EP # 159 - How to accomplish more in less time - factors you've never considered before

In this episode of the Diamond Effect podcast, Maggie Perotin, an international business and leadership coach, discusses how business leaders and entrepreneurs can achieve more in less time.

She emphasizes the importance of personal growth in three key areas: skill set development, time (focus) management, and emotional capacity.

Maggie explains that tasks become more complex as businesses scale, requiring leaders to continuously improve their skills, manage their time effectively, and enhance their emotional resilience. She shares personal anecdotes and stories to bring the topic to life.

If you're ready to double your business without adding more work to your days, book a sales call with Maggie here https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call

Key Time Stamps:

Introduction to the Episode (00:00:01)
Maggie introduces herself and the podcast's focus on achieving more in less time.

Referring to Previous Episode (00:01:21)
Maggie discusses the importance of inner work and delegation mentioned in episode 157.

Complexity of Business Growth (00:02:39)
As businesses scale, tasks become more complex, requiring ongoing skill development.

Skill Set Development (00:03:49)
Maggie emphasizes the importance of improving skill sets for efficiency and quality in business tasks.

Time Management and Focus (00:10:05)
Effective prioritization and planning are crucial for maximizing productivity and managing time.

Emotional Capacity in Business (00:11:25)
Maggie explains how emotional resilience impacts decision-making and handling business challenges.

Examples of Emotional Capacity Growth (00:13:08)
She shares examples of how emotional capacity evolves as entrepreneurs gain experience.

Handling Client Complaints (00:16:44)
Maggie discusses the need for quick decision-making when addressing client complaints as businesses grow.

Managing Finances and Emotional Resilience (00:20:14)
The emotional capacity to handle financial changes is essential for business growth and stability.

Conclusion and Call to Action (00:21:27)
Maggie invites listeners to engage further and provides contact information for coaching inquiries.

Transcript

Maggie Perotin 00:00:01  Your business exists because you had the idea to start it. Everything begins in our minds. That's why your business results cannot outgrow your current level of thinking. Do you want to serve more clients, make more money without working more, or burning yourself out? Grow yourself first as a leader of your business because that's who you are as a leader. Even if you're the only person in your business right now. When you lead yourself first, the business results will always follow. My name is Maggie Perotin. I'm an international business and leadership coach, an expert in business mindset, strategy and high performance. I created the Diamond Effect podcast to help you elevate your thinking, expand your perspective and through it, grow your business without overwhelm. So let's get started. Hello. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Diamond Effect Podcast episode 159. Today I want to talk about on how to get more done in less time from a different angle. And that came up lately in one of my coaching sessions, actually couple with two clients.

Maggie Perotin 00:01:21  And I wanted to share with you what I talked about. But before I do it, I do want to refer you to podcast episode 157, where I do talk about dabbling the business and ending work by 4 p.m., where I talk about external things more than kind of inner work that you need to do to be effective. And I talk about delegation there and planning and strategy and all those things. So as I said today, I want to talk about high performance and effectiveness from a different angle. Just because what happens is as your business grows and scales, there will be not only more things happening in it, but also more complex things happening in it. So even if you keep delegating the tasks that you don't have to do as a CEO, right? That don't belong to your core competency, which I highly encourage you to do, even if you streamline things and you automate things, the complexity of the tasks that you have to deal with, and even the number of tasks might keep growing, or the complexity of the task will take you a little bit longer time.

Maggie Perotin 00:02:39  So how do you do that? How you sort of accomplish more in less time? Or how do you accomplish everything that will be on you as your business skills without overworking, right. Without working 24 seven. So there's three areas of growth that you, as the CEO, will have to go through and keep going through, truly as you keep scaling your business. The first area is your skill set. I give that example over and over, but it's the best way for me to explain it is when you don't have a skill in something, not only it takes you much longer to accomplish certain result, but also the quality of that result usually isn't as good. And I will give you some business examples, but the simplest example is sports and I'll use basketballs. My ten year old son. No, even a year ago, he didn't know how to play basketball, so he couldn't catch. He couldn't dribble, not to mention shoot and score. But he wanted to learn basketball. He wanted to acquire that skill set because his friends had it.

