20% profit growth, alongside 15 more hours at home a week…

how did he do it?

Gabe is a small business owner and new father. He wants to grow his business profits, but also spend more time at home. How can he achieve this?

1. First, identify and prioritize VALUES & GOALS

For Gabe, family comes first, but his work schedule wasn’t reflecting that reality.  He needed to prioritize being home at night to tuck kids to bed.

Gabe’s second value is career.  We identified concrete goals: to grow his business to 250k net profit and win the centurion award for top producer in the organization.  These concrete goals make success clear.

2. Next, invest in STRENGTHS, outsource SPOILERS

Gabe is naturally good at building trust immediately, strategic problem solving, and mutually beneficial networking.  He calendars these items so he’ll do them more regularly, because they re-energize him.  Especially before and after draining activities — like budgeting and confronting a poor performer.

Freeing time to be home at night for kids requires that Gabe to stop doing tasks “below his pay grade,” i.e., tasks that others can do at a lower hourly cost.  His focus should be on business strategy and growth, not distracting activities like administration.

What tasks does Gabe pour time into and get minimal results?  Based on his answers to this question, we set up the following gameplan:

• Hire strong admin assistant for office work (so Gabe does less of this from 5-7pm)
• Create a new role in his organization to attend to high effort, low return tasks with customers.
• This frees up Gabe’s time to focus more on his strengths of strategy and networking.
• Have staff tease him with nickname “do everything guy” when he works late or isn’t focused on big picture. This helps Gabe laugh it off and refocus.

3. Finally, improve based on FEEDBACK LOOPS

We evaluated Gabe’s customer base and learned that 70% of his business comes from a certain type of customer.  What he thought was most important, wasn’t most important to them.  Now he focuses the bulk of his personal time on satisfying this critical 70% in the ways they want and need.

Finally, we restructured his key success metric to be net profit per hour (return on investment of time spent), rather than overall revenue. This keeps him focused on a productivity metric, rather than just a volume metric.