Time-starved Founder? Buy Back Time By Using a Ghostwriter

Almost every founder is time-starved. It’s partly the volume of responsibilities, opportunities, people to manage, decisions to make and fires to put out, often late into the night. The rest is exhaustion, stress and an endless to do list, in pursuit of growth. But when you’re at breaking point, a lack of time isn’t really the core issue – the time is there. You just need to find ways to buy some back, and redeposit it where it matters most, to allow you to push through the next sticking point.

It’s a universal truth, no matter if you’re a start-up, scale-up or established business.

Time can’t be bought, earned or accumulated, and you’ll never have more of it. Therefore, it’s a founder’s most finite business asset (both personally and professionally), and as such needs to be spent wisely.

Steven Covey says it best in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:?

“The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.”?

That means you need to focus on only spending your time on areas that are genuinely worthwhile to your growth. The rest, outsource.

This idea is repeated in countless business books including The 1-Page Marketing Plan, by Allan Dib, where he says: “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.”?

But how do you decide what’s worthwhile, when busyness seems to be wired into the job??

The Busyness of Being a Founder

Between financial meetings, product development, and strategic planning, your daily schedule is packed. And yet no matter how hard you try, there’s things that slip through the cracks. Keeping your head above water is a constant as is delegating and making smart decisions – but precious time still gets eaten up, which impacts your performance in other ways.?

In 2023 a Startup Snapshot study called The Untold Toll: Impact of Stress on the Well-Being of Startup Founders, clearly showed how (and where) stress seeps into time-starved founders lives:

• 72% of founders struggle with mental health
• 36% experience burnout
• 10% have panic attacks
• 54% are very stressed about their business, with fear of failure being the main stress
• 81% hide their stress, fears and challenges from others, and more than half hide their stress from their own co-founders
• More than 50% lose sleep since founding their companies, and that number skyrockets in step with the amount of money raised
• Founders spend 60% less time with spouses, 58% less time with kids, and 73% less time with friends and family, and the average level of loneliness reported is 7.6 out of 10.

That's not sustainable. For anyone. But what if it didn’t have to be that way??

Buying Back Time to Reinvest

Great leaders are constantly juggling both current issues and future possibilities. And while most build habits to protect their time, it’s still easy to get lost in the details, and lose perspective on how you’re operating.?

By realigning your time, it amplifies your impact. Dan Martell’s book, Buy Back Your Time, offers a solution he calls the ‘Buyback Principle’ – where you repeatedly use available resources to repurchase (i.e ‘buy back’) your time.

The most notable aspect of the 'Buyback' idea is:

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

Fundamentally, it’s grounded in the idea that “You can’t personally outwork yourself to a better business”, and encompasses defining where ‘to/not-to’ best spend your time, and then reinvesting the time saved.

Importantly, it advocates the practice of hiring with a clear purpose: to leverage the reinvestment of founders' time, exclusively into areas where it creates more energy, and more money.??

While the ‘Buyback Principle’ may not be the perfect solution for everyone, it offers a way to optimise how founders deploy their personal resources and manage their energy. Especially for tasks where they don’t either like or feel confident in their skills.

An Essential (but MIA) Skill for Some Founders

One of the most surprising areas that frequently slips through the cracks, is writing and publishing founder-led and thought leadership content. Yet founders – especially of early and scale-up stage startups – need to maintain a consistent online presence, because it’s crucial to the company’s visibility for venture capital and investment, and the founder's personal brand.?

Some of the avoidance is obviously time related. But there’s often also a lack of confidence in writing, an inability to crystallise ideas into a cohesive structure, or (as an SME), writing that’s dry, salesy and reads like a report.

Plus, there’s other curses that plague a clear-eyed effort allocation:

• Lack of time and focus
• Afraid to give away their knowledge
• Missed opportunities to tell bigger stories
• Unable to find stories that want to be written
• Lack of an experienced sidekick to road-test ideas on
• Choosing poor story angles that don’t engage or inspire readers
• Trying to appeal to high-level audiences, but ending up talking down to them

As a practical example of applying the ‘Buyback Principle’, let’s explore how hiring experienced ghostwriting talent for your content creation, allows you to reinvest the saved time, back into what you do best – growing your business – and maximising your productivity.?

How Ghostwriters Save Time and Deliver Your Voice

As you’d expect, the Harvard Business Review, has a lot to say about delegation. A quick search gave 176 results, and the repeated themes throughout are its ability to increase productivity and improve time management.

Briefing a ghostwriter to handle your founder content, means you can then:

• Focus on strategic tasks: Spend more time on high-impact activities like product development and business strategy.
• Improve work-life balance: Reduce stress and avoid burnout by offloading time-consuming tasks.
• Increase content quality: Ghostwriters ensure your content meets high quality standards, matches your own voice and enhances your brand’s credibility.

All three of these benefits qualify as ‘genuinely worthwhile’ to your growth, so this ‘Buyback’ is a valuable reinvestment of founder time and effort.?

How Do Ghostwriters Work?

Executive ghostwriters are professional writers who create content on your behalf, while capturing your unique voice and style.

Agreements and information are confidential, and there’s no public visibility of their efforts. The aim is to provide expertly written, detailed and high-value content on topics defining the market space and to establish the founder as an authority figure in the niche.

Ghostwriters save you time by:

1. Researching and planning: You regularly collaborate in a time-appropriate way, to discuss article briefs and where any extra research is needed – thus ensuring your content is accurate, relevant and timely. They’re also able to develop a content plan aligned with your brand’s goals, so you know what’s scheduled.
2. Writing and editing: Either rough drafts you’ve provided are structurally edited, or conversations are transformed into drafts. The ghostwriter takes care of the entire writing process and final edits. This ensures your content is polished, professional, engaging and error-free. You get the final signoff.
3. Consistent output and voice: Samples of your past writing (or recorded interviews/podcasts) are supplied for the ghostwriter to mimic your style and tone. In consultation with you, the ghostwriter maintains a steady stream of content, keeping your audience engaged and your brand visible.

Ghostwriters Are a Widely Used Founder Practice

Using ghostwriters isn’t unusual or a secret practice. Despite what some people say, it’s not cheating, because ghostwriters:

• Only ever use the information provided to write articles
• Never embellish the information briefed
• Don’t add their own thinking to an article
• Never create content that isn’t true to the personality or knowledge of the founder.?

In fact, many well-known founders leverage ghostwriters to maintain their online presence.

Both Elon Musk and Richard Branson are successful founders of multiple businesses, and from very early on they worked with ghostwriters to ensure their content was consistent and impactful. This allowed them to balance their priorities, focus on their zone of genius and impact their business in the most advantageous ways.

Buying Back Time Makes Business Sense?

Despite those (and many other) readily available examples showing different ways to help resolve the time issue, the busyness path is one that's trodden all too often by entrepreneurs. And repeated.

Again and again.?

Those who don’t learn to take time back and reinvest their energy, often end up burning out, burying or selling their company. A perpetual work hard, ‘no one can do it like me’ mentality only works for so long.

Because there’s always only 24 hours in a day.?

Quietly hiring out tasks, like content creation, allows you to reclaim time while ensuring your company stays on track. It frees up your schedule, leverages your zone of genius and grows your business. What’s not to like about that?

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Ready to reclaim your time, and publish content to build a thought leadership position – all without having to do the work? Send me a secret DM – I won't tell anyone – with the word 'GHOST' and we can see if we are a fit for each other.

Visit my LinkedIn profile. There are 15+ years’ writing experience packed in my keyboard and 3 options to work with me.

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