Chapter 2: Vision and Chapter 3: Time

I hope you enjoyed the first installment of "Growing A Professional Services Firm: How to grow your firm from 6 to 7 figures".

To get this out before Christmas 2020 we will increase the release to every week.

2020 has certainly been a strange year and 2021 will also present many challenges. I want to help your to grow and scale your business so please let me know what you think of this book and please share it with your colleagues and friends.

Chapter 2: Vision

Begin with an end in mind

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , Stephen R Covey analyses the different habits of people. The second habit is "To begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination". This influential book was first published in 1989 and is widely accepted as one of the most important books on that subject (with some 15 million copies sold).

Over the years of helping professionals through their business journey I have noticed that many people don't like to think of the end, as they simply don't know where the end will be. Professionals stress over the fact that they feel they have no idea what the end will be. So while I agree with this sentiment I believe that this has changed from beginning with the end in mind to beginning with an end in mind. Very few people know exactly where they want to go with their business or even life but having a goal in mind means that you can have a direction even if the ultimate destination changes in the future.

The number of people, especially young people, who chop and change their career path, would surprise a lot of people. The pressure to be what everyone else thinks you should be compared with what you want, only after doing this will you see the path forward. For these reasons I believe that it is important for you to shift the thinking to having an end in mind, work towards a goal and don't stress if you don't know exactly what this is.

This is the reason I wrote one of my previous books "Startup: With an end in mind". So long as you have an idea of where you are going if that changes in the future then that is okay. Always know the path you are on and constantly re-evaluate the path to make sure that you are on track to achieve that.

You will exit your business some day.

When you start your business journey you need to acknowledge that at some point you will exit your business. Whether you sell your business, shut it down or die you will exit your business. For most people their business is one of their most valuable assets (like their house) so you want to maximise the return that you get for all of the hard work that you have put into the business. For that reason you always need to think in terms of making sure that your business asset can be sold. Generally it takes 2 years from when a professional decides that they want to sell to have the business in a position that will achieve its maximum price. 

For this reason it is important that you consider the type of business that you own so that you can work out what you need to do to achieve your vision for the business and make sure that it survives the bus test (I know its crude but I need to make this point, how will your business survive if you were hit by a bus).

What type of business do you own?

In Chapter 1, I talked about the different types of business owners. Once you understand what type of business owner you are, you need to then consider what type of business do you own. So often these are not aligned which means that the business flounders and never reaches its potential. Geoff Green, in the Smart Business Exit divides businesses into three categories, SME (small to medium sized enterprises), Big Businesses and Entrepreneurial businesses. The distinctions between the three are important to understand so that you know your business and what you are going to achieve with that business.

SME's (small to medium sized enterprises)

These are small businesses that are usually operated by owner operators. They are largely in the professions, trades, food and hospitality and are run informally. Most of the owners of these businesses are happy and satisfied with the size and profitability of their business and don't have grand ambitions. Professionals in this category are great craftspeople who want to help their clients achieve their goals and provide solutions to there issues.

Big Businesses

These are much more structured, bureaucratic businesses that are operated in accordance with a set of rules and are usually more compliance-focused than SME's. As they are not operated by the owners, the operators usually have a lot of third parties that they consider. For example, shareholders, directors, and a range of other stakeholders need to be considered. They are usually large established companies with settled client bases and business models.

Entrepreneurial businesses

These are businesses that sit between SME's and Big Businesses. They are often operated like SME's but have ambitions to be a bigger business. The key distinguishing factor is their growth or their potential to grow.

All too often I see professionals who think that they need to be entrepreneurial or a big businesses without understanding the type of business owner they are. Nothing stops you from adjusting from one type to another type of business, in fact as you grow and develop your goals will change. However it is important that you understand the type of business that you own so that you can move forward towards your goals.

