The Optimized Week

What's good, everybody.

Greg Hickman here with System.ly and welcome to the Scalable podcast.

In this episode, I actually want to actually did a Facebook live in our private Facebook community called the scalable service provider.

... I was just kind of sharing a story that happened the other day, in one of our all-day coaching implementation days for our clients. And something came up. This tool that we share called the optimized workweek that a lot of our clients adopt and start to use when they go to start adopting the systems and installing the automation and the product possession of their agency in order to grow. And somehow always comes back to how this one tool, the optimize week has really enabled them to get the results that they actually came into the program for. Right? They came into prototypes there, their agency, they came into install automation and systems so that they can remove themselves from their business. And yet it's this underlying fundamental habitual system that they've adopted that has generated the results. That's what this episode is about. So let's hop on over, uh, over to the Facebook live and you can listen in on that conversation and really start to understand what are those things that maybe not everyone's talking about that actually are the things that lead to the results lead to the results. Let's get it going.

For three years, my agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there talking about scale like it's some sort of destination, we'll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills, and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply and share the strategies I'm using to build my multimillion-dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to scalable on Friday. This past Friday, we basically did an all-day event with our clients, uh, our, our leverage clients. And, uh, we did three kind of breakout sessions on different topics that our clients are working on. Um, I broke down kind of a high level. Uh, we've been revamping our entire marketing funnel, so I did a whole session on like how I thought through what I wanted to do, um, what version one of that's going to look like. Then we also did a session that Lisa on our team held and she talked about, um, you know, it's creating and enhancing experiences by using small, different pieces of technology that we use. Uh, and then Megan on our team talked through and shared kind of the behind the scenes of how we've been kind of turning our content creation process into a machine in a, like the distribution of that. Like the videos like this get slice and dice turned in emails, you know, social media assets and things like that, that all is not happening without me anyways.

So we kind of broke down those three topics. And at the end of the day we [inaudible], uh, had a couple clients left on the call and one of them, uh, one of our clients, Chris was talking about, you know, his journey in growing his agency. And he kind of alluded to one of the tools that we teach in our program called the optimized week. And he basically said that, you know, in while he was building his agency, he thought that he was positioning himself too, work on his business and you know, do the things that were required of him to grow his agency. But the reality was he, he wasn't. And he was really just filling each and every day of the week with client work. And it turned into this cycle that kind of took over his life. And I see this time and time and time again with agency owners and it is in many ways the very thing that is preventing, preventing you from having what you want.

Right? And so what I want to talk about today, a high level, is this concept of the optimized week. Now the optimize week is, um, if you haven't heard of time blocking, it's how me and my team and our clients approach time blocking so that we're working on the right things. As an agent, former agency owner, and you know, someone that coaches agency owners on how to productize and scale with systems, it constantly comes up where the only way you're going to make more money as, as an agency owner is by, you know, obviously adding another client. But oftentimes you don't have the bandwidth to even take that client on. So you, your work and your client work specifically pours over into your evenings, early mornings, your weekends, and that often prohibits you from ever really working on your own business. And it just turns into this vicious cycle where you're always working on your client's stuff and in order to get more money, you add on another client and the time that should have been or was being used for you to work on your business, which was the weekend or the evenings, which also wasn't the best time to be working on your business.

That's now taken over by the next client, right? And yet you still RN hitting the revenue that you want to and there's no more hours left in the day, right? Uh, you, you are the business. You're stuck in fulfillment and that's kind of the story. And so a lot of the people that come to us are in that situation where, you know, they've capped out on revenue. They are the business they want to expand, but they, they need to productize what they're offering so that they can tap into the systems and the automation to make their business more repeatable. You know, automate their lead generation, their nurture, systemize their sales process, automate their fulfillment so they can remove themselves from the bottleneck, uh, as the bottleneck from those areas. Right? That's, that's the objective. But tactically it's like, well, what do you work on? And then when do you work on it if all of your bandwidth is tied to your client's business. And so we have this thing called the optimized week, and I'm going to kind of break down a high level how we kind of approached this. And I go through this process every, um, I'd say every 90 days, give or take.

