September 16, 2024 • 12 mins
Instead of separating the "strategic" and the "tactical", or the "long-term" vs. the "short-term", we need to see how to use every activity in our business to do both, and the better we get at this, the faster our business will grow up and make money when we're not there.
This podcast gives multiple examples of business owners who weren't dual tracking, started doing it, and saw their businesses not only grow, but give them freedom while they were growing. Business owners who are buried in the day-to-day and think strategic "stuff" is something you do once a month (or less), will stay on the treadmill. Those that learn to apply Dual Tracking will thrive, grow, and gain freedom IN their businesses.
Check our special offer for the Making Money is Killing Your Business: https://bit.ly/m/3to5Club
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Welcome back to the Get Off The Treadmill
podcast for small business owners and entrepreneurs, where
we show you how to build a successful
business and to have a life too.
We're going to dive into another topic that
helps us make more money in less time
and to get off the treadmill so we
can experience a life of significance.
And now your host and the author of
(00:25):
the number one bestselling business book, Making Money
Is Killing Your Business, Chuck Blakeman.
Hi, Chuck Blakeman here again with you today.
We're going to talk about dual tracking, how
every business grows up.
There are no exceptions to this rule that
I'm aware of, so let's dive right in.
The right game in business isn't to make
money.
(00:46):
That's an income producer's mindset, not a business
owner's mindset.
I've had it.
The right game in business is to build
a business that makes money when you are
not there.
And to do that, you have to commit
to dual tracking, which most business owners never
embrace.
I know I didn't for the longest time,
and it's a major reason why we're all
stuck being income producers and not making the
(01:06):
money we hoped we would make when we
started our businesses.
If you've raised kids, you've done dual tracking.
If we see our kids as adults in
the making, as we should, it motivates us
to make decisions that will help them now,
but especially as adults.
If we also see our businesses as growing
up and giving back to us at some
point, it motivates us the same way.
We have to take care of the tyranny
(01:27):
of the urgent that we talked about in
another podcast, while also at the very same
time addressing the priority of the important every
time.
Because the important things that never show up
on our to-do list are the very
things that will, over time, keep tyrannical, urgent
things from dominating the list and our lives.
Dual tracking is using the same activity to
do two things at once.
(01:48):
As an example, finding clients now, and using
the same activity to build freedom for yourself
later.
I have to make money today, right?
Well, I also answer the question, how do
I build a business that makes money when
I am not there?
If all I do is react to the
tyranny of the urgent all week, I will
react to it and solve a lot of
present day problems, but I will never address
the things that will eventually give me freedom
(02:09):
in my business, not from it.
Dual tracking allows me to make more money
in less time.
It's basically the idea of inventing the wheel
once, not reinventing it every time you repeat
an activity in your business.
So, how do we dual track?
In principle, and even I think in practice,
it's actually quite simple, but it's not always
easy.
As I'm performing another tyrannical, urgent task coming
(02:31):
at me, like finding a customer, buying supplies,
making the chairs, delivering the chairs, sending an
invoice, collecting the check, making sure customers and
teams are happy, and dealing with accounting.
As I'm doing all those tyrannically urgent things,
I ask myself this question, how can I
use this activity to build a business that
makes money when I am not there?
(02:52):
Here's an example from one of my own
businesses.
When I first started advising and mentoring other
business owners in 2006, I was alone.
I was a sole producer.
To get clients, I started this thing I
called the Business Leaders Insight Lunch, which quickly
got known as the BLI Lunch.
We took over a private room at a
restaurant and invited business owners to come, buy
their own lunch, and discuss a business principle,
(03:12):
practice, or tool that I would share.
It was just 6-10 of us for
months, but eventually it grew to as many
as 75 people at its peak for a
few years, even though we had stopped marketing
it after the first year.
And I'll share more on how to cut
out the front end of marketing at other
posts.
You can do it too.
So we met every Tuesday for over 9
years.