Maggie Perotin 00:03:49  And he started playing a little bit at the park with them. So he wanted to get better at it. Right? So within six months, he went to two rounds of our towns basketball program. He improved. He started catching the ball every time you pass to him, or most of the times you pass to him, he started dribbling really well and bouncing it and also scoring great. So you don't go from I don't play basketball to Michael Jordan in one try. It takes a skill set and you also don't get the mastery in one training. You progress at a certain levels of excellence, right. So at first you're an amateur, then maybe you're really good amateur, then you're like maybe young, pre-professional, then your professional, then you're like world class. It's the same in any skill set in business, whether it's decision making, people leadership, sales, marketing. You don't go from, I've never led people to being the best leader in the world, or I've never had a sales goal to.

Maggie Perotin 00:04:55  I convert 100% of the potential clients that come my way. Those are skill sets that you can always get better, you can always improve, and it takes time to get to the mastery level. But as you get better, it takes you less time to accomplish a result. So in basketball, if my son wanted to score, let's say ten three pointer shoots. It would take him a long time to get there, because he's just starting a college basketball player that plays in a college team. Could probably do it in a couple of minutes. So you can see the time for somebody who is not good at something but knows how to do how long it takes. And of course, the quality of those shots wouldn't be there would be really random. Whereas somebody who has certain mastery level, the results that they achieve with their skill set is much faster, and the quality of those shots or whatever they do is much better. Same in business. So I'll give you a couple of my examples. Before I started my business, I've never sent a sales email or created social media marketing material.

Maggie Perotin 00:06:04  So in the beginning to create, let's say an email for my list would take me an hour and sometimes longer. But as I started practicing those skills, intentionally learning how to write those emails, how to edit them, what needs to be in it, my time started going down. It took me at some point 30 minutes to write one, and now it's 15. And those emails are getting better and better. So as you can see the time it takes to accomplish task doesn't equal to the quality. The emails that are used to take me an hour to write are not even that good, whereas now my emails that take me 15 minutes to write are way better than the first ones. There are way better in the effectiveness and the value that they offer to the readers, and also in conversion rates to whatever I want the readers to do. Another example is hiring. I always start my hiring process with the phone screen. And remember many, many years ago when I just started to hire people and I was learning how to do it, a phone screen would take me 30 minutes for me to figure out if that person was qualified and was good enough to move on to the next stage of the hiring process, and then hundreds and hundreds of hires later, I can do it in 15 minutes and usually less.

Maggie Perotin 00:07:29  But let's say I keep my phone screens within 15 minutes. I know if that person is qualified for the next stage, so it takes me half the time to know that, but also I pre-qualify better candidates. I have less candidates coming in to the next stage and me thinking, why didn't I catch something in the phone screen, right? How did I miss that? I don't have a lot of that anymore because of my skill set. And the thing with entrepreneurship and on running a business is that as long as you will keep growing your business. There will always be skills that you need to learn from scratch. So brand new skills that will come up for you to learn, or that you will need to get better and better. And without that, you want to be able to scale your business. So the question I have for you is that what is it in your business right now that only you can do, that you cannot delegate, that you will need to get better at that. You need to master that skill set in order to keep growing.

Maggie Perotin 00:08:38  Is it sales? Is it copywriting? Is it decision making? So-called soft skill? Are you taking too long to make decisions in your business and that's slowing you down? Whatever that is, identify it and start working at it and start investing in yourself, in learning and mastering that skillset ASAP so that you can accomplish more in less time when you master it. The second part of the growth is your time management and rather really your focus management. And there's of course different things that go into it. But in a nutshell, it's prioritizing, making sure that you do only the most important things that the CEO needs to be doing, that you're planning those actions ahead of time. You're not deciding in the moment what to do. And part of the planning is also allocating the right amount of time to do each task. So you don't have too little or too much. Also, knowing which day and which time of the day is the best for you that week to accomplish each task. Because, for example, I don't schedule a lot of creative work in the afternoon because I know by then my brain is tired and it won't be as creative, as innovative as it can be in the morning.