Growth vs Scale 

Now you know the type of business owner that you are and the type of business that you own (or want to own) you need to understand the difference between growth and scale. In any business if you aren't moving forwards you are moving backwards because your competitors will be moving forward. You can't sit still so you need to determine the type of business that you want now to achieve your goals.

We have all heard the examples of businesses that grow too big for the operators to continue operating. All too often we hear professionals who have grown their business to 7 figures say I made more money when it was just a 6 figure business. The reason is that they don't understand the different between growth and scale. The simplest way to understand the difference is that when you grow without scale you profit margin remains the same, your costs increase as you grow. Scale on the other hand is leveraged growth, keeping your costs the same (or only increasing them in a small way), and thereby increasing your profits. 

Of course, when they hear this difference everyone wants to look for a business that can grow with scale as it means that the owner of the business makes more profit. Understanding this difference though is a key concept for you to be able to achieve your goals. However you need to decide what is right for you. To be able to turn a 6 figure business into a 7 figure business you need to find ways to scale your time. You need to scale a team to help increase your revenue and profits so that you can achieve your goals. 

Conclusion 

There is a lot of information in this chapter about setting your vision. Building a business from 6 to 7 figures in a sustainable way requires careful thought and consideration for the future of the business. Once you decide, your answers, to these important questions (and acknowledge that it may change in the future) you can then go through the rest of the process set out in this book to build the business that you want.

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

Before you move on to the next chapter I encourage you to really think through these questions:

1. What type of business do you own?

2. Does this business align with the type of business owner you are?

3. If not, what do you need to change to make them align?

4. Critical Thinking Question - Do you want to grow or do you want to build scale? Scale sounds great but is that what you really want and if it is how will you do that?

Visit jeremystreten.com/grow for more on this topic.

CHAPTER 3: Time

Being the owner of a professional services business while doing the work of the business is one of the greatest challenges that you will face. Time is the great equaliser and it is the one thing that is the same no matter who you are. We all have 168 hours in the week and how you use that time will determine your success. The time that you spend on yourself, the time that you spend working on your business, the time that you spend working in your business all go together to determine your success.

Throughout this chapter I am going to give you practical hints and tricks to help you take back control of your time. However before I do that if you haven't done the Mindset and Vision exercises in Chapters 1 and 2 I strongly recommend that you go back and do them first. As will become apparent through this chapter you can't determine what to do with your time until you understand your priorities. Remember where the focus goes the energy flows.

Are you addicted to being Busy?

A professional masters their business when they are engaged and organised. There are different levels or steps that a professional business owner will go through on their journey. Often a professional needs to be busy, stressed and lonely before they decide that they need to make a change. Often we get so busy in the day to day of working in our business that we make excuses about what we are doing and when. We don't want to confront problems and we don't want to cause conflict with those around us. We therefore put things on the back foot and avoid confronting problems. This avoidance then causes problems to escalate because they are not resolved making the problem worse. This leads us to fall into a rut and not be able to move forward as we are always making excuses about what is next.

Don't worry if this sounds like you, you aren't doing anything wrong, it is human nature. I have seen it time and time again, there are literately thousands of self-help methodologies out there that can help you solve them. At the end of the day what these methodologies do is give you a method out of being busy. Before you consider that thoroughly you need to make the decision to actually solve the problem in the first place. If you don't do that then you will never solve the underling cause and will continue in this vicious cycle. 

What I have seen is that unless called out on it, often people seem to need to hit their lowest before they do something about it. Do you want this to be you? Being busy, stressed and lonely are terrible things for most human beings, we don't want to deal with that in our life. What is your way out? Utilising the wisdom of others is one way to get you out of this rut. It’s amazing how often I see professionals engage with a group of peers to see that they are not alone and take strength from that group of peers.