When it started, I needed clients, and it
was a great way to serve the business
(03:33):
community with my experience, while also creating credibility
for me and my business that might lead
to clients.
The easy thing would have been to focus
solely on using the lunch to make money
right then and there, lead the discussion, get
some clients, produce, get paid, do another lunch.
But I had made the mistake of focusing
on making money in 5 earlier businesses, and
I was determined this time to figure out
how to get the business to where it
(03:54):
made more money when I wasn't there, so
that I could have freedom in my business.
So I wasn't just satisfied making money from
the BLI Lunch.
I was on the hunt to find ways
to build a business that makes money for
me when I am not there.
I couldn't articulate it at the time, but
what I had stumbled on was the mindset
of growing what I now call a mature
business.
(04:14):
So for the first couple weeks that I
was recruiting and working on my first BLI
Lunch, I was constantly asking myself, how can
I use this activity to build a business
that makes money when I'm not there?
What I hit upon wasn't all that eye
-opening, but it was powerful and incredibly helpful
to me.
As I grew, I knew I wanted other
future facilitators of our 3-5 clubs to
(04:35):
be able to easily have their own BLI
Lunch at some point, or start speaking at
mine as well.
So I did two things that as a
left-handed, right-brained, ADHD dyslexic, I had
never done before.
First, I wrote a process, yes, an actual
written process, something until that moment I had
always believed was something only big companies wasted
their time, money, and energy doing.
(04:56):
Until then, processes were always something I had
in my head, and I could easily and
efficiently execute it myself, and even explain it
to others, over and over and over again.
But the desire to build something that made
money when I was not there required that
I write it down, that I get it
out of my head, through my heart, and
out my hands onto a piece of paper,
(05:17):
so that others could do what I do.
I learned later that what was really happening
was that I was putting a part of
me on a piece of paper, so that
when I was not there, others would know
how to do things the way I had
always done them for my customers.
And since then, to the dismay of my
tender ego, I've learned that once people know
what you want, they many times can do
it better, faster, and cheaper than you did.
(05:38):
The second thing I did to build that
lunch, that I had also never done before,
instead of winging it with a topic at
lunch, which I could easily have done every
time, I wrote a leader's guide for future
facilitators to follow each time, and a handout
for my attendees that future facilitators could also
use and modify, if they started their own
lunches in other cities.
I did this for every lunch.
(05:58):
This took time, effort, and commitment, three things
I had always expended on solving reoccurring problems
or re-inducting the wheel every time I
did something for a client.
Writing all this down added probably an hour
of prep time to each lunch, but I
was now dual tracking, again, something I didn't
have a name for at the time.
Instead of just holding a lunch, I used
(06:19):
that potential money-making service activity to help
me build a business that would also make
money when I wasn't there.
I also documented the process of starting and
hosting that lunch, finding the right venue, marketing
it to the right people, and I documented
everything that went into the lunch that I
was creating.
As I did things and learned, I wrote
those learnings into that process.
Not a single bit of any of this
(06:41):
made me any money today, and I could
have seen all this as just a distraction
from being able to make even more money
today, right now.
But now that we have facilitators and clients
in other cities around the world, all I
have to do is hand them the process,
the 100-plus presentations I've already produced, the
recordings, and provide general guidance, and they can
just follow the process, add their own fresh
(07:02):
examples to the handouts, and jump right in.
The lesson for me, if you keep asking
the question, how can I use this activity
to build a business that makes money when
I'm not there, you can find helpful ways
to dual track almost every activity.
After a couple of weeks of lunches, I
thought of another way to make money later
when I was not around.
I bought a high-end handheld recorder and
(07:22):
started recording my talks.
I now have well over 100 of them
in the can, and besides training other 3
to 5 club facilitators with them, there are
multiple other uses for them, such as podcasts,
webinars, pulling out bits and pieces as marketing
shorts on social media, and many other uses.
