24 hours in a day. Less if you’re selfish enough to sleep.
This is the Big Trick, increasing the number of hours you “work” without actually doing them. I first got a taste of this when I co-founded a podcast for a local non-profit. Boom, 300 hours of outreach for every hour put into it.
But it took a while for that to kick in. When we think of leverage, it’s common to think about people, but people are generally the last step in the process to leverage mastery in a self-funded business, from what I’ve been seeing.
Here are a few ways where I’ve been gaining leverage without having to recruit, train, or sell to people:
Mass emails. When I collect an email address, they get automatic followup emails. No, it doesn’t look like its fresh from me (people are so used to this that when I do send a mail by hand to these audiences, I include real time sports scores, which is kind of like a nicer version of including a photo of me holding the day’s newspaper, hostage-style.) But modern software means I can send these mails on a schedule, and automatically turn them off or switch the sequence up based on actions people take. It’s a massive time saver.
Screencasts. I have a Goto Meeting account, but I hardly ever use it directly unless I need to run an idea by a client. Generally, I record screencasts and send them over for people to review before they ask me a single question. As a tech guy, I’m sensitive to any app that takes an iota of my CPU cycles, but I leave Screenflow running most of the time so I can record stuff on the fly with minimal friction if I think it’s something I need to share with my team.
This blog. Again, a hint into the “why do this every day?” question – I post these things every work day, and just like the podcast example I started with, I get read a zillion times more than I read. The “average time on site” stat in analytics is a massive teacher. Trust me, it’s an incredibly cool feeling when you can multiply the number of visitors per day by the average time per visit and it’s more time than you spent making the content. It’s even cooler when that total time per day is more than the 24 hours that exist in a day. And then you get to calculate multiples. From an academic “building a business” perspective, it’s obvious, but when stuff gets real and it really happens, it’s damned inspiring.
Voicemail. Oh how I love voicemail. It’s the cheapest virtual assistant you’ll ever have. What, $4 a month for a machine that’ll record your messages and email them to you? Why would you ever answer the phone and take that away from yourself?
Oh, and webinars (with recordings) are next.
Don’t get me wrong, getting people involved in your business is awesome, but automated tools are way cooler, because you can focus on duplicating what you already do without having to learn human psychology to get people to actually repeat your process.
Whether you have a job or a business (or a business that’s a job,) leverage is what’s going to take you further. Do you have it?
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