Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire

by Dan Martell

Done the wrong way, hiring more people will increase your workload.

Rather, every time you make a hire, buy software, or complete a transaction, you should be asking yourself, How do I buy back more time with this purchase?

$100 million companies were not built on $10 tasks.

At Level 3, your personal life gets really exciting:

At this level, other capable people run the day-to-day of your (probably multiple) businesses, and you have all the time you want to dream up new investments or opportunities. Your headspace is so clear and your energy is so high, you’re thinking of how to turn good into great, some into more, and an investment into a bigger return.

to audit her time by writing down what she was doing every fifteen minutes, every day, for the next two weeks.

She recognized what was sucking her into Delegation.

Once you clearly see where you’re spending your time, you’ll want to buy it back, trust me.

start with the lowest-hanging fruit.

Later, we’ll talk about how to get rid of larger, more complex tasks.

For now, attack tasks in your Delegation Quadrant.

“The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!

Warhol capsized existing notions of authenticity and the value of the artist’s hand.

“build the machine that builds the machine.”

how to get out of Replacement and into Production.

find what makes you money and lights you up.

Replacement Quadrant is different. Here, there are high-value tasks that are important, and who you give them to matters.

Replacement Ladder—a time-tested system for what business operations to transfer at each stage of your company. It works for every business, at any level, in any industry.

Here are the rungs, in order: Rung 1: Administration Rung 2: Delivery Rung 3: Marketing Rung 4: Sales Rung 5: Leadership

There are three key components at every rung of the Replacement Ladder: The key hire you need to make Your current feeling of stress or liberty The responsibilities that must be transferred to the key hire (I call this ownership) Here’s how it all looks when put together:

The key hire is clearly critical. But get this: it’s not the title that matters, it’s the role.

OWNERSHIP

do they have ownership of the right tasks?

until one person is ultimately responsible for the associated tasks of a given rung, you will ultimately own the outcomes. In that case, you can’t move up.

if I can figure out how the founder is feeling, we can determine where the company is truly at on the ladder.

(If they say they’re feeling stalled out, that’s a good indication they’re on Rung 2: Delivery.)

Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.

you may enjoy drawing up the plans.

In that case, I suggest following the 10-80-10 rule. You do the initial 10 percent, then put someone else in charge of executing on the middle 80 percent of the work, then you sail back in and finalize the last 10 percent, putting your magical touch on the project.

The 10-80-10 Rule

The 10-80-10 rule is a simple technique you can use when you still want to be involved with the end result, but you don’t need to do all the work on your own.

Let go of marketing and put someone else in charge of ensuring that next month, next quarter, and next year there’s still business coming in.

Rung 5: Leadership Key Hires: All Levels of Leadership

Collaboration: This is where it gets fun.

Here, you get to strategize with other people. You meet on a regular basis with your leadership, collaborating on ideas. They’re running your business, hiring and firing, and putting out the fires. You’re a bystander who has enormous input but little responsibility.

By Rung 5, other capable people are running your business. It makes money without your day-to-day involvement. You can continue to refocus your energy on your Production Quadrant because you’ve s...

Production Quadrant—they love the ideation and creativity that comes from strategizing and leading.

With a headspace free of the daily tasks of running your business, how many good ideas could you come up with?

With an executive team that can execute, how many of those ideas could you actually achieve?

The Replacement Ladder is designed so that at each rung, you’ll have an increase in revenue, affording you the next key hire.

I needed to back off and let my team handle it. Otherwise, I wasn’t even following my own Buyback Principle.

Jump back in, and you assume the stress, and you lose the freedom.

Fill your new time with tasks that make you the most money and light you up. If you don’t remember what those are, refer to your Time and Energy Audit from earlier: look for green tasks with lots of dollar signs.

2 | BAGGAGE-FREE EXECUTION Administrative assistants also have the benefit of executing without the mental and psychological hang-ups that make it difficult for you to execute. For instance, it’s sometimes hard to bite the bullet and pay a huge invoice that you need to pay. Other times, you may not want to schedule the meeting that you know requires a tough conversation. But your administrative assistant doesn’t have this emotional baggage.

The easy way to know if something has personal emotional baggage for you is to ask yourself: What do I procrastinate doing?

Make a rule for yourself: I am no longer ever, ever allowed to touch an email that wasn’t first checked by my assistant.

I’ve listed off how the Email GPS works.

I can’t believe I’m going to lose my administrative assistant that I’ve built a relationship with for nine years.”

needed to negotiate to keep his assistant.