And beyond what I even imagined I could
do with them, they ended up forming the
(07:44):
basis of over a dozen workshops and seminars
we continue to do 18 years after the
lunches started, and they gave me the material
for my first book in 2010, Making Money
Is Killing Your Business, which was the number
one rated book of the year, beating out
books by famous authors like Seth Godin, Bo
Birmingham, and many other small business writers.
In another podcast, we talked about the two
opposing forces we are faced with every morning
(08:06):
before we even get out of bed.
The tyranny of the urgent, all those things
that come flying at us every day that
require that we react to them, and the
priority of the important, the few things that
sit quietly in the corner waiting for us
to proactively engage them so that they can
help us solve the urgent things permanently.
These lunches, which we no longer do, still
(08:27):
make money for me now while I'm out
of the office because I took the time
to stop and proactively engage the priority of
the important, like writing down processes and creating
handouts.
Doing the important things almost never make us
money right away, but they almost always make
us a lot more money down the road
because they save us from the tyranny of
the urgent reinventing the wheel, and they help
(08:48):
us permanently solve urgent things that before would
have reoccurred with the regularity of the sun
coming up, but more like wind and snow
in our face every day.
When you do track your efforts and feed
both the urgent and the important at the
same time, you've found the sweet spot.
Samantha and Cam DeWald have owned a wholesale
retail window store for 22 years, and they
(09:09):
do about $2.5 million per year in
gross revenues, and it provides a real nice
lifestyle for them.
They told me they were successful and quite
happy with the 22 years behind them and
the next 15 or so in front of
them before they retired, but before I tried
to talk them out of retirement, we talked
about what it means to have true wealth,
which I believe means your business regularly gives
back time and money, not just money.
(09:32):
I could see Samantha's face getting tighter and
tighter as I talked about time and money,
not just money.
After a long few seconds of silence, she
turned to me and said quietly, I'm so
sick of this.
It doesn't seem like we can ever truly
leave for a few days.
This thing, I think by this thing she
meant her business, this thing is like a
millstone around our necks.
(09:53):
22 years later, she was still investing as
much time and emotion into her business as
when it was born.
It had never grown up to begin giving
back time along with money.
22 years later, she was still a hostage
to her business.
It will wear you out, and it had
worn her to the bone.
So we got started helping them that day
by showing them how to dual track.
(10:13):
For the first time in 22 years, they
were building a business, not just making money.
A couple of months later, they lost their
highly valued office manager who'd been with them
for almost the whole 22 years.
When I checked in a couple of weeks
after that, I asked Samantha how the new
person Jenna was doing.
And she said, in the past, it would
have been six plus months of relearning in
trial and error in any position we have,
(10:35):
and that would have cost us a lot
of money and customer confidence.
But because of some of the simple processes
we stopped to write down and put in
place, we only had to sit with Jenna
for a few hours over a couple of
days, and she got this thing figured out.
Jenna, who was sitting right there, smiled and
pointed to the simple process we had put
together for the original office manager, and said,
I'm doing great as long as I have
(10:55):
this.
Samantha and Cam were on their way to
building a mature business for the first time
in 22 years.
They were gaining confidence that they could see
this happen very quickly in the next year
or so, allowing them to actually enjoy their
business for many years to come.
These are just two examples of dual tracking.
It's not about being clever or creative, but
simply being committed to finding ways to use
every money-making activity in your business to
(11:18):
pay your bills now, and at the same
time to help you build a future business
that will make money when you're away doing
something else important to you.
In dual tracking, it's critical to ask yourself,
how can I use this activity to build
a business that makes money when I'm not
there?
Ask that every day for every activity in
your business, and your business will change dramatically
(11:39):
and begin to actually grow up.
If you are only focused on completing tasks
today, your business will never get to maturity.
If you're focused on building a business that
makes money when you are not there, dual
tracking is your ticket for freedom in your
business, not from it.
Enjoy the ride and keep going.
I'll see you in the next podcast.
(12:01):
That wraps up another episode of the Get
Off The Treadmill podcast.
