EP286 - Get Your Time Back Part 1 - Don't Confuse Activity With Achievement with Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, in actual fact, this part one of two episodes of The IT Experts Podcast, we're going to help you get your time back in your MSP. You don't want to miss the next two shows if you're feeling a bit busy.

INTRO: Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million, and if already there, get to five and go faster. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast. Great to have you here again today, and I've got a real treat for you. Today and next week, we are going to be talking about getting your time back. Every single day, we hear about MSP owners that are busy, "I'm too busy to do this. I'm too busy to do that. My team are taking up this," yada, yada, yada, all of that kind of stuff. So what we've done is we've rolled up a Get Your Time Back, two-part series. The first one, today, is going to be all around don't confuse activity with achievement. And then next week, we're going to be talking about part two, which is going to be helping you to stop becoming the default decision-maker in your MSP. Now, being busy, as we know, as we hear all the time, is not the same as moving the needle. We, you know, the to-do list, I've got on for the avoidance of the camera, if you're here now, a little to-do list pad that I had printed out. Love them, but I hate them, because the to-do list doesn't give you the connection with the main task, objective, KPI, of why everybody's in- involved in the business, why everybody's, you know, recruited in the business and, and working in the team.

The most important thing is that every single activity that you should be doing should be doing something to move the needle, to sell more managed services, to sell more projects, to sell more licenses, whatever it might be. And we sometimes get really caught up in being busy, and that adrenaline hit that you get when you've ticked off your to-do list or when you've finished your list and all, you've got through your emails and everything like this. So it's really important that we kind of, like, just focus back in a bit. We don't confuse being busy with actually getting somewhere, because that's why we talk to MSPs on a daily basis, some that have been working for 10, 15, 20, 27 years, and they are still, you know, not in the best place that they wanted to be, because they've just carried on doing what they're doing. And when you look back in your rear view mirror, which we don't recommend you do an awful lot at the Growth, at the MSP Growth Hub, you kind of see how far you've come in some terms, but you've also seen how long it's taken you to get there. So, you know, what are the real symptoms of being time poor? And it's the same for everyone. We've all got the same time amount of hours in the day. It's what you do with it that matters. Absolutely true. But also, what got you here is not going to get you there. You know, and some of the things that I've learnt over the years about time management, time allocation, protecting your time, being selfish, actually, about what you want rather than what other people want, building a great team around you. All of this kind of stuff makes you more productive, which means that you can achieve more by doing less, make more money by doing less, spend more time with the family by doing less, and it is absolutely possible.

Over Christmas, I read an incredible book. Please go and get it. It's called Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, really powerful book. And it, I was talking to someone the other day about it, and I basically said that you could read this book every year, and every year you get a completely different message out of it. It's quite incredible. Just, you know, there's nothing in there that's revolutionary, right? But the stuff you've heard before and at the certain time you read it, but if you're not consuming books and you're not consuming all this information that these people have put together, you're missing out. So, you know, podcasts, audiobooks. I'd obviously don't recommend you go and buy a load of audiobooks and stop listening to the podcast, but there you go. That could be a by-product of helping people out, Ian. You know, what are some of the other symptoms?

You know, working evenings and weekends. You know, full disclosure, I'm not great at this because I love what I do, right? So if I'm sitting there and my wife's sitting there watching some crap on telly that I don't really want to watch, and I could be writing a bit of copy or I could be working something strategically out how we're going to help our clients succeed in the next event or something like that, I'm going to do it, you know. I don't feel stressed. I don't feel under pressure to do it. I do it because I choose to do it rather than because I'm wanting to do it. And I think that's the big difference. You know, other things that could be going on is everybody asks you everything, you know. They're looking for your permission. They're looking for your direction. They're looking for your acceptance all the time. And that not only does it chew you up from a leadership point of view, it also makes you, your brain kind of, like, fry because it's like you're then taking the weight on from everybody else's problems and all the other issues you've got going on in the business. But it also means that you don't get any time to think. Now, in one of my roles in corporate, someone said to me, he was a bit of a lazy sod, to be fair. He said, "Oh, you need to have time to think in your day." And it's are you bloody serious? We've got some money to make here. We need to get this business, this project off the road at the time, off the ground at the time. "No, you need to have time to think." If I met him now, I'd say to him, "Thank you for that. That was one of the most powerful things you ever taught me," but I didn't recognise it at the time, probably about 20 years ago now. Having that time to think, you know, whether you're walking the dog, you're in the car, whatever you're doing, having that quiet time, that's when the thousand, 10,000, 100,000 pound tasks really do start to come to life. So making sure that you've got that, but also, you know, making sure you're not getting robbed of that.

