Buy Back Your Time: How CEOs Escape the Operational Trap with Peter Oxley

We've just wrapped up recording the latest Metronomics Tip Top podcast, and my guest today was Peter Oxley. The topic was Buy Back youk Time by Dan Martell. Peter, what did we talk about today? Well, we talked about the pain line that most entrepreneurs, owners and leaders hit when they run out of time in their business. Talked about frameworks to actually get that time back by actually liberating time from administrative tasks that frankly, if they're doing, they're robbing their business, robbing the business of further potential and robbing it by overpaying themselves to do those tasks. And we talked about some simple tools to get started on this that shouldn't cause overload and should free up one to two hours a day almost immediately by putting in place. Yeah. And if you're a CEO who can't see the path to freeing up their time, this is probably the podcast episode for you. Welcome to Tip Top. Grow up your business with Metronomics. Join me, Shannon Burn Susko, and Metronomics Certified coach, Jed Roberts. We'll be talking to business thought leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and coaches who have all taken the journey to grow up their businesses to their Tip Top. We'll be sharing strategies, systems, stories on how you can grow your company up at the speed you want. If you're searching for your path to the Tip Top and feel your time is running out, then this podcast is for you. Welcome back to the Metronomics Tip Top podcast. My guest today is Peter Oxley, a certified Metronomics coach and founder of Oxygen Advisory in Vancouver. Like me, Peter specializes in helping CEOs build great businesses. And Peter has also built something a little bit special. He's built a workshop around one of the best business books of the last few years, Dan Martell's Buy Back youk Time. And today we're going to dig in and just drill into the book and the topics and some of the tools and, and just show you how they can help CEOs get time back in their day, which is essentially what the book is all about. Now, Peter, this is your second time on the podcast, so welcome back. Thanks, Jed. Yeah, I think I left a little dangler at the end of the last podcast about sort of, hey, we need some tricks to actually get time back in our calendar, especially when we start working with clients. And I found this is an incredibly strong framework for getting. Getting people to free up some time. Yeah, I think today's podcast will be very useful to a lot of people, but buying the book isn't enough. Reading the book isn't enough. You've also got to implement the book. And that's what today is all about. Yes. So for people who haven't necessarily met you before, give us the 30 second intro to Peter Oxley. Yeah, I like to say I'm a reformed entrepreneur. Free times entrepreneur. I think make most of our lessons are learned from the downsides, the hard times that we've grown through. And now with Oxygen advisory and coaching, as you said, GH CEOs, leadership teams. I think it's my job to help leadership teams and CEOs navigate past a lot of the pitfalls, all the glass I've eaten over the course of my CEO career and help them have a great business and also a very fulfilling personal life. They can have both and that's the reason why we all start businesses, is to have both. It doesn't have to wait until after the exit. Yeah, I love that expression, eating glass. And I've used it a few times myself. I hope that's okay. All good. All good. So Peter, you were, you were implementing metronomics inside some of your businesses for a very, very long time. What was the trigger for you to, to think, okay, now is the time for me to move into coaching CEOs rather than being a CEO. Yeah, I think, you know, tying it back into Dan Martel's buy back your time book. His opening chapter is about how stuck CEOs and owners feel. There's just not another hour left in the day. You know what, you're just grinding it out. You think if 40 hours was good, 80 is even better. I'm just going to power through this. We just have to hit that next level of growth and then I'll be able to afford the people to actually back, backfill and stop working these ridiculous hours. So I think for me it was a recognition that I needed to play more as a team player. As a CEO, I needed to build an a player team around me and have a system like I had built, a broken system that was totally reliant on me to scale and we just couldn't get where we needed to. So that entered in the Metronomics framework and I was lucky enough to be in a roundtable coach by Shannon Susko, our founder. So the book was actually a catalyst for you moving into coaching? Well, I tried to self implement very poorly, both scaling up and then Metronomics. And then I realized I needed the help of a professional to get this done. Being an implementer, a facilitator, and also CEO is a Recipe for disaster. Yeah. That doesn't work, does it? That does not work. No matter how many hours there are in the week, it still doesn't work. Yes. And I did a terrible job at implementing it too. Yes. How did you come across the book? I mean, was that a suggestion from someone else? I mean, I know it's very well known, it's very popular, but at one point it wasn't. Yeah, it's interesting. I think it must have come up in social feeds, you know, and I think it sort of ran the circuit probably about a year or two, two years ago. I would sort of say it was at probably its apex with regards to a good framework. I just really liked it because we hear a lot. You know, I heard this as an owner, as a CEO, you need to work on the business, not in the business, you know, and I was like, that's a kind of a Captain Obvious statement, right? It's like, yes, you know, we need to do that. We need to work smarter, not harder. I'm like, yes, I do. But I needed a practical tool to break the cycle, right? And I, you know, we see this, right? We, we see owners who have built