Maggie Perotin 00:10:05  So anything creative I schedule for the morning. I know that about myself. And then when you sit to do the task, you don't have other distractions preventing you from really being present on. It's really focusing and you can get in the state of flow, because when you're in the state of flow, it takes you again, less time to accomplish everything. And the quality is better, right? So your focus slash time management is another thing that when you get better and better at this and prioritizing planning specific tasks and really concentrating on it, it will take you less time to accomplish specific actions. And then the last thing that plays a big role in how long it takes you to accomplish something or lead something to completion, right? It doesn't have to be one specific task. It can be a project. Or whatever you're dealing with in your business is your emotional capacity that allows you to handle a variety of different situations, making decisions in a very effective way. The simplest example I can give you that's not business related is how we develop as humans, right when we are a small child that doesn't have a lot going on in our emotional capacity is very small.

Maggie Perotin 00:11:25  Let's say losing a lollipop or losing an ice cream that fell on the ground becomes this big deal. End of the world, where little kids break in tears and it takes them sometimes long time to console and kind of process that situation. Right. Just because their emotional capacities hasn't developed yet. And of course, we grow it as we grow and become adults. But you can also intentionally grow it. And therefore handling and processing certain situations will not take you as long. Another professional example before I go to business example is, for example, a doctor in an E.R., right? If you think about the doctor in any yard, they have to deal with some critical, life threatening situations. And if they were freaking out every time they handle a client with a heart attack, with the after car accident with a huge injury, those people would die, right? Or they see their situation would get worse because they would have to deal with the doctor who needs time to calm down to help them. Right? A doctor in the ER, in their professional capacity, they develop their capacity to handle the side of blood, the side of human flesh out, not only without them being so distraught, they can help the person, but then being still able to access their expertise and quickly assess and make decisions on how that person has to be helped to serve, save their lives and, you know, make them as healthy as possible, as fast as possible.

Maggie Perotin 00:13:08  It's the same in business, not to that extreme, but it's the same. The more emotional capacity you have to handle difficult business situations, the less time it takes you to deal with them and the better you deal with them. So now I will give you examples from entrepreneurs at different stages of their business growth, because I deal with clients at a different stages in their business growth. So that will help you see the progression of that capacity. For example, when I see brand new entrepreneurs who are just starting, they don't have clients and let's just say they've never had experience in sales or in business. They've never had to do it for them to get in front of people and even talk about their business can be sometimes very demanding emotionally. They have to prepare for a meeting like that for hours. After a meeting. They're very tired and drained, or as they have, for example, sales conversations, and they hear ten no's in a row. They go through sort of high emotional roller coaster. Their brain makes them think that nobody wants what they offer, that they are not good, that they will never gain any client, and so on.

Maggie Perotin 00:14:26  And that type of thinking definitely takes a lot of time and energy to process. Therefore, sometimes they procrastinate. Then it takes them a few days or sometimes a couple of weeks to get back out there and talk again and find potential clients and have those conversations again. But that is normal when you start. But what you want to do is learn how to expand that emotional capacity. So then whatever that scary thing is becomes less and less scary, and it takes you less and less time, and it drains your energy less and less. And you don't even need time that much to prepare or less time to prepare. And you definitely don't need more time after to kind of recoup. Right. And I see that in my clients, whether it's they're preparing for public speaking engagements and webinars and just presenting in front of people or meeting people in the beginning, it's a big deal. It takes a lot of energy from them, but then the more they practice and the more they deliver, it's a they get better at this specific skill, but also at processing those emotions the less time they need.