On the back of that, you might get excited at Christmas, come out of the new year period, build a plan for the year, and then it goes in the drawer. And then it comes to Easter, and you're busy because everybody's off. And then it comes to the summer, and you're burnt out. And then it comes to September, and you go, "Right, we're going to have a really good push." And then you do till the end of September. And then Christmas comes along, and guess what? Whoop, whoop. All the way round, you've got Groundhog Day all over again. The strategy's always getting postponed. So important that just stays front and center of everything you do. That's why big companies have board meetings. That's why they have monthly meetings, quarterly meetings, daily meetings, and all of this kind of great stuff. From a mental health point of view, you're never going to switch off. You're always going to be buzzing. Your head's always going to be full. And the sad thing is here, it's full with stuff that other people are filling it with, right? You know, there was a few things, that I read on social media a few years ago, that's like, "You'd be really powerful..." And that wasn't read on social media at all. It was someone like Jim Rome or Jim Rohn or one of the, one of the great mentors of time. Be careful what you put in your mind, you know, what you consume. If it's someone's Facebook feed every day or YouTube feed, and it's not serving you, I'm not saying that you don't need to have a bit of downtime, but just be careful of about it, careful of it because otherwise, you know, like on the subjects of not being able to switch off, you're just going to... Your brain's going to be absolutely fried. You're going to need to try and work out how to kind of calm down and sift out what's important and what's not important. You're going to be absolutely exhausted. You know, this is where meditation and all of these kind of great things come in as well. The cost of staying reactive to your MSP is quite big as well, in fairness. You know, if you are that person where you're not making those decisions, I remember Jeff Bezos once, quite, openly saying, you know, "My job is to make three or four decisions a day, and that's it. Then the team will build and do whatever they need to do to bring those decisions and those actions to life."

But, you know, the cost of staying reactive means that you don't get that time to think, and you won't get that time to, to be a bit more strategic and a bit more, you know, have, have that bit more planning about those relationships you need to build to build the great team, that's going to help you, you know, achieve your arrive on the MSP journey, as we call it.

You know, you're going to continue to be the bottleneck in the business, and that, you know, carries a certain amount of guilt, to be fair, because, you know, while you're worrying about making sure everything's all done properly, you're then worried on the next side that you can't pay your team properly, or you've lost your biggest client, and now you're in the brown stuff, and you've got to kind of do some real big work to try and get things running.

Then you start struggling and sitting there going, "What the hell are we doing this for?" So, you know, growth slows as a, again, as a by-product of that. Your team dependency absolutely increases. And then burnout creeps in, you know. So you're looking forward to the holidays, but you're also not looking forward to the holidays because you're not looking forward to what you're going to come back to when you come back from the holidays.

So when we look down at what actually causes this problem, it normally boils down to three, three root causes. Number one is the lack of people, not lack of capacity. Everyone we speak to, their people are really busy. They can't take on any more work. Everything's really... Is a really, really busy place.

It's about doing the right people doing the right things, right? You know, lack of process, inconsistency and the rework. Just again had a conversation with someone about how they're going to use AI to transform their business. I said, "You won't transform your business if you've got crappy processes." "Yes, it'll build the processes." I said, "It won't." I said, "It won't build the base process. It might be able to enhance the process and bring it to life and actually do some of the work for you. But you need to understand what you want to do in your business to operate it so that you can then automate it, and then you can build AI into it." You know, and that lack of process is just so important. Everybody thinks there's just this magic wand out there called AI. It's going to fix all these issues. Well, sorry, it's not. It will fix a lot of issues, but not if you haven't got the base foundation and the base structure of a good, you know, performing, efficient business already.

