0 (2s):
Light that Spark Fire Nation, JLD here. And welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like CEO School. Today we'll be breaking down why top CEOs should work two hours a day. So, drop these value bombs. I have brought Siimon Sander into EOFire Studios. Siimon runs a portfolio profitable internet business, including about hire, Oscar Hamilton, and podcast wise. In Today Foundation, we'll talk about productivity, we'll talk about the day-to-day of CEOs, we'll talk about a chief of staff and why you might need one, and the most common mistakes management makes over and over and over again and so much more.

0 (42s):
And a big thank you for sponsoring Today's episode goes to Siimon and our sponsors. Many EOFire listeners have launched franchises in a variety of industries outside of food. And FranBridgeConsulting has guided them to these premier opportunities. The founder, John Austinson, has done more placements than any other in the country. Sign up for a free consultation with John or get a free copy of his book, non-Food franchising at franbridgeconsulting.com. Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Tune in for convos with leading sales experts and top performing reps to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients.

0 (1m 22s):
One of my faves, The Monthly app with Jason Ethan, where they share hacks, tips and tricks. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Siimon, say What's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. You

1 (1m 42s):
Know, I think most entrepreneurs don't work and don't need to work extreme long hours to build successful business. You know, John, there's obviously exceptions when you're working on really hard problems trying to build a nuclear fusion startup, you know, to provide clean energy or your venture backed or, you know, you have VCs holding Gunther Head. But I think for most medium, small size businesses out there, I don't think working hard is the answer. And I can kind of expand on that if you'd like.

0 (2m 11s):
Yeah, I'd like to expand on that just a little bit so Fire Nation can really get a clear grasp on this.

1 (2m 17s):
Yeah, I think a good question to ask yourself is what would happen at your company if you went on vacation for, you know, six months, 12 months? And if you think things would start falling apart, then working hard is usually not the answers. And, you know, putting in more hours, working 12 hour days like a lot of entrepreneurs do. But instead, you need to focus on building systems, processes and spending time with things that you are actually really good at and leaving everything else to your team. And it makes me really sad because I see a lot of entrepreneurs who are working insane hours and, you know, their companies are successful on paper, but you know, they're not seeing their friends, they're not seeing their families, they don't have time to do things that they really care about.

1 (2m 58s):
And you know, I, I used to be in the same boat for, for many, many years. So I I, I love shining light on that challenge that you don't really need to work that hard. You need to put a, put together a good team, delegate everything that you don't enjoy doing.

0 (3m 12s):
Well, in our pre-interview chat, Siimon wanted to make sure that I was still batching my interviews and I let him know, yes, I'm still doing seven interviews one day per week for Entrepreneurs on Fire, as well as one day per month. I do between 10 to 20 interviews on other shows. So I really batch those as well. And man, I'll tell you, it just frees me up for so much stuff and it makes me so much more productive when I'm doing this. Like, man, you know, I'm every 40 minutes right now for the day, so I am just like on top of it, like, like you, like my bathroom breaks for schedule. But I love it that way because it frees me up so much more for other things. Like, I leave next week, Siimon for three weeks in Japan, and like people are like, how can you do that?

0 (3m 52s):
I'm like, well, I'm actually booked out through April now, so like, I could be gone even longer than that. Cuz one thing that I really want to talk about is that word productivity that we keep dancing around. For me, the definition of productivity is producing the right content. Right now I'm actually being productive because I'm producing the right content for what my business is, which is Entrepreneurs On Fire, our daily podcast interviewing the world's most successful entrepreneurs. What's your definition of productivity, Siimon?

1 (4m 22s):
Working on things that you are uniquely good at and that actually, you know, give you energy? I think a good thing to do is, you know, take a step back and do a calendar audit. You know, tomorrow when you start working, track your time in 15 minute in increments and you know, be really honest with yourself. What are some repetitive tasks? See what can be delegated, what tasks strain you and you know, what really gives you energy and what are you only uniquely good at? And when I did that exercise couple years ago, you know, I quickly realized that, you know, there's like 95% of tasks that I, you know, ended up doing for many, many years that could have been easily delegated to, you know, people who actually are better, number one, better than me at those things.

1 (5m 7s):
And also, you know, enjoy doing them way more than I do. And, and we're talking about, you know, admin tasks, maybe it's, you know, hiring, maybe it's collecting invoices, sending invoices, you know, whatever that might be. So what you wanna do as an entrepreneur is, you know, spend at least 80% of your time on tasks that you are actually, you know, amazing at. And you know, 20% of the time you can spend it on low value tasks and you know, reactive, reactive requests. So I think productivity comes down to not, you know, squeezing out every minute from 24 hours, but you know, really asking yourself, am I spending the time and mindfully every single hour?

