Why Hire for “Time” Not “Growth” — A New Approach to Leverage People and Teams

I just finished an incredible book, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell . I read a lot of business books, but this one has had a truly significant impact on me. I found myself taking copious notes and immediately rushing out to implement its sticky concepts and practical frameworks.?

The message is this: Don’t hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time.

The author and book arrived at just the right time. (When the student is ready, the teacher arrives!) I’ve been obsessed with team productivity in my own business these past few months and in this latest series in my Leverage Your Knowledge LinkedIn newsletter. I believe every entrepreneur, business owner, and leader should read this book too.

Leveraging Others Is An Essential Skill (They Don’t Teach in Business School)

As someone who has for a long-time taken an (albeit faulty) pride in my sense of independence, resourcefulness, and technical competence, it has been a change for me in recent years to place more effort into managing people and building effective teams.?

My amazing fellow entrepreneur and friend Andrea Reindl , owner of the branding and marketing firm Legacy Creative , had been insisting for months that I read Buy Back Your Time (because she knew I needed it so badly!). When she invited me to an event at her office to hear its author speak, I finally got it. Dan Martell understands business owners and leaders.

Martell talks about this particular form of stuckness: when your business (or team, or division) can’t grow anymore because of an “invisible barrier” you can’t get through. He believes this “stuckness” happens when too much sits on the shoulders of the business owner or leader.

For many years, I was hell-bent on figuring out things for myself and often doing them myself too. This stubborn willingness brings its advantages: for one, it grows a tremendous skill base. But it has a strong dark side too: you become a bottleneck for your business and your life. And you will eventually run yourself into the ground.

Leveraging others is an essential skill but it’s not one you are born with, nor do they teach you in business school. Most of us learn through confronting our frustrations, observing others, taking risks, and learning from our own (many) mistakes. Buy Back Your Time is a must-read guidebook for overstretched businesspeople looking to scale and to give themselves more freedom (and enjoyment).?

Here are three of my favorite takeaways from this book to get you started (and inspired).?

#1. The Pain Line: An invisible barrier stunting your growth.

I have never heard anyone talk about the “Pain Line” yet I understood the concept immediately and viscerally (because I’ve experienced it firsthand). This is the stage of your business where growth becomes impossible.?

The Pain Line happens when the owner of the business has a “buck stops with me” mentality that they can’t let go of. (I’ve been there.) It can be a physical manifestation of stress where the owner becomes so “tapped out” that she can’t handle any more work. The Pain Line can be a time constraint where the owner can’t take on more projects, clients, or people under the current design of their company. Martell explains:?

“An entrepreneur will ruin their business before letting it grow into something more painful. They may do it subconsciously, and they may do it slowly — just enough — to bring the pain of their growing company back to a more manageable amount of difficulty.”

As a business owner at a stable stage of my business, this concept hit me like a brick wall (or Thomas Edison’s apple falling out of the tree, for a nicer metaphor). I’ve experienced many points –whether its revenue, people, profit, projects, and clients where you simply hit your breaking point. Even though I have a high tolerance for a large volume of work, there comes a point where you can’t deal with more meetings, issues, emails, scheduling conflicts, late nights, early mornings, reviews, or documents. It’s a type of burnout where you start saying a vehement NO to opportunities (even good ones) that come your way, thus sabotaging your business’s potential.

If you have been a business owner for a long time, you probably know the feeling too. If you are in the corporate world, you probably feel it too. But fear not, with the Buyback Loop, Martell gives the recipe for overcoming it.

#2. The Buyback Loop: How to get over the Pain Line

Martell has readers “get real” with their work and business. No more wishful thinking and pie-in-the-sky vision. His solution to the Pain Line is this:

“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.”

Audit, transfer, fill. How brilliant!

• Audit: What tasks do you hate doing that are easy to give to someone else?
• Transfer: Who do you have on your team or who can you hire to take these over?
• Fill: What tasks should you focus on that you love doing that bring you more success, fulfillment, and happiness?

In my own business, I immediately started to audit my time. In the first few days, I caught myself doing things I shouldn’t be:

• Formatting a newsletter at 10 pm (that I should have assigned to someone else).
• Preparing detailed numbers for a client that I should have assigned to a team member with better accounting skills.
• Spending hours emailing back and forth contracts for signature with a few clients.

If you’ve hit your maxing point and you want to grow, you simply have to change your systems, people, beliefs, or tactics.?

#3. Playbooks: Cloning yourself through repeatable processes.

As a documentation expert — or you could say “nerd” — I also love Martell’s concept of Playbooks which you create to effectively “clone” yourself. Playbooks are where you build repeatable processes your team can leverage. Think of Starbucks, Subway, or McDonalds which can replicate themselves anywhere through exact specifications for how they perform accounting, sales, delivery, marketing, real estate, and so much more. Martell puts it this way:

“Unlimited predictability is more valuable than intermittent quality.”

Dan Martell suggests an approach he calls the “the Camcorder method” where you video yourself doing a task to explain it to others on your team. You can complement this approach by getting someone else to write a procedure based on what you recorded. Martell encourages you to start with a playbook on the processes where you have the most pain.?

One example for me is the “pain” of all the back-and-forth effort that it takes to finalize speaking events. I sat down with my assistant and we created a “playbook” list of questions we should ask from the get-go to minimize the number of emails. I’ve? quickly recorded a few videos to explain to my team how to approach specific client situations. And I’m looking for other places to codify and share what I (and we) do.?

“Leveraging your knowledge” — the name of this newsletter – isn’t about doing everything yourself. To leverage yourself and the valuable knowledge, skill, and experience you have, you need to get rid of tasks that are bringing you down — and which others can do better — to get the best results for you, your team, and your business.

Buying back your time might be one of the best investments you can make in your business, happiness, family, and your life.?

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