And then the third thing is lack of performance. You know, there's low standards, and there's low accountability. People are not doing what they should be doing. Whether you've asked them to do it, whether you've connected them to your main KPIs and goals and sitting down with them doing one-to-ones and all that. That's another podcast all, all together. Don't worry about that one for now. Um, but it's just all these really important things that we just need to make sure that you've kind of, you know, you're considering at the same time. So what can we do about it? What are we needing to do about it? Got a two-part episode here.

STUART INTERRUPT: Hey, Stuart here. Got a quick message for everyone that's listening. If you've decided that you want to grow your MSP, but you're not sure what support you need, then you must check out our Ultimate MSP Growth Guide. It's designed to help you compare all of the support that's out there in the channel for you and help you shortcut your decision-making so you get the right support to help you get the right results to grow your MSP. But alternatively, if you'd like to come and see us in action, then why not come to one of our events? Simply click on the link in the show notes and we'll see you very soon. Now back to the show.

IAN: Cheers, Stuart

On the first one, the first point is wanting to schedule one full off-grid day a month. What you're starting to hear probably is how some of the members, the successful members, clients at the MSP Growth Hub work, and this is one of the most amazing, strategies and things that someone does, that they do which is booking off-grid time. This is non-negotiable, strategic thinking time, strategic planning time. You know, when you get into the cadence of you doing that once a month, when you start doing that once a week, you will start to see that needle move dramatically. Focus time, clear agenda, use the Pomodoro method to make sure that you're being productive with your time. What do you want to achieve? What's a good outcome? Who needs to be involved? What preparation do you need to do? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Make sure that you're spending that time off grid, out of the business. Not working in the business, working on the business, working on the strategy. If you haven't got a strategy, use this time to design a strategy and build one. It's so important. Okay.

Number two, time block your week. And protect that thinking time just like it's a client meeting. If you went to a client meeting and someone phoned you midway and said, "Hey, we've run out of coffee. Could you c- could you help us out?" You're not going to stop and do it. It's a really important meeting. So why are you not treating the time that you block out in your diary as important as what you do with your clients? As what you do with your team when you're sitting down with your one-to-one team? You know, book that meeting with yourself. Again, prepare for the meeting. Set yourself agenda. What is it you want to achieve? I guarantee you one thing, you'll actually achieve more than you said you'll achieve and/or do it in a quicker time because you're focused. All the distractions are off. No one else is getting in your way, and it's really important. But all the time that you're doing this, we're going to cover this off in the next episode, is you are training everybody around you that you're not around.

When I started working, Stuart and I put the Growth Hub together, there was a guy there. Andy, you may be listening to this. And he's the one that actually coined the phrase off grid time. And at the time, his role was to spend a day a week off grid time. Okay, fast-forward four years, four and a half years, whatever, where it might have been, that conversation in the past. He's just taken a month off his business. One whole month. Little contact, not a lot, but he didn't need to get involved in the day-to-day running of it. The best bit is, the ti- the business grew while he wasn't there, and the team loved it. So guess what? This year he wants to take two months off. How cool is that? And that comes from having that time blocking and then also training your people, training your staff and the teams that you're not available, that you're not ready to jump and quickly put my fire out, that you're not ready to make sure that, you know, everything's kind of all in place. So making sure you block out your time, okay?