If you found this podcast helpful, please subscribe
and hit the like button to ensure you
are receiving the latest tools you need to
grow your business and to get off the
treadmill.
If you want more information on the 3
to 5 Club, the Crankset Group, or to
book Chuck as a business advisor, speaker, or
workshop leader, you can contact us at grow,
(12:24):
G-R-O-W, at cranksetgroup.com.
Until next time, have a great week.
Welcome back to the Get Off The Treadmill
podcast for small business owners and entrepreneurs, where
we show you how to build a successful
business and to have a life too.
We're going to dive into another topic that
helps us make more money in less time
and to get off the treadmill so we
can experience a life of significance.
And now your host and the author of
(00:25):
the number one bestselling business book, Making Money
Is Killing Your Business, Chuck Blakeman.
Hi, Chuck Blakeman here again with you today.
We're going to talk about dual tracking, how
every business grows up.
There are no exceptions to this rule that
I'm aware of, so let's dive right in.
The right game in business isn't to make
money.
(00:46):
That's an income producer's mindset, not a business
owner's mindset.
I've had it.
The right game in business is to build
a business that makes money when you are
not there.
And to do that, you have to commit
to dual tracking, which most business owners never
embrace.
I know I didn't for the longest time,
and it's a major reason why we're all
stuck being income producers and not making the
(01:06):
money we hoped we would make when we
started our businesses.
If you've raised kids, you've done dual tracking.
If we see our kids as adults in
the making, as we should, it motivates us
to make decisions that will help them now,
but especially as adults.
If we also see our businesses as growing
up and giving back to us at some
point, it motivates us the same way.
We have to take care of the tyranny
(01:27):
of the urgent that we talked about in
another podcast, while also at the very same
time addressing the priority of the important every
time.
Because the important things that never show up
on our to-do list are the very
things that will, over time, keep tyrannical, urgent
things from dominating the list and our lives.
Dual tracking is using the same activity to
do two things at once.
(01:48):
As an example, finding clients now, and using
the same activity to build freedom for yourself
later.
I have to make money today, right?
Well, I also answer the question, how do
I build a business that makes money when
I am not there?
If all I do is react to the
tyranny of the urgent all week, I will
react to it and solve a lot of
present day problems, but I will never address
the things that will eventually give me freedom
(02:09):
in my business, not from it.
Dual tracking allows me to make more money
in less time.
It's basically the idea of inventing the wheel
once, not reinventing it every time you repeat
an activity in your business.
So, how do we dual track?
In principle, and even I think in practice,
it's actually quite simple, but it's not always
easy.
As I'm performing another tyrannical, urgent task coming
(02:31):
at me, like finding a customer, buying supplies,
making the chairs, delivering the chairs, sending an
invoice, collecting the check, making sure customers and
teams are happy, and dealing with accounting.
As I'm doing all those tyrannically urgent things,
I ask myself this question, how can I
use this activity to build a business that
makes money when I am not there?
(02:52):
Here's an example from one of my own
businesses.
When I first started advising and mentoring other
business owners in 2006, I was alone.
I was a sole producer.
To get clients, I started this thing I
called the Business Leaders Insight Lunch, which quickly
got known as the BLI Lunch.
We took over a private room at a
restaurant and invited business owners to come, buy
their own lunch, and discuss a business principle,
(03:12):
practice, or tool that I would share.
It was just 6-10 of us for
months, but eventually it grew to as many
as 75 people at its peak for a
few years, even though we had stopped marketing
it after the first year.
And I'll share more on how to cut
out the front end of marketing at other
posts.
You can do it too.
So we met every Tuesday for over 9
years.
When it started, I needed clients, and it
was a great way to serve the business
(03:33):
community with my experience, while also creating credibility
for me and my business that might lead
to clients.
The easy thing would have been to focus
solely on using the lunch to make money
right then and there, lead the discussion, get
some clients, produce, get paid, do another lunch.
But I had made the mistake of focusing
on making money in 5 earlier businesses, and
I was determined this time to figure out
how to get the business to where it
(03:54):
made more money when I wasn't there, so
that I could have freedom in my business.
