Episode 257: Where Business Owners Should (and Shouldn’t) Prioritize Their Time With Amber De La Garza
There are so many things that need your attention on a daily basis as a business owner. How do you know what you're supposed to be prioritizing? How do you know which tasks are actually going to move the needle? Productivity specialist Amber De La Garza shares the four buckets that every entrepreneur needs to pay attention to.
Amber De La Garza is the Productivity Specialist! With more than a decade of experience helping small business owners maximize profits, reduce stress, and make time for what matters most by improving their time management and elevating their productivity! Amber is a sought-after coach, trainer, speaker, writer, host of the Small Business Straight Talk Podcast and creator of Leverage Lab®.
In today’s episode, I want you to listen to how you can increase your business productivity and avoid that burnout hustle culture.
Making time and productivity a priority
Amber started out in the real estate industry. She realized she hated selling but loved the operations side. She gravitated to the organization, business systems, and processes.
She gained a mentor and found herself trained as a coach, teaching sales executives business systems and leveraging through team building. She loved it. Then, the market crashed in 2008. Amber pivoted to a role of brokerage manager, but as she got ready to return from maternity leave, she realized this wasn’t what she wanted.
Amber decided she would spend the first two years at home with her son and went in to resign. She was given the option to become a consultant.
“I took those two years to be really present with my son as intended, but really building myself, my expertise and my confidence on the back end,” says Amber.
While coaching highly successful people, Amber noticed they would come back to sessions and not have done the homework or take action – the running theme was “I don’t have time to work on my business."
“I actually shifted to productivity because I wanted to focus on the actual behavior and the skill set of managing themselves and managing time and managing others.”
Defining productivity
Amber’s definition of productivity is when we're investing our best time into our best activities. And it's purposely a framework because what my best activities are, are going to be different because my goals are different than yours.
The best time is that focused, uninterrupted deep dive into the work.
“I just want to follow that up to say that I also believe we are not meant to be productive all day, every day,” says Amber. “If you think you're going to truly be productive all day, every day, then you're diluting your high value activities.”
All tasks are not created equal. All activities are not created equal. Productivity is not the same as organization or being organized.
“Have you ever met somebody that has a color-coded calendar, perfectly clean desk and not reaching their goals? Yes,” says Amber. “And have you met somebody that looks like they're practically buried behind piles of paper, but they can get into some deep work and do amazing things and slay their goals? Yes.”
Amber says it’s important to honor both sides. For her, she needs a clean desk to focus, and generally starts her day clearing her inbox, checking in with her team and clients before starting that deep work.
“I can't do that deep work with clutter in my head like, oh, my team needs something,” says Amber. “So I build a schedule around how I know how I show up best.”
When you're prioritizing your best time as a business owner, that's you showing up your best. It's your job to find out what that is and then purposely create that environment, purposely create that time in your schedule for you to show up your best, and then to be focused on those high value activities.
Four buckets to focus on as a business owner
Amber says there are four buckets that business owners should be focusing time on a regular basis and will actually move the needle. She calls them buckets because the idea is to fill the first one and have it cascade and overflow into the next. And you don’t own the bucket, if you have a team they can help fill it as well.
The first bucket is marketing and visibility, letting the world know what it is you do and how you can help them. The strategies are going to be different for every business, every personality.
When you show up in marketing and visibility, then you get to have sales conversations with the second bucket. Face to face, you’re asking for the business. What are you doing to say “Will you work with me? How can I help you?” This looks different for everybody. Sometimes it's consultations or discovery calls or sometimes it is coffee or lunch, but you're asking for the business.
It's the lifeblood of the business, but sometimes you see the relationship building and sales activities not getting evenly distributed with time, energy and attention.
Bucket three is servicing the client or providing the thing that you're selling. With service-based business owners, serving the client is a really comfortable place, because it aligns with your expertise and how you got into business.
“My warning with this bucket is this bucket will be the one that sabotages all else because you can have your head down servicing the client and then not showing up consistently in marketing visibility or sales,” says Amber.
The fourth bucket is leadership. Who is leading your team, because you’re not meant to be in those other three buckets by yourself. Where else can you invest time and actually get a multiple of your time than investing in other people? One of your highest value activities is showing up to lead your team, to delegate, to have the meetings, to clearly communicate, to hire, to fire, to discipline.
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