Buy Back Your Time

Dan Martell is a serial entrepreneur, an early-stage angel investor, and a successful business coach. He is the founder and CEO of SaaS Academy (a training company for software company founders), one of the largest coaching companies in the world. He is also managing partner of High Speed Ventures, Canada's leading angel capital investment firm. Dan Martell previously founded and then successfully exited three technology companies within a ten-year period — Clarity.fm (acquired by Startups.co), Flowtown (acquired by Demandforce), and Spheric Technologies (acquired by Function 1).

To excel as an entrepreneur, you pretty much always have to start with a get-stuff-done-yourself mindset. However, for your business to continue to grow and thrive, at some point you have to start buying back your time. That is, you have to hire people to do the routine and repetitive stuff so you can take back the reins of your life, enjoy your work again, and reclaim the freedoms you're after.

That's the underlying message of the Buyback Principle which states succinctly:

The good thing about the Buyback Principle is it starts a positive feedback loop. As you start hiring people to do the stuff you don't like, you have more time to do the things you love, which are usually the highest-value tasks anyway. The more you do what you love, your energy levels will rise, and your business will grow.

1. The Buyback Principle — Three mental shifts. To understand and apply the Buyback Principle, you have to rethink how you spend your time at work. Identify what's draining your time, understand how your mindset needs to change, and get familiar with the Buyback Loop, the DRIP matrix, and the five most common time assassins.

2. How-to buy back your time. Once you can see your time assassins, it's time to get to work applying the Buyback Principle. To position your business to scale without being limited by the hours you have available, get to know the replacement ladder, how to clone yourself, and the importance of building and updating playbooks for everything that needs to get done.

3. Useful tips and buyback hacks. To accelerate your use of the Buyback Principle, learn and use these hacks:

1. The best way to grow a business is to buy back your time. Hire others to do the repetitive low-value stuff, so you can spend more time doing what matters most.
2. For most entrepreneurs, someone else should be handling about 95 percent of your current work, so you can get back to what matters. Hire to buy back your time.
3. Don't hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time. Clone yourself, and build the empire of your dreams.

Awesome book this week. Serial entrepreneur and business coach Dan Martell has hit it out of the park with BUY BACK YOUR TIME. The central idea is whenever you do a startup, you pretty much always have to start with a get-stuff-done-yourself approach. For your business to grow and thrive, however, at some point you have to start buying back your time by hiring other people to do repetitive stuff. Hence, the Buyback Principle which states: "Don't hire to grow your business. Hire to buy back your time".

This just makes so much sense. Doing this creates a self-perpetuating cycle. As you start hiring more people to do the now repetitive stuff you probably don't like, you have more time to dedicate to the parts of the business you love and feel passionate about. Typically, these are the highest value tasks anyway, so your energy levels will rise, you'll add more value to your business, and you'll be able to drive growth to the next stage again and again. Buying back your time is a great way to view the world as an entrepreneur.

As Dan Martell notes: "You have real gifts that create real value. Clear out your calendar so you can practice those gifts." Buy back your time is the perfect growth strategy. Audit-Transfer-Fill (the Buyback Loop) your way to more success and growth. Build the empire of your dreams by outsourcing the time-consuming low-value tasks that soak up your time. This book is full of ideas about how to make that happen. Highly recommended.