So I wasn't just satisfied making money from
the BLI Lunch.
I was on the hunt to find ways
to build a business that makes money for
me when I am not there.
I couldn't articulate it at the time, but
what I had stumbled on was the mindset
of growing what I now call a mature
business.
(04:14):
So for the first couple weeks that I
was recruiting and working on my first BLI
Lunch, I was constantly asking myself, how can
I use this activity to build a business
that makes money when I'm not there?
What I hit upon wasn't all that eye
-opening, but it was powerful and incredibly helpful
to me.
As I grew, I knew I wanted other
future facilitators of our 3-5 clubs to
(04:35):
be able to easily have their own BLI
Lunch at some point, or start speaking at
mine as well.
So I did two things that as a
left-handed, right-brained, ADHD dyslexic, I had
never done before.
First, I wrote a process, yes, an actual
written process, something until that moment I had
always believed was something only big companies wasted
their time, money, and energy doing.
(04:56):
Until then, processes were always something I had
in my head, and I could easily and
efficiently execute it myself, and even explain it
to others, over and over and over again.
But the desire to build something that made
money when I was not there required that
I write it down, that I get it
out of my head, through my heart, and
out my hands onto a piece of paper,
(05:17):
so that others could do what I do.
I learned later that what was really happening
was that I was putting a part of
me on a piece of paper, so that
when I was not there, others would know
how to do things the way I had
always done them for my customers.
And since then, to the dismay of my
tender ego, I've learned that once people know
what you want, they many times can do
it better, faster, and cheaper than you did.
(05:38):
The second thing I did to build that
lunch, that I had also never done before,
instead of winging it with a topic at
lunch, which I could easily have done every
time, I wrote a leader's guide for future
facilitators to follow each time, and a handout
for my attendees that future facilitators could also
use and modify, if they started their own
lunches in other cities.
I did this for every lunch.
(05:58):
This took time, effort, and commitment, three things
I had always expended on solving reoccurring problems
or re-inducting the wheel every time I
did something for a client.
Writing all this down added probably an hour
of prep time to each lunch, but I
was now dual tracking, again, something I didn't
have a name for at the time.
Instead of just holding a lunch, I used
(06:19):
that potential money-making service activity to help
me build a business that would also make
money when I wasn't there.
I also documented the process of starting and
hosting that lunch, finding the right venue, marketing
it to the right people, and I documented
everything that went into the lunch that I
was creating.
As I did things and learned, I wrote
those learnings into that process.
Not a single bit of any of this
(06:41):
made me any money today, and I could
have seen all this as just a distraction
from being able to make even more money
today, right now.
But now that we have facilitators and clients
in other cities around the world, all I
have to do is hand them the process,
the 100-plus presentations I've already produced, the
recordings, and provide general guidance, and they can
just follow the process, add their own fresh
(07:02):
examples to the handouts, and jump right in.
The lesson for me, if you keep asking
the question, how can I use this activity
to build a business that makes money when
I'm not there, you can find helpful ways
to dual track almost every activity.
After a couple of weeks of lunches, I
thought of another way to make money later
when I was not around.
I bought a high-end handheld recorder and
(07:22):
started recording my talks.
I now have well over 100 of them
in the can, and besides training other 3
to 5 club facilitators with them, there are
multiple other uses for them, such as podcasts,
webinars, pulling out bits and pieces as marketing
shorts on social media, and many other uses.
And beyond what I even imagined I could
do with them, they ended up forming the
(07:44):
basis of over a dozen workshops and seminars
we continue to do 18 years after the
lunches started, and they gave me the material
for my first book in 2010, Making Money
Is Killing Your Business, which was the number
one rated book of the year, beating out
books by famous authors like Seth Godin, Bo
Birmingham, and many other small business writers.
In another podcast, we talked about the two
opposing forces we are faced with every morning
(08:06):
before we even get out of bed.