Right, number three. Let's create a decision filter. What must come to you versus what stays with the team? And be really, you know, clear with your senior people about this to start with, and then get them to cascade down. What we're not saying is that we want you to do all of the work or, you know, your team to do all of the work. But I certainly want you to come to me with some better decisions, some better suggestions, some better recommendations about what you think you should do to overcome this problem in the business Rather than just coming to me and asking me my opinion so it'll be my fault if I do something wrong, which then, you know, completely dumps the whole responsibility back onto me, which is not what you need because you need other people to be empowered, you know, and energised and to fit into that whole culture and live the values of the company so that they can then start to make decisions on their own so that you're not involved. And then it starts to, you know, remove everything that I've just spoken about in the first 10 or 15 minutes of this podcast. So get real clear on who needs to make what decision. I want you to come to me with some suggestions and then your recommendation on which one you need to be doing. That's going to empower the team. It's going to make them more, feel more excited. It's going to help them make them feel more valued. It's going to make you feel good because someone's actually going to be you know, you're going to be helping and coaching and developing these people within your organisation rather than just expecting them to do stuff for you at any given time.

Okay, number four, we need to measure what matters. God, all the books are coming out in this podcast, aren't they? We need to measure what matters. Audit people, processes, and performance. Okay? Fix the root cause and not the symptoms. If something's happening on a project process and it's just not giving you the deliverables that you need or the profitability that it needs, don't just go and put more money in it or go and buy it from some... go, you know, go and buy the bit of kit from somewhere else, for example. Go back and work out what caused the problem to start with. Where's the root cause? Not in a blame culture, in a business improvement culture. So getting people to own their numbers, getting people to sit there and work through. I was just actually just going through with a client a minute ago where I've got his team on the call, and we were trying to get them to a point of being a little bit more accountable on a weekly basis. So rather than just doing stuff, they're focusing on tasks that are helping them achieve their goals. So I said, "Okay, we're going to fast-forward a month. Going to look back, see what you've achieved. In a month's time, what would that look like?" And we wrote it down, and I said, "I'd love to get this project done. I'd love to get that project over the line." "Oh, great." So we've got five priorities. So the next thing we did was we went, "Right, what order, what order of importance do these priorities take?" It's really important you do that because, when someone comes in and tries to give you a bit of a sidewinder and say, "Hang on a minute, I need you to do this, or I need you to do that," you go, "Well, where does it fall in my priorities?" And you can obviously reverse that to your team as well. And then all of a sudden, they've got a list of priorities with a list of outcomes for the next month. And then I said, "Right, now go away and tell me all the things you need to do on a weekly basis to make sure that happens." They thought I'd just come up with some amazing little ingenious little idea. I probably learned that when I was about 22 or 23 years old. That was quite a while ago, by the way. But making sure that you're measuring what happens, measuring the people and measuring the process and measuring that performance and getting them to agree their targets. Don't just give people targets. Get them to agree. What do you think you could achieve this month? What do you think good looks like? What do you think great looks like? How do we need great? What support do you need from me to achieve great?

And then finally, number five is around removing the £10 an hour task from your weekly diary. So if you haven't heard about it before, we talk a lot about £10,000 tasks. We're actually talking now about £10,000 and a £100,000 tasks being acquisitions. But if we just do with £10,000, strategically thinking £1,000 an hour task is a strategic task that business owner. £100 an hour is kind of like your middle manager. And then £10 is going to be the admin task that now really we just need to automate, right, with AI or automation.

So remove the £10 an hour task from your diary and really upgrade yourself, upgrade your team around you so that you're not spending time checking on the emails, going through, you know, admin, going through the receipts and all of that kind of stuff, all, you know, approving purchases and all of that kind of great stuff.

So come on, it's time to be the MD and not the technician. You know, let's protect your time so you can protect the future of your business because this is all about two things. Number one, you setting the trajectory of what that North Star looks like, where you're going to go. And number two, it's empowering your team so you can achieve more without being a busy fool. So it's time to build that business that works for you rather than you for it. I hope you enjoyed this show. That was your first blast on how to get your time back. I look forward to seeing you next week where we are going to cover off a little bit more detail in how to help you to stop becoming that decision maker in your MSP. I look forward to seeing you next week. Do not be late. That's a good one. I'll see you next week. Have a great week. See you then. Take care.

OUTRO: Hang on a minute, just before you go. And if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you're already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP Mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time, engage and align your people, and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify or iTunes or your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day, and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best now.