – Carl Taylor
WHERE YOU CAN FIND CARL TAYLOR
Automation Agency
CarlTaylor.com.au
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
TRANSCRIPTION
I need to sell more. But I’m so busy, I don’t have time to sell more.
You’re listening to Dadpreneurs Rising. This is the show for you if you’re a dad, who runs a business, so you’re a dad and an entrepreneur, and you’re looking at how do you balance being the entrepreneur, the dad, the family, man, the husband, a lover, and maybe a friend and a healthy man, and actually just yourself, right? Today’s society, there’s a lot going on for us as men, and even more so when you’re an entrepreneur.
I am your host, Carl Taylor, if you don’t know me, hey, you can learn more about me over at carltaylor.com. Or you can learn more about my companies. I got two of them, automationagency.com, it’s a marketing agency, and dadpreneur.com. Hence the name of this podcast. I work with dudes just like you. And we’ve got a great community of coaches and members, we call them Kings.
Now, today, I want to talk about this challenge that one of our members in the King’s Council was facing. He said, I need to sell more, right, I need to be doing more sales. But I’m just so busy in the day-to-day of my business, I don’t have time to actually do the selling. And the main issue that this man was facing was he didn’t realise it, but what he was really saying is, I’m not making enough money for the time I’m putting in. Right. He’s saying, I need to sell more, meaning I need more money, I need whether, you know, I need more cash flow, I need more profit, whatever it is, like I need more money to fuel this machine of my life and the business. But I have no time. And so what that means is where he is putting time into the business is not producing a high hourly rate for his time, he’s not getting enough out of that to be actually worth his time. He didn’t say that. He didn’t know that that’s what he was saying. But that’s ultimately really what he was saying or what I was able to be like, hey, clearly, there’s an issue here.
And so he’s got this idea of what I need to sell more, which if he does it well will be a far really high hourly rate, right? If you can, especially if you can do a one to many type sales strategy, which he was looking at doing. So let’s say you’re looking to do a webinar, you know, an online seminar, if you’re not sure what a webinar is, like, you run a webinar, you might have 20 people on that call, you spend an hour, you’ve been able to have a sales conversation with 20 people in that one hour, that’s a high impact activity. Versus if you are in your business, let’s say you’re, let’s say you’re a marketing agency, and you’re working with one client, maybe it’s doing an onboarding call with them. Or maybe you’re, maybe you’re worse, you’re actually in there, clicking the buttons and doing things in their technology or doing the graphic designs, those kinds of things. If you’re in the actual weeds of doing the work, that time is not as impactful as having a sales conversation with 20 people. If you are a tradesman in some way, shape, or form, right, going and doing a quote is probably a higher value activity than going and actually doing the job. Because that time to do the quote is probably a lot smaller than the time to deliver the project. And it’s the thing that will get the decision for them to do that to do the job, right.
And so what we’re talking about here is if you’re going to have the same setup in your business, there’s going to be activities you do that keep you busy, but they don’t have the same impact on the dollar bottom line, on the cash flow. And what we want to do is an activity we call “getting out of the weeds.” We want to get you out of those weeds so that you can focus your time on the things that actually pull the right levers, the things that are going to increase your owner’s hourly rate. So you can take more money out of the business, and have less time involvement in the business, which ultimately will give you a more valuable business as well. Like if you ever want to sell down the line, I can tell you with firsthand experience, you will make a lot more money selling a business that doesn’t require you, even if you are involved, doesn’t require you as the owner, versus what you’re actually selling them is a job. Right? You sell someone a job, you’re gonna get a far less valuation of your company versus you sell them a business that they, someone could come in and just go great, it’s a money making machine. I put money in, I get money out. So what I want you to do is look at your business. And look at your week, maybe it’s the coming week, maybe it’s last week, look at your calendar and go, what are these activities, did I do or am I about to do, that really, they’re not putting real money in my pocket? They’re taking up a lot of time, but it’s not actually moving the needle. Now with this particular man that I was talking about at the beginning, for him he was spending a lot of time fixing devices.
And so he’s doing the delivery work on a client that’s paid, well half paid, because they only pay the balance after the jobs complete. So there’s an element of him getting the job done does bring in some more cash. But it was holding him back from being able to do an activity that had a far higher leverage and a far higher hourly rate. If you are going to be involved in delivery, what I want you as an owner to be doing is I want you involved in high profit, low time delivery services. I’m talking about where you can deliver a consulting hour, or you have a service that you can charge a high price for your expertise. But the time involvement is not what you’re charging for, you’re charging for that expertise. You may have heard the story, the idea, I can’t remember the actual original originator of the story. But it’s basically the idea of you know, a guy comes along, and he offers a quote, there’s a customer struggling, they need something fixed. And the guy says I can fix that for you. It’ll be $10,000. And the customer says, Okay, I need it fixed. And the guy comes in, and he grabs a screwdriver. And he moves a screw, a quarter of a centimetre or a quarter of an inch, whichever country you’re in, whatever we want to work with, let’s say a quarter of an inch, you move a quarter of an inch. And then he said, Okay, it’s fixed. So within around 30 seconds, he’s fixed the problem. The customer checks, absolutely, it’s fixed. Now the customer is annoyed. He’s like, Hold on, I just paid you $10,000 for you to move a screw a quarter of an inch. Only took you 30 seconds. And the businessman, rightly so. Says, Well, I charged you $1 for my time. And the $9,999 was for me, it was for the knowledge of which screw to turn and how far to turn it. And that’s what you want to be looking for. Maybe not to that same extreme of profit margin. But you’re wanting to be able to position you as the person who delivers a service where the service price is high, but it’s not linked to the hours you put in. It’s for the fact that you know which screw to turn and how far to turn it. And that’s where I really want you to focus.
So if you’re a service provider, in particular, that’s what you need to be doing. If you’re not a service provider, you’re more in the product based business, you’re still not necessarily involved in the delivery. But you’re involved in the product selection, you’re involved in the logistics of making sure you’ve got enough stock and which stock you should hold, and you can still be involved in the promotion of joint venture partnerships, raising money if you need money on stock, going out to shows, there’s a whole bunch of other activities that are high leverage for you even if you’re a product based business.
So I leave that with you to look at your business, look at your week and go, where are my activities? And am I putting my time into the high leveraged dollar high owner’s hourly rate activities, or am I getting distracted in the weeds which are holding me back? Meaning that you’re stuck in this conundrum of I need to sell more but I don’t have time to sell more. Till next time, keep up the journey.