An interesting study undertaken by Columbia and Harvard universities shows that busy people feel more important. The key problem here is that a lot of us have grown "addicted to busyness" as Tim Kreider wrote in the New York Times. How often when someone asks you how you are you give the response "Busy", "So Busy" or "Crazy Busy"? Its like busyness serves as a protective layer giving you meaning so that you can't say that you are worthless. If our time is not completely booked out all of the time then so often we feel empty and unwanted. 

According to Silvia Bellezza “Compared to our grandparents, we have more access to luxury,” Bellezza, an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia Business School explains. “The wealthier middle class has increased the demand for luxury products, and there's more supply of these goods because of mass production. If everyone has access to these luxuries, they stop giving off signals.”

Paradoxically the studies have found that the space and quiet space that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it as a whole. Idleness provides the time for you to make unexpected connections and wait for that moment when lightning strikes with a great idea. 

In this study Bellezza says “When I say I’m busy, I convey status not through what I'm wearing, but by signalling that I'm something that's very scarce. I'm communicating that I'm high status because of the intrinsic value of myself and my human capital. It's a more sophisticated and nuanced strategy than signalling through products. It’s about our intelligence and our inner-characteristics.”

So next time someone asks you how you are try to call yourself on not being busy for the sake of busy (unless you are actually busy). Wouldn't it be better to say that you are organised? That everything is going to plan and that you have no complaints. That sounds to me like a much better way of phrasing how you are going. 

Busy leads to Stress

Reframing your mindset around being busy and busyness is the next step that leads you to master being a business owner. Unfortunately, what happens for most business owners is that they become busy and then this leads to significant amounts of stress. The modern schedule and mindset is often seen as frantic, it leaves many of us feeling constantly pressed for time. 

In a study produced by the American Marketing Association titled "Is your busy schedule affecting your health? Time might not be the problem" researches Jordan Etkin (Duke University), Ioannis Evangelidis (Erasmus University), and Jennifer Aaker (Stanford University) found that the feeling of being pressed for time impacts how people will spend their time, and how much they are willing to pay to save it. Feeling pressed for time can lead to poorer health, trouble sleeping and, in extreme cases, depression. When people used breathing or other techniques to see the stress in a more positive way they become happier and healthier. 

The competition for time between different tasks also makes people feel like they have less time overall the researches found. This is because "emotions such as guilt about their time is being spent or fear over loss of income both generate stress, and make a person feel more pressed for time than they actually are". When looking around you, you will probably see that this happens all the time. 

When people are busy they actually make themselves more stressed and get less done. It is a vicious cycle that so many people go through. This often happens when you get stuck in your own head and don't have anyone to talk to. The collective mind is a technique that many people have found works for them, it allows them the space to talk about issues and to work out solutions. Those solutions are then implemented and the person is held accountable to their peers to make sure that they get done. 

The 6 steps to becoming a Master 

In my experience there are 6 steps that a professional needs to go through to become a Master in their business. Visually these can be represented as follows:

When a business owner is busy they will often try to make changes that lead them no-where. This makes them stressed, as I will discuss later in this book, stress is a terrible thing for both your mental and physical health but your relationship with others. This means that busy and stressed people become lonely. 

Unfortunately all too often it is not until a professional is confronted by all three of these levels that they realise that they need help. Don't try to do it alone, by taking the steps to organise yourself, your business and your life you can progress through this ladder from Busy to Master much faster than you can do for yourself. 

Let's Get You Organised

The best way to move up the ladder is to get organised, when you are lonely you never have time to do anything. Becoming organised will help you to cross the threshold from Busy, Stressed and Lonely to Organised, Engaged and ultimately to being the Master of your business. Crossing the threshold to organised is something that few professionals ever actually do, they are so busy and stressed that it becomes their life and they move around and around in circles. 

Often organisation can be seen as the holy grail and it is something that most people don't fully master. I see it all the time, people pretend to have a full plate but that’s just because they are busy. You need to get organised. There are a large number of different organisation systems, you need to find the one that works for you. Once you get organised your time frees up, you have so much more space in your brain to get things done.