The tyranny of the urgent, all those things
that come flying at us every day that
require that we react to them, and the
priority of the important, the few things that
sit quietly in the corner waiting for us
to proactively engage them so that they can
help us solve the urgent things permanently.
These lunches, which we no longer do, still
(08:27):
make money for me now while I'm out
of the office because I took the time
to stop and proactively engage the priority of
the important, like writing down processes and creating
handouts.
Doing the important things almost never make us
money right away, but they almost always make
us a lot more money down the road
because they save us from the tyranny of
the urgent reinventing the wheel, and they help
(08:48):
us permanently solve urgent things that before would
have reoccurred with the regularity of the sun
coming up, but more like wind and snow
in our face every day.
When you do track your efforts and feed
both the urgent and the important at the
same time, you've found the sweet spot.
Samantha and Cam DeWald have owned a wholesale
retail window store for 22 years, and they
(09:09):
do about $2.5 million per year in
gross revenues, and it provides a real nice
lifestyle for them.
They told me they were successful and quite
happy with the 22 years behind them and
the next 15 or so in front of
them before they retired, but before I tried
to talk them out of retirement, we talked
about what it means to have true wealth,
which I believe means your business regularly gives
back time and money, not just money.
(09:32):
I could see Samantha's face getting tighter and
tighter as I talked about time and money,
not just money.
After a long few seconds of silence, she
turned to me and said quietly, I'm so
sick of this.
It doesn't seem like we can ever truly
leave for a few days.
This thing, I think by this thing she
meant her business, this thing is like a
millstone around our necks.
(09:53):
22 years later, she was still investing as
much time and emotion into her business as
when it was born.
It had never grown up to begin giving
back time along with money.
22 years later, she was still a hostage
to her business.
It will wear you out, and it had
worn her to the bone.
So we got started helping them that day
by showing them how to dual track.
(10:13):
For the first time in 22 years, they
were building a business, not just making money.
A couple of months later, they lost their
highly valued office manager who'd been with them
for almost the whole 22 years.
When I checked in a couple of weeks
after that, I asked Samantha how the new
person Jenna was doing.
And she said, in the past, it would
have been six plus months of relearning in
trial and error in any position we have,
(10:35):
and that would have cost us a lot
of money and customer confidence.
But because of some of the simple processes
we stopped to write down and put in
place, we only had to sit with Jenna
for a few hours over a couple of
days, and she got this thing figured out.
Jenna, who was sitting right there, smiled and
pointed to the simple process we had put
together for the original office manager, and said,
I'm doing great as long as I have
(10:55):
this.
Samantha and Cam were on their way to
building a mature business for the first time
in 22 years.
They were gaining confidence that they could see
this happen very quickly in the next year
or so, allowing them to actually enjoy their
business for many years to come.
These are just two examples of dual tracking.
It's not about being clever or creative, but
simply being committed to finding ways to use
every money-making activity in your business to
(11:18):
pay your bills now, and at the same
time to help you build a future business
that will make money when you're away doing
something else important to you.
In dual tracking, it's critical to ask yourself,
how can I use this activity to build
a business that makes money when I'm not
there?
Ask that every day for every activity in
your business, and your business will change dramatically
(11:39):
and begin to actually grow up.
If you are only focused on completing tasks
today, your business will never get to maturity.
If you're focused on building a business that
makes money when you are not there, dual
tracking is your ticket for freedom in your
business, not from it.
Enjoy the ride and keep going.
I'll see you in the next podcast.
(12:01):
That wraps up another episode of the Get
Off The Treadmill podcast.
If you found this podcast helpful, please subscribe
and hit the like button to ensure you
are receiving the latest tools you need to
grow your business and to get off the
treadmill.
If you want more information on the 3
to 5 Club, the Crankset Group, or to
book Chuck as a business advisor, speaker, or
workshop leader, you can contact us at grow,
(12:24):
G-R-O-W, at cranksetgroup.com.
Until next time, have a great week.
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