To be a roofing contractor for any period of time, you have to be tough and work hard. It’s in the nature of the business, but if we have an industry of tough, hard workers, why don’t we have more successful roofing companies?
When we meet with new clients and ask them what they want their business to become, most owners aren’t looking to be filthy rich, although they’d welcome that.
They want have a business that runs in a predictable manner, that provides comfortably for them, their team, and it’s not a hundred percent dependent on them. What they want is security and freedom.
In the businesses I’ve developed, this was always my main focus. I think, how can I build a machine that functions properly to produce a predictable result? This led me to develop a formula that’s worked well for me, and I hope it works well for you.
Your level of freedom will be in direct proportion to the systems and processes that you implement that can be easily operated by others. So freedom equals systems implemented divided by ease of operation.
This is where the next hurdle comes into place with the people that we work with. You see, most owners don’t look at their time in the proper way and spend far too much of their time working in their business versus working on their business.
The value of something is typically determined by the demand for it and the supply that’s available. When something is easily created and there are ample amounts, or if no one wants it, it has very little value. But if something has limited supply and high demand, the price is very high. These are things like gold, diamonds, et cetera.
There’s a commodity in this arena that we all have, but most fail to value correctly. It’s our time. See, there’s a finite amount of it, and if you ask a dying person on their deathbed what they wish they had more, they will all say more time and that they would gladly trade all their gold and diamonds for it.
The funny thing about time is that we’re all gifted with the exact same amount of it every day, but what people do with that time is what determines the results they’ll achieve. You see, there are only two things that we can spend. Do you know what they are? Time and money.
And we can spend our time and money on two things, expenses or investments. I learned this at an early age while reading a real estate investment book in it, the author explains that you can spend your money on butter or guns.
When you buy butter, use it once and then it’s gone. But if you buy a gun, you may own it for decades and pass it from generation to generation. It will always have some form of value in utility. This lesson can also be applied to your time. If you’re spending all your time working in your business, processing paperwork, selling jobs, managing crews, and selling roofs, you’re just performing a job.
You do the job, the job’s over onto the next one. This is an endless wheel of work that will never scale. Conversely, if you’re spending your time developing systems that can be implemented into your business or working with a team of people like us who can teach you those systems, then teaching those systems to your people and ensuring they’re getting executed properly, you’re investing your time into a machine that will live and produce in the business forever.
As you add more and more, you’re working the freedom formula that can eventually gain so much momentum that you’ll reach the level of other people operating systems and processes that don’t require your direct involvement. Sounds easy, right? Well, it is kind of, it’s easy to understand, but for some challenging to implement. Why? Because it requires you to change your behavior. In order for this to work, you have to treat your time like a precious commodity. This means you can’t just go through the motions and react to whatever’s happening and run to the rescue, putting out fires all day.
You may have to put out those fires initially, but find additional time to invest in building your systems and your people. Now, before you say, but I don’t have any time, let me show you a tool that has helped me and millions of other successful people.
To illustrate an easy way for you to visualize your time, we’re gonna use a tool called the Eisenhower Matrix. The Eisenhower Matrix was created by the famous general and American President, Dwight Eisenhower, and has been used by successful and effective leaders for decades. The purpose of the matrix is for you to categorize where you’re spending your time into four quadrants.
The quadrants are divided by important or not important, and urgent or not urgent.
In quadrant one, we call these due activities because they’re important and urgent. These are things like crisises, fires that come up that have to be dealt with right now, or scheduled tasks and appointments you have for that.
Quadrant two, we call schedule activities. These are important, but they’re not urgent. These are things like planning, training, coaching.
Quadrant three is the delegate quadrant. These are not important, but they’re urgent. These are things like some emails, meetings, administrative work.
Quadrant four is the eliminate quadrant. These are not important and not urgent activities. These would be things like gossip, social media, tv, video games.
The scaling quadrant is quadrant two. This is where we build and implement. The problem is that we know these things are important, but since they aren’t urgent, like a scheduled task or a fire we need to put out, they end up being things we’ll get around to someday.
Leaders of scale businesses defend and protect their time to dedicate to quadrant two by reclaiming it from quadrants three and four. Then they’re rewarded by not having to spend as much time in quadrant one putting out fires or working in the business because their systems and processes are working for them.
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