Episode Transcript
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S1 (00:00):
Welcome to business and the podcast for people making it
all happen. Running a successful business completely takes over your life,
but I'm a believer that there is still room for
some ands like health, wealth, beauty, and maybe even some fashion.
On this podcast, I'll share with you what's working for
scaling my nine figure business while keeping you up to
date on the latest trends, news and fun finds. This
(00:23):
is a place for business and let's dive in! Welcome
back to business. And I like today's episode because it
is my short and easy process for how I look
at time, how I become more effective, and the systems
that I use in order to create the life that
I want. For those of you who've listened to this
podcast for a while, you have seen many iterations of
Natalie over the last six years. From when I first
(00:45):
started this podcast. I am literally not the same person
today as I was back then. And for people who
know me, they ask me, how do you do this
the way I do? This is the process that I
lay out in this episode. It is the framework that
I use and I am disciplined about using this and
implementing it every single week because I know where I
(01:06):
want to go and it's just a matter of what
do I need to change, and where do I need
to spend my time in order to get there? I
am relentless about this, and to the extent that you
are relentless about this, you can have the life that
you want to. I hope you enjoy. These are the
systems that turn my chaotic schedule into a life I
actually control. These systems help me go from overwhelmed, making
(01:28):
no money in a job that I hated, to co-founding
my dream business and getting married to the love of
my life. So let's dive in to the frameworks that
actually work. The first system to help you accomplish anything
is to start using a calendar to control. You and
Beyonce have the same 24 hours in a day. I
read that quote on a card once and my mind
(01:49):
was instantly blown. At the time, I was 19 years old,
juggling all of the things, not creating any sort of success.
Still a student and thinking about the fact that Beyonce
and me have the exact same amount of time. And
yet look at what she's doing. She's an actress. She's
a dancer, she's a singer. She's a mom. Beyonce was
(02:09):
doing all of the things, and she was not that
much older than me. So when I realized I started
trying to figure out how do I find tools to
help me use my time better, and my go to
tool that I recommend every business owner, every future entrepreneur,
or everybody who just wants to make more money uses
is a Google Calendar. Now, you could really use any calendar.
If you're not a fan of Google, that's fine, but
(02:32):
you have to use a calendar to track where you're
spending your time. Because let's face it, if you don't
have the results that you want, it literally means that
you are not spending your time on the right activities.
If you don't have the amount of money you want
to make, it means that you haven't learned how to
make money, which means you haven't spent the time to
learn the right skills. If you don't have the husband
of your dreams, how are you spending your time in
(02:52):
order to become the type of person that your future
husband would actually want to date and hopefully marry? So
tracking where you spend your time is the first step.
If you don't know where you're spending your time, you
will always feel like you are not in control of time.
And one of my mottos that I remind my team
of almost on a daily basis is I create time.
I say that all the time, so there is never
(03:13):
a reason for me to say I don't have time.
I'm too busy. Those are not real excuses because I remember, hey,
wait a second, I create time. That means that I
can make time for the things that matter most. I'm
going to get to where I want to go, but
if I don't make time, I feel like I'm a
victim of time. I don't use my calendar to structure
my time. Everything feels chaotic and like I can never
(03:34):
get ahead. I can never get what I want done.
This is a fallacy, and this is one of my
strategies for actually being effective. Use your calendar to track
where you're spending your time. What you need is a
tool that is so simple for you to use that
isn't perfect. It doesn't have to be beautiful. You don't
have to convince yourself. It needs to be this color coded,
nicely organized with good handwriting planner. Throw all of that out.
(03:56):
I used to get caught in this trap where I
would want to get organized, and I would want to
be successful. So I would buy a planner and then
I would spend four hours planning everything perfectly. But when
it came to using that planner and making tweaks to
my schedule the next day, I had already stopped using
the planner and I never picked it up again. And
I would keep buying these planners every 2 or 3
(04:16):
months in order to start the process all over again.
You do not need some perfect process. You're using a
tool that is effective for tracking where you're spending your time,
because this is the foundation in order for these next
four steps to actually work. This next system is my
four step framework. And the first step is to look
(04:37):
at your calendar and see what you can entirely stop doing.
What's wild about this idea of creating time means that
you can actually stop doing things that you currently do.
A lot of people just start adding more, adding more,
adding more. And yes, in order to be more effective,
in order to expand your business, in order to learn
new skills, you are adding something. But the first step
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is actually to figure out what you need to stop
doing for me back in the day before I created
real success. I was confused about where I spent my time,
and I would think that I needed to do all
of these things and create these never ending to do
lists of things that were of medium or low importance.
So instead of doing something that would actually move my
career forward, I would use this idea of going to
(05:21):
target as being effective and being busy. But I didn't
need to go to target, when really what would have
moved the needle in that one day was to move
the one email forward that I was avoiding. So before
you even use a Google calendar, this is easy to implement.
What are things that I'm doing that I don't actually
need to do? So some examples of things that you
don't need to be doing. Taking on the project to
(05:41):
clean out your garage, or going to the grocery store
when Amazon could deliver it. Instead, these little things that
we add to our to do list are the things
that stop us from doing the most important things. So
moving forward, we're going to stop doing the unimportant things
so we can make time for the things that matter most. Now,
don't even get me started on how much time you
are likely wasting on things like YouTube, Netflix, Instagram, TikTok,
(06:06):
all of those things. Could you stop doing that so
that you are able to create time in the short
run to get closer to your goals and be more productive?
Now the next step is learning how to delegate. Look
at your life and decide what can you delegate to
other people? So in some situations, you can't entirely stop
doing something. Let's say you can't entirely stop going to
(06:28):
the grocery store because you are responsible for feeding your family. However,
how can you delegate this to Amazon? Amazon can effectively
deliver your groceries to your house without you spending a
whole hour picking out everything, searching through aisles, checking out driving.