0 (5m 45s):
I love those audits that we do, those self-audits that we do on ourself and our business. And I also love the Reality Fire Nation that so many things in life come down to that 80 20 rule. I mean, how are you using your time, how you're making your money, how healthy you are? Like 80% of the time are you eating like the right things? Like think about that. I mean, you need to be always kind of going back to this and CEOs, Siimon, they have literally, and I mean literally infinite things that they could be doing on a day-to-day basis. So how could those leaders of businesses, and this is you Fire Nation if you're the founder, I mean, how can we make sure that we're only working on high leverage activities?

1 (6m 22s):
I think Calendar audit is a good place to start. If you truly are feeling overwhelmed, there's a good chance that number one, you're, you know, burnt out or number two, you just have too much in your plate. And I always recommend when I, when I talk with entrepreneurs or just, you know, working crazy hours, evenings, weekends, get yourself a chief of staff and chief of staff is basically somebody who's going to help you manage day-to-day tasks at your company. They can, you know, take tasks off your plate, start hiring people, attend meetings on your behalf, and eventually, you know, make decisions behalf of you. It's, it's essentially the right hand person to run the company with you. There's also, you know, online business manager, there's also virtual assistants and so on, but I've sort of gotten most success with chief of staff, especially from that executive position.

1 (7m 11s):
And I'm happy to kind of go into how to find one for your company and you know, how we can onboard them without a lot of effort from your part.

0 (7m 19s):
Yeah, I'd love to really dive into what a chief of staff is and why specifically that we need one.

1 (7m 25s):
Yeah, I think for entrepreneurs, you know, there's endless responsibilities. If you, you know, if you have a successful business, and I, you know, really well John, that you know, you end up getting crazy amount of emails, I don't know how many you get a day, but I end up getting, you know, 80 to a hundred emails each day and you know, there's constant fires that you have to put out and you know, you spend four or five hours on these tasks each day and then, you know, it's Monday to 3:00 PM and you realize like, oh crap, I haven't actually focused any time on, you know, long-term projects. So getting help chief of Staff can kind of help those get those low value tasks off your plate so you can really focus on high priority responsibilities.

1 (8m 7s):
So the current rule I have for myself is, you know, the first four hours today is to focus on a top priority long-term work. I don't check my email, I don't, you know, I'm not reactive at all, it's just my time and I focus on long-term projects. So when it comes to chief of staff, when you're too overwhelmed, get yourself one first obvious step. Put up a job post, you know, use rework remotely.com or you know, similar and make sure you get, you know, at least a hundred to 200 applicants so you have enough of a pool to choose somebody from. And you know, my advice is just to get somebody young, somebody hungry, they don't need to have, you know, be ex you know, consultants or, or you know, super well, like create academic background, just somebody young, hungry, you know, ideally from your, you know, even from tech background or the industry you're in from that background and give them, you know, if you like somebody onboard them and the number one, you know, thing I've heard is, hey, I don't have time to, you know, onboard them correctly.

1 (9m 8s):
So here's what I would do. If you find somebody that you really like, start doing Zoom phone calls with them, and here's what I did, you know, for my agent, Oscar Hamilton, I was just overwhelmed with everything and they didn't have time to onboard somebody properly. So I would start doing these Zoom calls where I would invite my chief of staff, Tammy, and basically I would just go about my day. Normally, you know, I would answer the answer emails, I would check in with my employees, sometimes I would, you know, do one-on-ones and so on. And so eventually, you know, after one week or so she kind of realized, hey, you know, I can start take taking this thing off your plate, Siimon, I can take this thing off your plate. And if there were, you know, more complicated situations, I would give my reasoning why I'm thinking this way or that way.

1 (9m 53s):
And I would say after, you know, 60 days or so, she was able to take off at least 95% of my, you know, day-to-day tasks from, you know, answering emails to doing one-on-ones. And when something hits my calendar today, I know it's, you know, like one of these, like this interview John, like this is the thing that I can only do from my company, but almost everything else somebody else can do better than me. So getting the chief of staff in is, is very important.

0 (10m 17s):
I love when people look at their business this way because again, Fire Nation, there are things that you are amazing at. And if you can spend more time doing those things that you're amazing at, of course your business is going to flourish. And those things that, hey, you either don't like doing that, take away your energy, take away your focus. I mean, that needs to be pushed on to other people, to other things. So that is a great situation that a lot of us can get into right now is let's sit down, let's do a situational audit, let's make this happen. And we're gonna be talking about a lot of things around this when we get back from thanking our sponsors. I still can't believe Kate and I met his neighbors almost 13 years ago. We were incredibly lucky to find ourselves sharing a wall.