And this is going to be a calendar and we'll look at the days of the week. Uh, and then I'll actually, we'll tack on, we'll tack on Saturday and Sunday over here. So we've got Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, right? Obviously the days of the week. Now, like I said, I go through this process about every 90 days my calendar adjusts. Um, you may or may not do that yourself, but you have to have the room to work and work on the right things, not just be reactionary. And until you take control of your own calendar, your own day, your own week, you will always be a servant to your clients. Period. This is why when you get on a plane, they tell you to put your mask on first. If the plane is going down before you put on the mask of your own child who is sitting right next to you. And you need to literally take this into your business as well and start taking care of your damn self so that you can be the best for your clients and really the best for you're your own team.

So here's the deal you've heard of, you've heard of time blocking before. It's, it's nothing new. Um, if you've read the book, the one thing, uh, or essential ism, you know these books, so many books, talk about time blocking productivity. We talk about time blocking. Um, what's going on. I can't see your name if you're chatting in right now, if you just said, hey bro, whoever that was, I have to look at my phone and see who this, who's watching so I can see the comments. Um, let me quickly jump on just so I can see your comments. I will need to look at the phone real fast. Give me one second.

Let's see where this do, do, do. All right, well this is not showing up for me. So, um, anyway, thanks for those of you that are joining. Um, oh Christian, what's going on? Christian? Sorry. So time blocking. You guys have all heard of this strategy, right? Many of you, if you haven't, well welcome. The reality is right now you basically, or many of you will fill each and every day with your client client workload. And the strategy was, oh well I'll work on my business on Saturday and Sunday. Well now you're working on your business on Saturday and Sunday when you should probably be with your family or your or you know, your loved ones and, or taking time for yourself. Um, and so maybe in the evenings, like if you are like, all right, well, like I'm going to work on my client stuff and then my goal is to work on my business.

You know, in the evenings. Well, at some point you're going to say, well, I need to get a new client and oh, I can add this client. But now that work bleeds into your evenings, right? And you leave yourself with no room to actually work on the things that are important to growing your business. And so what we've done is we've kind of structured our business a to Wa to give us the time to work on our, to actually work on our stuff. And honestly, it's beyond just our business. We want to, um, I look really sporty running seems to do good job for you. Thank you. Um, really the way I look at my calendar as if it's not on the calendar, it doesn't exist. I just did a podcast episode called the cashflow follows your calendar. And this is very much how we approach it.

And I look at how do I theme my days. So, uh, you know, on Mondays, you know, if we zoom in, you know, I do a lot of, oops, let me go back on this color. Here I go, you know, team, I have a bunch of calls and then I also, I do some sales stuff. Tuesday I'm, I got a pocket of time where I'm doing my podcast and then we have some coaching stuff. Wednesday is pretty much all sales for me right now. Tuesday is, we got a little bit of miscellaneous in the morning. Uh, and uh, what I call management time in the afternoon. And then Friday is literally all creation, no calls. Um, and then Saturday and Sunday I don't, I don't work right. So I've created these blocks that are allocated to specific things and I want to kind of break down, you know, if you understand these concepts, the order in which I break down what goes in these blocks and where I create blocks first. So if we look down here, the first thing that I'm creating a block for, I move this over.

Yeah, go like this. The first thing I block on my calendar is self care. So if you were to go look at my calendar, you'd see that like at between 5:00 AM and really 6:37 AM is like Greg time I'm reading, I'm meditating, I'm like stretching some, depending upon the day I'm working out, excuse me, before the family gets up and does a bunch of stuff, you know, I have to do a bunch of stuff on specific days. I'll have blocks like right before I recorded today, Tuesdays, Thursdays I go for longer, I do runs. And then Sunday is kind of my long run and then I'll come in and say, okay, well what, what's date night? Like Wednesday night is date night. Um, you know, I'm putting in all of the things that take care of me first. Okay. That's what goes on the calendar first. Then the second thing, his family, right?

So I, like I said, this was a date night. Then over here, you know, I'll come in, I'll say, all right, well let's pick a different color. Let's do this one. Like Saturday, this past Saturday, I put on the calendar for our family to go to the Greek festival. You know, it's like I'm blocking time for family activities. Right? And that's the second thing. Then the third thing is creation. I literally have blocks on my calendar for creation. This is where I will record content. I'll do stuff like this, a work on email copy. I'll work on things that will move the business forward and I'm gonna make that green because that's like money time, right? So like my podcast creation, that's a creation block. Um, I have on Thursday I have, you know, I have a morning creation block. Obviously I'm overlapping on some of these things right now just for the sake of me drawing Friday is like mostly creation, right?

