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You don’t learn without doing, and once you’ve really learned something valuable, you should pass it on.
The little-known secret to reaching the next stage of your business is spending your time on only the tasks that: (a) you excel at, (b) you truly enjoy, and (c) add the highest value (usually in the form of revenue) to your business.
You can always get more money, but you can never get more time. So you need to ensure the stuff you spend your time on makes the biggest impact.
That’s what the Buyback Principle is all about: How to spend the most finite asset your business possesses: the founder’s time How to invest that time into what will bring the founder more energy and more money
The Buyback Principle: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.
The Buyback Principle means that entrepreneurs shouldn’t be checking email unless they want to. The Buyback Principle means you excel at a few tasks, and you’re mediocre at best at the others. The Buyback Principle means that when you’re choosing what to do today, you should be selecting the highest-value tasks.
While no one wakes up and says, “I’m going to ruin my business today,” they subconsciously ruin their business by rationalizing unnecessarily dramatic decisions.
Growth isn’t just necessary for expansion. Growth is necessary for survival.
The Pain Line is your opportunity to change your perspective from thinking that more business growth = more pain to knowing that more business growth = more freedom.
A Buyback Loop occurs as you continually audit your time to determine the low-value tasks that are sucking your energy. Then you transfer those tasks, optimally, to someone who’s better at them and enjoys them. Lastly, you fill your time with higher-value tasks that light you up and make you more money. Then you start the process over again.
you’ve got to couple a great work ethic with buying back your time.
Audit: What tasks do I hate doing that are easy and inexpensive to offer someone else? Transfer: Who do I have on my team—or who can I hire, even part-time—to take these over? Fill: What tasks should I focus on that I love doing that can immediately bring more money to my company?
I’m constantly visualizing what I’m after, and that future vision motivates my present.
“I’m actively working to identify areas where we can grow, because I want to operate at the ten-thousand-dollar-an-hour level, not the ten-dollar-an-hour level.”
A study by Columbia and Harvard showed passion combined with perseverance predicts higher educational scores.
“perseverance without passion isn’t grit, but merely a grind.”
is when you don’t enjoy something, you’re also not as good at it.
working hard at things that challenge you, you’re actually costing your company.
Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they’ve learned to do what they love, and only what they love.
“We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”
I’m not in charge of my calendar. They are.
Unlimited predictability is more valuable than intermittent quality.
Cornell University, every time a worker switches between software applications, it takes them almost ten minutes to get back to a high level of productivity.
Once I find alignment with a top candidate, I sell, and I sell hard.
transactional management: they tell people what to do, then check that they did it, then give them what to do next.
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. —Steve Jobs
Once you set the outcome instead of telling your employees “how,” they start talking about results, not tasks.
Key metrics provide clarity, and they help your employees get crystal clear on their objectives.
While the overall goal for your entire company is probably to increase profits, each team or member needs one number they can directly impact.
Once you give everyone in your company a measurement, here’s the good news: their motivation instantly increases.
Often, they won’t need you to help them determine their own success. Often, they can look at their scoreboard and self-correct because they know what they’re aiming at.
If you want to have a high-performance team, learn how to coach successfully.
Leaders know how to pull the best out of someone.
In transactional management, you’re micromanaging every decision. In transformational leadership, you’re helping your teammates make better decisions in the long run.
IF YOU WANT to build a lasting organization, you’ve got to learn to transform your team instead of just managing tasks.
Smart leaders don’t tell others how to do something.
Ensure that each person is empowered to handle their own responsibilities.
you give an outcome, offer a metric to measure progress, then coach to success.
Use CO-A-CH to focus on the COre issue, share an Actual story about when you faced this problem, and then try to get an agreement to CHange.
No Feedback = No Productivity
Your employees are literally hoping to find their life’s purpose inside their job.
and if a talented player isn’t enjoying their current work, why not swap them into a different position? I’ve moved several of my “A” players because they’re hardworking, motivated, but there was a better seat for them on the bus.
someone on your team needs to redirect their efforts into a different task is if they feel comfortable speaking with you. And that starts with you.
Alphabet knows it’s better to hear about a problem in a boardroom than it is to hear about it from the market.
People often lead with something small. Give them one more chance to share the real deal.
Employees, too often, will just quit if they aren’t allowed to voice their concerns.
(Think about how much feedback you have for them. Then realize they feel the same way about you!)
If you do not know where you are going, you will end up exactly there (where?). If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. If you have no specific goals, you will get no specific results. —David Cameron Gikandi and Bob Doyle
As you find more time, you’ll need to learn how to redeposit some of it into the Investment Quadrant.
Passionate people ignite passion in others.