0 (10m 59s):
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0 (11m 41s):
That's elitesingles.com/fire. More and more entrepreneurs and investors are discovering the awesome franchise opportunities that exist outside of food franchising can simply be the better path. And interest in franchising is at an all-time high lucky for you. John Austinson, founder of FranBridgeConsulting and a frequent EOFire guest is here to help you explore the premier franchise opportunities. Today, John and his FranBridgeConsulting team are part of the largest brokerage in the US and have vetted the market thoroughly. FranBridge is hands down the premier source for the best opportunities in the non-food franchise worlds. They represent every type of non-food franchise from healthcare to dumpsters, use soccer to oil changes, specialized senior care, to dog training, to insulation and floor coatings.

0 (12m 25s):
John has served as an Inc 500 franchisor and a multi-brand franchisee, and he does more placements than any other in the country. Sign up for a free consultation. Call with John today or get a free copy of his book Non-Food franchising at franbridgeconsulting.com. That's franbridgeconsulting.com. Tech is great, it can help us grow and scale our businesses in so many ways, but it can also be clunky, time consuming to manage and expensive. That's why I'm excited to introduce you to HubSpot CRM, the best platform to speed up your sales and scale your business without blowing your budget. HubSpot's all in one CRM helps you automate tedious tasks, keep track of all your deals in one place, and make sure your whole team has access to the same data.

0 (13m 11s):
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1 (13m 54s):
Once you, you know, do that Zoom call work as you normally would, you know, whatever you work four hours, six hours, eight hours, having that chief of staff just basically observe how you do work on day-to-day basis. If you aren't a remote company, having chief of staff sit next to you, attend all the meetings, you know, attend all the one-on-ones, really get a sense of you know, how you operate. And it was really interesting, you know, that really famous YouTuber, Mr. Beast, I actually heard a couple months back in an interview that he did something similar for his own business. I mean, he runs a bunch of different businesses in YouTube, like a chocolate company, his philanthropy project. And he had the same thing done, actually, he brought somebody in who had literally observed him in person for several months and then that person is basically running all of his businesses.

1 (14m 40s):
Because once you observe somebody for long enough, you really get a idea of how they make decisions, you know, how they like to think about things, even like down to nitty gritty how they like to write emails. So, so yeah, it's, it's a bit of trial error, but you don't need to write, you know, long step-by-step processes of, Hey, this is how I make a decision, this is what you should be doing. Just have them observe you via Zoom and then slowly, if they're smart, you're gonna take things off your plate.

0 (15m 11s):
One thing that both you and I have found running our businesses that if critical tasks don't get executed, a company will fail. I mean, it's that simple. It's that black and white. How can we make sure that all our company's tasks get executed? You know, even if people get sick or if they leave suddenly. Because I mean, things are always gonna happen and we need to be able to adjust.

1 (15m 33s):
Ah, this is a concept I wish I knew, you know, when I started off my, with my first business. So we like to use this thing called areas of responsibility or AORs. And Apple is really famous for pioneering this in Silicon Valley, and most of successful tech companies use that today. So basically what you want to do is create a list of every single function in your company. You know, it could be collect invoices, publish weekly blog posts to one-on-ones for you, John, it could be, you know, edit the podcast, push it on social media, interview guests, I mean, send out interviews to guests. You get the idea. And next to each function you want to list a directly responsible individual and the backup person and then cross-train them.

1 (16m 19s):
And the final piece, which is super important, is you want to document the processes step-by-step exactly how to do every single function at the company. So you know, when people get sick, let's say your audio producer John gets, you know, has to leave the company or you know, takes a vacation or whatever, whatever that might be, you can get a new person or a backup person jumping in literally next hour without the machine stopping. And just one kind of important note here, you have to be ruthless with your team and yourself to update these progress, update these processes. So if somebody leaves a company, you make sure this gets updated and it can feel a bit tedious to have, you know, list out all the functions and you know, have these step by step guides.

1 (17m 1s):
And it took us almost half a year to put all of this together, but it's, it's night and day how company operates now versus how it used to

0 (17m 9s):
Fire Nation. One thing that I've done for years now, which has been critical, is every time I'm training somebody, or anytime I'm having somebody on my team train somebody, I'm having them record this, they're making video tutorials of this. And this is building a video library. So if an individual leaves, a person comes in to take that place, hey, guess what? I don't have to recreate the wheel, I just send them there. I say report back after you've watched all these videos with your questions and we make that happen. And that makes you know, again, if somebody leaves or disappears in the night, like boom, like we can keep on rocking now, let's be honest, there are mistakes that management makes over and over and over again and, and it's really sad to see because it doesn't have to be that way.