Three of my favourite organisation tools are the Default Diary, Getting Things Done methodology by Dr David Allen and Kanban popularised by Jim Benson . These three systems, when used by themselves are powerful tools to organise your time and make you more efficient. Used together I have found them to be powerful tools that help shift Busy, Stressed and Lonely people over the line to Organised. Before we get into these three I wanted to talk about the benefits of time management.

Benefits of Time Management

There are many benefits in organising your time:

1. Less Stress - better organising your time can directly reduce your stress levels. The fewer surprises that come up in your day, the fewer tight deadlines and less rushing from task-to-task will reduce your stress levels immensely.

2. Get More Done - in your working life you are always straining to be more productive. It is one of the main goals of time management, when you are aware of what you need to do, and when you need to do it by you can better manage your workload. You will be able to get more of the right tasks done in less time.

3. Less Rework - one of the most frustrating parts of being less organised is having to do rework because you rush through a job. Being organised results in less mistakes and therefore less rework. If you forget items, details and instructions this all leads to extra work. How often do you have to do a task more than once? Or make an extra trip because you forgot something?

4. Less Life Friction and Problems - lets be honest, how often do you create your own problems? Whether it is a forgotten appointment or a missed deadline not organising your time results in increased life friction. Avoid creating your own problems by planning and preparing your day.

5. More Free Time - you can't create more time, but you can make better use of it by managing your time better. Even simple steps like arriving early and getting your work done fast can produce more leisure time in your life.

6. Less Wasted Time - where you haven't managed your time properly you find that you waste a lot of time working out what you want to do or worse in idle activities. Instead of wondering what you should do next have you time organised so that you remove that procrastination step from your life. This produces less effort, which may seem counterintuitive, however by taking time earlier to organise your time you will end up with more time to do the things you want to do.

7. Improves your Reputation - people always know the organised people in their network. They are ones that get more work and more of their social life in order. They will be known as reliable and no one will question your ability to show up and will know that you will do what you say you are going to do.

These are just some of the benefits of managing your time better. What would the benefit be to you to be liberated from the chaos of time management? Which of these resonate with you as a benefit that would work for you. 

Studies vary on the time that you get back from being more organised and less distracted, it is anywhere from 25 minutes to 2 hours, managing your time will help prevent this from happening to you. Many people believe that we are born with determination and that those who succeed are simply the fortunate ones who are born with an abundant supply of determination. This is simply not the case, to get things done you need willpower and determination, we all have this you don't need to make up excuses. The successful people are the ones that find a way to harness and use what they have more effectively. 

Here are 5 simple steps to help you get more organised and if you take nothing else away from this book then please implement these in your life.

1. Set up your day the night before - if you spend 5 to 10 minutes working out what you need to do the next day that will give you greater clarity over your time moving forward.

2. Do the most difficult things first - putting off the most difficult task on your to-do-list does not make it any easier in the future and doesn't make it go away. You need to step up and get the most difficult things done first so that you can use the most productive time of your day to do that (if you are an owl it may be best to do these later).

3. Eliminate distractions and time wasters - we all have distractions and things that waste our time. Make a note of them and then look for strategies to eliminate those distractions. Turn off your notifications. If you have things or people that are wasting your time, discuss it in a mature way and remove them from your life. It always amazes me at how often people don't realise what they are doing and how that will affect others. A simple discussion will usually fix that problem really quickly and simply.

4. Regenerate and keep up your energy - do not sit at your desk all day. That is probably the biggest time waster of all. You need to get up, move around and relax. This will help you get more done because breaks will help you to become more focused when you finish. 

5. Constantly remind yourself of your ultimate goals - we should all have goals that we are working towards. By constantly reminding yourself what you are trying to achieve you will stay focused on your ultimate goals and therefore get more done. 