Maggie Perotin 00:15:35  I just give you example on emotional capacity when doing new things. Then there's also emotional capacity is making decisions, sometimes difficult decisions, and then learning from the results, adjusting and moving on faster and faster. So here let's say an example is you had a client complaint. And in the beginning, because you don't have a lot of clients, you can get one complaint a year. And if it's a bigger complaint in the beginning, again, it takes a big emotional toll on you. Because of course, when you're an entrepreneur, your mission driven. You love what you do. You're passionate. You want to do the best for your clients when things don't go perfectly, and there will be a time when they want. We're all human. We all make mistakes. It can be rattling. Right? So your first few client complaints a you want to be sure how to handle it. Therefore you won't be sure like what type of decisions you need to make. It will feel very personal. You will be thinking about it for a couple of days, or maybe longer.

Maggie Perotin 00:16:44  But think about this way if Jeff Bezos of CEO handled each customer complained this way, the guy would never sleep and wouldn't be able to do anything else now. I don't say that he handles it. I'm sure he has an apartment, but this is just an example. As your business grows and you have more and more clients, even if the percentage of the complaints becomes stays the same, let's say it's 1%. Just because of the sheer volume of your business, it will be more individual cases. So let's say 1% of 100 is one, right? So if you have 100 clients it's one complaint. But now if you have 1000 clients, now it's ten complaints. If you have 10,000 clients, it's a hundred complaints a year. So you can see what I'm getting at. That same percentage but different scale of the business. The number grows. So you can be taking a week to sort of emotionally process a complaint because you don't have enough weeks in a the year. If you have 100 complaints a year because of the size of your business.

Maggie Perotin 00:17:48  So you need to be able to decide fast, learn from it, improve and move on. And you could tell me, yes, Meg. Okay, well, I'll delegate that as soon as I can. I won't have to deal with it. And I would say only to an extent, because as I said, as your business scales, the complexity scales. So certain complaints and usually those are in the more complex, the biggest one you might need to address. I remember in my corporate role as a director of Operations and service excellence, I had two managers, and then the managers had team members that when there were certain complaints from the client, either the team member could address or the manager could address as a second level of escalation. And there were still certain complaints that became so big and so complex where my team could not handle. And I had to step in and I had to talk to the client or appease the client, even because of my rank. Right? The client was upset to the point where they didn't want to deal with an entry level employee or a manager.

Maggie Perotin 00:18:53  They wanted to deal with somebody higher. So no matter what, as a business owner, even if you delegate majority of those things, there will be certain complaints or certain situations you have to deal with, and that's where you want your emotional capacity to be strong enough, and your decision making to be strong enough to handle with it without that complex thing affecting you for a week, because you have other things that will need your attention very quickly, right after. And then last area that I see where our emotional capacity as business owners has to grow is around money and managing money. Not only the income, but the expenses, how the cash flows were. Sometimes you need to have a big expense, but you haven't received payments yet from the clients. And how to manage that? Even the self-concept of somebody who handles right so much cash when you're going from making $50,000 to six figures, multiple six figures and seven figures or multiple seven figures, there is definitely inner work and emotional capacity to grow there, to be able to handle this kind of money going in and out of your business, in and out of your personal life.

Maggie Perotin 00:20:14  So what I talked about here today is really part of high performance. It's really part of becoming a high performing CEO. And when you work with me, we cover that in my top CEO Performance Enhancer formula. It's part of it. And of course we always tailor it to your specific situation where you are with your business. What do you need right now to get to the next level? But it's an important part that very often is not talked about and overlooked when business coaches just, let's say, talk strategy or just mindset or specific hard business skill, we cover it all. If you're ready to double your business without adding more work. You can always talk to me. Book sales go through the link in the show notes. See you next week. Bye. Thank you for listening today. If this podcast resonated with you, please come back. Also, you can leave a review on whatever platform you're listening and if you have a suggestion, question or a topic you would like me to talk about, let's get in touch via email.

Maggie Perotin 00:21:27  Email me at Maggie at Stairway to Leadership. Com. See you in the next episode.