They're driving home. They could just deliver all these things.
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And better yet, you would now have a system because
it could just go on repeat order. So you get
exactly what you need inside your house. This is just
one idea of delegation that can totally transform how you
think about making more time because most of the things
that you do, you might actually still need to have
those things done in your life. You can't just stop
them entirely. But who else in your life or in
(07:10):
your business could effectively take those things off of your plate?
You train them. You duplicate yourself so that they take
on that responsibility, which allows you to spend more time
marketing your business, promoting your products and services, fixing your
sales cycle because your salespeople aren't converting in the way
that they used to when you were overseeing the department.
When you think about the process of delegation, you have
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to ask yourself this question what is important that needs
to get done but that I don't have to do myself?
The lack of delegation is why most businesses stay small.
The business owner thinks that they have to sell the customer.
They have to market why their business is the best
they have to fulfill on the services for the customer.
They have to be the customer success arm. Many business
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owners just hold on to every part of their business
because they think that they are the best at doing it,
and that nobody can do it like them. But if
you really dive into the way that you duplicate yourself
in a business, you can remove yourself from certain activities
that don't need you, so you can focus on more
important things. And the question then that you have to
ask yourself is, is my business growing? Because if your
(08:15):
business isn't growing, it's likely that you are the bottleneck
and you don't know how to delegate effectively. The next
step is to look at your calendar and decide what
you need to continue doing. You need to track what
you're doing every day to make sure that those things
are actually working for you. I think of the continue
bucket as this is my job description. This is what
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I am responsible for. What is my primary function to
move our business forward? And my job description today with
a $100 million plus business, is very different from the
job description that I had when our business was doing
$12 million. What's weird about this, though, for a business owner,
is that your title stays the same. So how are
you updating your job description based on the most important
(08:58):
problems in your business today? I believe that productivity spans
into all aspects of life, including your relationships. If your
relationships aren't doing so well, your marriage is struggling. You're
having difficult times with your kids. You can use the
same framework. These four steps allow you to identify exactly
what you need to change, so you can make those changes.
Implement that time on your calendar and then watch to
(09:22):
see are those changes working? And if they're not working
over a period of time, you can fix it. You
can change out one task that you thought was important,
no longer important. You've now put it in the stop category,
or you recognize that your relationships and your business or
your income is improving. So you're going to continue to
do those things until it makes sense to delegate them.
So you can now target new areas of growth. But
(09:42):
all of this is connected to how do I become
more productive with the 24 hours that I have to drive,
the impact that I want to create? What I do
with the business owners I work with is I have
them pull out their calendar, share with me where they're
spending their time so I can better assess what they
need to stop doing altogether, what they should delegate to
somebody else and what they should continue to do. Oftentimes
(10:05):
those three buckets are very confused and they're struggling because
the whole point of looking at these areas is to
actually identify what you need to start doing to have
your business grow so that the wheels don't fall off
your business. While you are also pursuing this new expansion
and growth related opportunity. When it comes to the continues,
(10:26):
if you are a leader in a business, what would
always stay the same is you continuing to lead and
develop your team members. For me, that looks like having
consistent one on ones every other week with my team members,
doing performance reviews with them and also ensuring that they
send me end of week reports so I can remove
any roadblocks or barriers that are in their way of
(10:46):
being successful in their role. I have done this for
the last six years with every team member who reports
to me, and that is the reason that we've been
able to grow as fast as we've grown, because we
have a system in place that is productive, that allows
leaders to help their team members flourish and prosper inside
an environment. The last step in my framework is asking
yourself what you should start doing. I like to get
(11:09):
really creative with the things that I need to start doing,
because I'm oftentimes just dissatisfied. I see other people doing
cool big things and I'm like, I want to do
that too. And it's frustrating to me that I'm not
able to do those things. And so if you do
have this mindset where you could have what you want
in life, you just need to figure out how you
use your time to actually go get those things. One
(11:30):
of the most impactful decisions that I made in my
career was deciding that I needed to learn how to
publicly speak. I had a very embarrassing experience early on
in my career that made me get stage fright, and
made me get incredibly nervous whenever I would speak to
a group of more than 3 or 4 people. And
this held me back for years. But then I thought
about in 20 years from now, in 30 years from now,
(11:52):
in 60 years from now, Natalie has, of course, figured
out how to publicly speak. Like I'm going to be
able to articulate myself at some point in the future.
So I have to start getting better at that right
now in order to eventually get to where I want
to go. So what did I start doing? I started
giving mini speeches every single day, whether that was in
a team meeting or a toast at dinner. I started
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to incorporate this skill set that I needed to learn,
which was learning how to speak in front of people.
And I would literally add this into my calendar, make
toast at dinner, or kick off all team meeting so
that it forced me to get over this very uncomfortable
thing that was holding me back from where I wanted
to go. So you use your calendar to identify how
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you're going to start doing the things that you want
to be doing in the future with ease. And when
it comes to starting new things, you have to be
very careful that the things that you start are measured,
because you don't just want a list of things that
aren't making an impact, but are wasting your time. If
you're going to start making public speeches, if you're going
to spend time looking at new businesses to buy, if
(12:56):
you're going to learn sales skills, don't just invest your
time in those areas. Measure your effectiveness in those areas.
Make measurement senior to you doing the activity because the
measurement is going to dictate to you whether or not
you are improving. And if it's a good use of
your time, if you're not improving and it's not a
good use of your time, you should start doing something
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else that is going to get you closer to your goal.
You need to start doing things that will make your
life better, that will allow you to achieve your goals.
If you enjoyed this podcast, you are going to definitely
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(13:38):
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S2 (13:51):
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