Step 1 - Default Diary

Using some of the tools that you can find on the website companion page to this book jeremysteten.com/grow will greatly help you to organise your time. They worked for me, before I started using systems to organise my time I was in absolute chaos. I was moving from one crisis to another, constantly putting out fires and feeling like I never achieved anything. Once I put in place a default diary of what I was going to do each day and using a system like the kanban system to manage my tasks my stress reduced and I simply got more done. There are so many distractions in modern life, turning off the notifications on your phone, computer and social media will simply help you get more done.

A default diary is exactly what is sounds like it is a document that shows you what you should be doing on any day by default. It is the key plan for your week that helps you get more done. Putting one together is tough, it takes time and dedication and many iterations. However when you do it you will find that you are more organised and can get more done. I have put together a free course on building your default diary, visit jeremystreten.com/grow or jeremystreten.com/default-diary to see how to build a default diary.

Step 2 - Getting Things Done

This methodology is to help improve your personal productivity. It does this by redefining how you approach your life and work. I highly recommend that you read the book Getting Things Done by David Allen, it is a powerful read. If you focus and follow the steps in the book you will find that you will instantly become more organised. The 5 step process is as follows:

1. Step 1 - Capture - collect a list of 100% of everything that has your attention, little, big, personal and professional

2. Step 2 - Clarify - is it actionable, is it something that you can action right away? If it is then do it now, delegate it or defer it. If it is not then trash it, incubate it or file it.

3. Step 3 - Organise - create a customised system, that works for you, to remind yourself where your things are and what you need to do.

4. Step 4 - Reflect - make sure that you frequently review and update your system

5. Step 5 - Engage - simply get things done that are on your list.

Check out the free resource where I go through this process at the companion webpage www.jeremystreten.com/grow. If you want to dive straight into this methodology check out the videos at www.jeremystreten.com/GTD for the process of implementing this into your life and business.

The filters in step 2 are critically important for you to ensure that you get things done. They are simple and there are some great examples of how they have helped countless people (around the world achieve their goals). 

As part of our continuous education and improvement in my law firm we instituted this process with a number of team members. The truth of it was that they were extremely unorganised, they were drowning in a sea of paperwork, emails and telephone messages. This was causing them an extreme amount of stress, they were always busy and felt that they never got any work done. Many of them were sceptical about how it would work for them, they couldn't see how something so simple could work. Some even delayed doing the process for weeks thinking that they just simply had to do the work rather than getting organised. 

After a few hours of going through the Getting Things Done process and working out a list of work to do, delegate and defer they had a revelation, they were organised. It was amazing to see the benefits for them personally, they had gone into the process with such scepticism. Coming out they were much more organised and were able to get work done. Unsurprisingly they also started to get more work done, which increased their efficiency leading to other gains for their business.

The getting things done process is great to get you and your team organised. As with any system it is only as good as its implementation. You need to implement and having someone holding you accountable to performing the system will be the key to your success. Please read the book and also make sure that you implement and have someone hold you accountable to that implementation. You should also redo this system regularly, at least every 6 months, to ensure that you maintain your organisation.

Step 3 - Kanban

In life you have those moments, and meet those people who truly change your life. Meeting Jim Benson and implementing the Kanban system was one of those moments for me. I will explain the Kanban process here but to get the true learning I highly recommend that you read the book, Personal Kanban by Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry. If Getting Things Done helps you move from Lonely to Organised then Personal Kanban keeps you Organised freeing you to move up the ladder to Engaged and ultimately Master your business.

The history of Kanban comes from the 1940s and was first developed by Taiichi Ohno (an Industrial Engineer and Businessman) for Toyota automotive in Japan. His goal was to create a simple planning tool, to control and manage work and inventory at every stage of production optimally. There are different Kanban systems depending on what you need, however authors Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry developed two simple rules:

1. Visualise your work; and

2. Limit your work in progress.

The personal Kanban system starts as three columns and looks as follows:

In it’s analogue form each box in each column represents a post-it note that sets out a simple task (usually no more than 25 minutes). In your options column you have everything that you need to do (these are tasks taken from your 'do it' and 'defer it' from Getting Things Done). You then move across what you are doing into the middle column (you should never have more than 3 things in this column). Once you have completed the work it then goes into the done column.