0 (17m 52s):
So let's talk about those common mistakes that management makes and how we can avoid them.

1 (17m 58s):
Good question. So I think there's three things that come to mind. Number one, micromanager team. If you find yourself supervising too often, you're probably hired the wrong people. Number two, I think you, this is an interesting one, but don't tell people what you're doing wrong. Instead it's instead teach them how to do something right? And you know, there's a very subtle difference here. You know, somebody messes up something like you can, you know, you, you get really angry and you're like, Hey, don't do this. But instead shift it and say, here's how you should do this instead. And then third, which we've covered a lot today, is spending too much time on doing busy work. And also this concept called heroing, which is the idea of, you know, fires are burning, you're basically heroing and jumping in to fix other people's messes.

1 (18m 45s):
Instead, you should be the coach, you know, teaching, but not, you know, going to the field and playing the game. So don't hero and don't spend your time on busy work. And I think there's a couple things that I've sort of learned about management over the years. Obviously work on the business, not in the business. And this is, this is such a crucial concept when it comes to team management. Set goals, not tasks. This is a common one. Again, if you've hired people and you and, and you feel like you are constantly giving them tasks and tasks, it might be that you are a poor leader, but it also might be that you've hired a poor performer.

1 (19m 26s):
And this is the most important one. Keep your eye on your team's health and happiness. Something we like to do at our company, and I think a lot of our companies do the same thing once a month. We do an anonymous survey in Slack. You can set it up via Google Forms, email, whatever, and basically ask a series of questions. It's, you know, what do you think about your ceo? Do you feel like you know he's performing? What do you think about your executive team? Do you feel like your management team is, you know, helping you reach your goals? What do you think about your compensation? All of these questions that typically we wouldn't get answers to. And once your team grows, it's really hard to get feedback as you are, you know, cuz you're not working in the business anymore.

1 (20m 8s):
You're sort of only having maybe couple people report to you. So having this anonymous service to keep your ion teams health and happiness is so important.

0 (20m 18s):
Fire Nation, I really hope you're understanding what Siimon is saying because he's creating the type of business that I've created. He's talking about implementing the kind of things that has now allowed me to run Entrepreneurs on Fire. A daily podcast that's seven days a week, one day per week, 52 days per year. And just crack open so much opportunity in different areas because of that. So Siimon, let's give Fire Nation the one final takeaway that you really want them to make sure they get from this conversation. Give us the best way to connect with you, your business, and any call to action you have for our listeners. And then we'll say goodbye.

1 (20m 58s):
Yeah, thanks John. I think kind of reflecting on what we talked about, be extremely mindful every single hour, how you spend your time. If you're not, you won't be able to spend more time with your friends, you won't be able to spend time with your loved ones, with your partner, if you have a dog or a cat, whatever that might be, that really gives you joy. It's a myth that you need to work insane hours. So please, I'm begging you be mindful of your time and put together a great team so we can only work on things that, you know, bring you joy. That's what you know great business is all about. If you wanna learn more about me, check out about hire.com, which is my company that lets you hire great talent, faster true video interviews, and I'm pretty active on Twitter as well, which is Siimon with two eyes and Sander on Twitter.

1 (21m 48s):
Thanks John.

0 (21m 49s):
Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with Siimon with two eyes and JLD today, so keep up that heat. If you have any direct questions for Siimon, find this episode on the podcast listening app, Puto Post, post, a comment, get the conversation rolling. And of course, eofire.com type Siimon, s i i m o n, and the search bar, the show note page will pop up with links to everything. And Siimon, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, and value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, brother and we'll catch you on the flip side.

1 (22m 25s):
Thank you, John.

0 (22m 26s):
Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Siimon for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 3000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and I've created a revolutionary 17 step roadmap to your financial freedom and fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book, the Common Path to Uncommon Success, personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The common path to uncommon success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit uncommonsuccessbook.com, order your copy and I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Many EOFire listeners have launched franchises and a variety of industries outside of food.

0 (23m 10s):
And FranBridgeConsulting has guided them to these premier opportunities. The founder, John Austinson, has done more placements than any other in the country. Sign up for a free consultation with John or get a free copy of his book, non-Food franchising at franbridgeconsulting.com. Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Tune in for convos with leading sales experts and top performing reps to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. One of my faves, the monthly app with Jason Ethan, where they share hacks, tips and tricks. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your.