Then we have um, after creation time I have manage and meeting time. So I literally put blocks on my calendar like management, oops, let me go back to my orange like management I have there. Um, I have management block here and I really have about like two hours a week where if my team wants to meet with me, they, they block time within the management or meeting blocks to get a call with me. Right? So like I'm dictating when they can come have a, a meeting now management wise, like we have team meetings on Monday and then we have a team huddle on Wednesday and and also on Friday in the morning. So we're also talking at those points. But if there was like an off topic thing that needs to be addressed, my team would literally just look at my calendar and look for availability in a management or meeting block so they can get on my calendar. Okay. Uh, the next important one is buffer time.

This is like literally intentional time where you don't assign anything, you can call it miscellaneous. Um, what have you. I usually have a block, uh, scheduled for myself for lunch, you know, each and every day. And usually right after lunch I'll add a little, uh, we'll use, we'll use this blue here, we'll do a little like a little buffer block and sometimes I'll have like specific meetings and there's like a 30 minute gap. Like I'll just let those be buffer blocks if there's like a task that I need to do that the team needs me for or some tasks that I didn't get to because something else kind of went over. I have room left to kind of fill in the gap. Right. I'm not sure filling my calendar to the minute where there's now no room to work on the stuff that is important. And then the last piece is planning time.

And every Sunday we'll use dark blue every Sunday. Sometimes I do it in the morning, but usually it's, you know, right before dinner. I'll plan the upcoming week. So on my calendar you'll see blocks of time that have nothing assigned to them yet, but you'll see it's called the creation, it's called management. It's called meetings. And on Sunday, during this block of time, all go in and look at my calendar and look at my to do list and I will then go and fill in the upcoming weeks blocks. I'll say, hey, in this creation block on Friday, I'm going to work on this one. On Friday I'm going to work on x, Y, Z, uh, on, you know, this creation block. On Tuesday I'm going to work on blah, blah, blah. The two episodes I'm going to record for the podcast this week are Yada, Yada, Yada. And so when I come into my week on Monday and I hit my first creation block, I'll look in the creation block and I'll see the thing that I'm supposed to be working on.

And then I go work on it, right? And the combination of these six areas allow me to prioritize what I need to work on, right? And I take care of myself first, my family, the stuff that's going to move our business forward. Then you know, the whirlwind tasks. Now for you, depending upon how heavy your client base is, you might create a block of time for client support, right? I have team that works on some of those things, so I don't need to be as involved. You saw here on my Tuesday, like I'm coaching our clients like this afternoon is the date I'm recording is on Tuesday. Like all afternoon I'm working with my clients. So like I have a dedicated time for that. It's not them dictating all the time. I'm waking up to fire drills and then go into immediate, um, you know, reaction mode.

This is intentional with how you use your time. And when we have clients come through and they start to see success, they literally always reference like taking back control of how they show up each and every week. And it's really just this tool of the optimize week. So if you feel like you are always in reactionary mode and you are filling all of your time with your client's work and leaving no time left for your own health, your own family or your own business, you will burn out and you will probably go out of business. Um, you will sell your business for next to nothing. You might even have some sort of health issue. So like the sooner you start taking care of these things, the better you're going to be. Um, again, this is something that our clients work on and in our 12 month program leverage, like they're constantly reiterating how they plan and optimize their week.

How your week works for you might not work for me. If you don't have kids, you're going to structure your week a little bit different, right? You might be more of a morning person or an evening person, like all of these things like it needs to be yours and your going to optimize your week, your production, uh, that's customized to you and that's the important piece your week should enable you. And allow you to become a producer, big time producer. That's what you need to need to be. You need to be producing sales. You need to be producing content. You'd be creating conversations that are going to turn into sales. All of these things need to provide training to your team like they need you and you need you at your best and the week, the optimize week is what's going to get you there. Just wanted to share that with you guys.

That keeps coming up in a lot of our conversations internally with clients. And if you want help diving into this, you know where to reach me. Um, and if you're watching on the podcast, um, and or on Youtube and another date and you really want to tap into the foundational elements of like the habits that you need to adopt as a person, as a CEO, the owner of your business in order to take it to the next level. Let's chat. We can talk about how we can really help you dial this into your business and we'll catch you next time.

If I gave you five to 10 new clients, would you or your agency break? If so, your agency model is broken. I struggled with this too, until I found a better way. By adding online programs, training, and coaching to our agency, we doubled profits without adding more hours. If you want to work directly with me and my team to transform your agency, visit www.myscalable business.com to learn more.