This simple methodology is so easy and it helps busy, stressed and lonely people to get Organised and get more work done. There are many different electronic systems for using the Kanban system. However I recommend, from personal experience, that you start analogue and move into electronic only after you have mastered the analogue version. There are many other complex ways for you to use the kanban system and many different variations. You need to build a system that works for you.

If you go to the companion webpage for this book www.jeremystreten.com/grow you will find resources about how to build your personal kanban board and how to update it. If you want to get straight into it then please visit www.jeremystreten.com/kanban for my step by step guide to using this system. 

You may be thinking that these systems are complicated and won't work for you. I know that it is scary but you are reading this book because something isn't working for you. I have been there before, you need to find the system that works for you. I recommend that you try this and see how it goes. Adjust the process if it doesn't work for you until you discover your flow.

Using systems to reduce stress

One of the most stressful professions out there has to be a doctor and in particular surgeons. They literally have peoples lives under their control every time they go to work. This can be a particularly stressful profession and you only need study the history in medicine to see that doctors have used checklists since the 5th millennium BC, in other words they have been used for a long time. One study by the New England Journal of Medicine , showed that having a checklist, even for simple procedures could cut deaths by 36%. 

This study by Dr Atul Gawande, associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health led to the World Health Organisation starting the Safe Surgery Project. In this project doctors around the world are encouraged to utilise checklists and implement their own recommended checklists for surgeons. Checklists, when used in both the medical and non-medical industries, as cognitive aids, guide users through accurate task completion. Their development requires a systematic and comprehensive approach in all industries.

How can you use checklists in your business? What can you put in place to help deliver better outcomes to your customers? How can you become more organised and therefore more efficient. 

Case study

A financial planner based in Florida in the United States who has long struggled with the management of his time to get all of his tasks done sort my help. Like so many professional he struggles between getting the work done so that he fulfills his obligations to his clients and spending time on his business. Realising that he needed to make a change he implemented a default diary and put his work through the getting things done process. He admits that getting control of his time is still a struggle and that he was struggling to triage everything to where it needs to go but that he already saw the benefits of these systems and was taking back control of his time. Following the Getting Things Done methodology he reduced the number of emails in his inbox from between 50 to 80 emails to 3 emails

Another case study is an immigration lawyer who runs a successful business in Brisbane. When I started working with him he used some of these techniques but had not put them into place in a formal manner. He was constantly struggling to focus his time on the tasks that needed them the most. Richard wanted to make changes in his practice for sometime to give him more freedom. By implementing a strict default diary and communicating that diary to his team Richard has been able to free up his time and realise that he can get more done if he focuses on tasks at set times without been distracted. It has given him the tools and tactics to implement these processes that have helped him leverage his business.

Conclusion 

I encourage you to eliminate the word busy from your life and get organised. When someone asks you how are you, don't say "I'm Busy" but say "I'm organised" or something similar. Being busy has turned into one of those buzz words that really doesn't have any meaning. Busy means that you are not organised. 

A study by the American Psychological Association, Stress in America , found that the most common reason given by adults for not doing more to manage their stress is because they are too busy or don't have enough time. This is a terrible paradox, people are saying that they can't get organised because they are too busy. Until they get organised they will be too busy. What are you waiting for?

QUESTIONS AND TASKS

Before you move on to the next chapter I encourage you to really think through these questions:

? Read and implement Getting Things Done

? Read and implement Personal Kanban

? Critical Thinking Question - What work am I doing that I shouldn't be doing? You want to really consider all of your tasks to work out what you want to do and what you don’t want to do.

Visit jeremystreten.com/grow for more on this topic.