systems that are broken, right. It's not, no one has more time. There's only 168 hours in the week, right. So no one can create time. It's just we're misallocating how we're using our time. And I needed a simple framework to work with clients to help give them some relief so that they could, you know, reduce the cognitive load and start to work better on their business. So this, this, this fit a slot with regards to being a very simple, practical framework. Yeah. Beyond that. And we'll talk about the workshop in a moment. But what made you realize that a workshop would be useful to, to the people that you work with, the CEOs that you work with? I could see as we were trying to coach in the Metronomics process, right. Which is tried and true. I ran it for 12, 12 plus years at my businesses. There are certain owners that just don't have capacity. It's one more thing to put onto the, onto the pile. And I wanted to take at least an hour or two off their plate immediately a day so that they could actually get some breathing room to start to work. Right. So I think that was my recognition is I just, I needed something to break. And to be frank, when I read it and implemented, I was like, I can use this in my own coaching practice to scale up way faster as well. So. And I think it just is a very good practical framework from, you know, one of the tools, the time energy audit that you put in place. You can actually see the relief on people like the first day that they start implementing it. They can see the madness of where they're spending their time. Yeah. I'm working with a CEO at the moment and he's got a very, very fast growing business. And about three or four months ago, he came to me with exactly that problem. I just don't have time to get everything done. And I talked about the book buy back your time and his response was, I don't have time to read a book and I certainly don't have time to implement a whole load of tools. Exactly four months later, I got a call from him last night saying, I think it's time I read that book. Don't read it. Why don't we work through it together? Why don't we work through it? Exactly, yeah. Like you said, it's one thing to read a book. There's one thing. There's a longer tail on implementing it and getting the behavior changed. Right. And having someone accountable to saying, we're going to stop doing this, Jed. Right. We're stopping doing that. That's a low value energy suck behavior. Stop doing it. Yeah, yeah. Is it good enough? It doesn't matter if it's not as good as if you did it. Is it good enough? Is it 80%? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I love that expression. Dan Martell says 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome. Right. That's great. And, and, and I think that is again, another paradigm that the business owner, they are the best probably at a lot of things. That's why they're an entrepreneur. But you gotta delegate and you have to delegate properly. Right. You can't just abdicate, throw things over to people, which they have done. I did that in my business. And then when it comes, it comes back and it's crappy quality and you're like, I told you no one can do it like me. Right. And you know, if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself. It's like, no, the system was broken. Of how you delegated, not the fact that it needed to come off your plate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I also love that quote and I was sure it was going to come up in the, in the podcast today. Yeah, yeah. So for those who haven't read the book and there must be a few people out there, for those who haven't read it, what's the central Premise of the book. Okay, so there's. It's a great book. I would high. I'm not going to do the whole book justice, but we're going to skim just like bounce off the top of it. But the whole premise is times you're stuck. Right. As an entrepreneur, you can't create more time. You actually need to hire to free up your time. We all get in the trap as owners, operators, entrepreneurs. We need to hire to grow. Right. So first thing we're going to reach for is we need more marketing, we need more sales. I got to get bigger. Well, because the system's broken. When you grow, you actually just exacerbate the problem. You become even more of a bottleneck. So the whole thing is hiring to free up time so that you can spend it on your 5% of the behaviors that create, like a disproportionate economic value to your business. You know, you're. I think in strategic coach, they call it unique abilities. In lencioni, we call it the, you know, the working genius. Right. Like spending it on that. I think Dan also talks that there's quite a prescriptive framework in the order that you should actually be getting stuff off your plate. Right. The drip matrix, which we'll talk about. You know, I guess it sounds like a leaky faucet. Leaky. You're leaking time. And then just a. There's some really good tools. We'll hit on a couple of the tools today that actually will give immediate relief to anyone that's listening that find themselves in this position. The time energy audit is a really good one. And as well as, I think time blocking. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And one of the quotes from Dan's book very, very on is you don't hire for growth. As you said, you hire to free up your time. And that. That is just so contrary to the way a lot of people think about, you know, hiring. Oh, I've got to hire a new salesperson. Got to grow, got to grow, got to grow. Well, actually, you know, you're growing yourself into a grave because at some point, you know, at some point it's going to hit you because we become slave to our own, the businesses we've created. Right. So we hire other people that are specialists and we just take all the leakage on as the owners. Right, right. So we become basically slaves to the admin of the business. Right. And if whatever you're paying, let's assume you're paying yourself $200,000 a year as the CEO or whatever, it is you would never hire someone at that wage rate to do the admin. That's probably most of your day. So I would actually say you're robbing the business by paying yourself to do those tasks as well as the stuff you're not getting to. Right. So we have to break this cycle. Yeah, yeah. So to break the cycle, where should a CEO start? Okay, so I really like the drip matrix. Let's just talk about that really quickly. D stands for the delegation quadrant. These are things that are low value to the business, they don't drive any value, and they actually suck the life out of you. Right. They drain you of energy. There's the replacement quadrant, which is high economic value to the business, but it still also drains energy from the owner or the CEO. There's the investment quadrant, which is low economic value, usually currently to the business. It maybe has future value, but it really fills the cup of the CEO or owner. And the last one is the production quadrant. Right. And that's the one we want to focus on, which is high energy. Gives you energy and it delivers value. So in this, just to skip past it all, what we want to do is try and get the delegate low value, sucks your energy, get that time down and focused into the production quadrant. Right. The things that only you can do as a CEO. Right. To drive the behaviors. That's the framework for this, this, this sort of stuff. A lot of times we jump to the replacement quadrant, like hiring a salesperson, that's really hard. High stakes poker, really high stakes, expensive, drives a lot of value. And then basically it, it can usually fail if not done really properly or be very expensive to the business. So it's focusing on those easier things to delegate that, that will free up time. Yeah. Okay. When I love the drip matrix. Now, one of the, one of the questions I often get is around the investment quadrant, you know, is that, you know, what about if I love doing it and it's high value, but high value emotionally or personally or, you know, so I know. Well, no, I don't, I don't think so. You know, the contrast between things you put in there and in the production quadrant, you know, the production is it makes you money and you love doing it. Now the investment is you love doing it, but it probably doesn't make you any money as you said right now, but it might in the future. So that's your new product development, that's your research. That's the things that are going to show value into the future. And some people have said, well, you know, things like working on the culture that goes in there too, because it's probably something that a CEO likes doing, but it's not really generating any revenue and they sign up. Yeah, yes, yes. But you could also argue that that's actually high value and should be in a production quadrant. Where do you sit there? I love it. So I think it's an ordering, right. You want to take things from the delegate and you want to get to the production quadrant. Right. The things that only you can do. Right. And the thought is that that's going to generate value for the business so you'll have more time and you'll be able to delegate more. Right. I think the investment quadrant comes and there's stuff that you need to do. We need to exercise, we need to spend time with our family and friends and hopefully we grow our businesses so that we can spend a lot of time in the investment quadrant. And we actually have a players in the production quadrant as well. I take your point on the core values and the culture and stuff. I would argue that that is part of a broken people system and human system in metronomics. And it is core, absolutely core that's working on the business. Right. To actually get that flying. So I would say functional scorecards and getting the team clear on their strategy and their role is definitely production quadrant. Yeah. Okay, we agree, we agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how do you get to the point where you know which quadrant the things you do fix? Okay. So we talked about that tool, the Time Energy audit. Right. Which is interesting because, you know, you've probably done a lot of assessments as I have done with clients. Right. Like Lencioni's working genius tells you about things you're good at, things you're frustrated with. I like Martel's extra layer on it, which is Time energy audit. Right. And he adds, there's three things that you look at when you're going through this one is in 15 minute increments. Look at your calendar. Right. And we're going to do this over the course of a couple of weeks because there's no trends in this. What's the task you're working on? Short description, what's the value to the business? Right. So that's the $1 to $4. And then all we're going to do is binary shade the cell as well. Red drains energy, green gives you energy. Right. So we get a really good snapshot across a couple of weeks. It does not take long. Most people have multiple screens. They're just working on this on the side. And they populate it. Super amazing learnings from the first time we start going through that. So what we're looking for in there is low value behaviors that are taking up a lot of time and it typically is interrupt a lot of stuff that's interrupt and multitasking and drains you. Right. So we will find a whole bunch of things in there that are low value and red and themes with the tasks. Right. So that's, I think, the first part where we can start to identify those delegation quadrant things that need to be moved off the leader's plate. Yeah, yeah. So we, we use a time audit that tells us which quadrant things fall into. Yeah. And then it's a question of, you know, removing things from the delegation and potentially the replacement and freeing up that time to put back in the production and the investment quadrants. Yeah. And, and this is where you get the, the two major limiting beliefs that come in. Oh, I've tried this before. It doesn't work. No one does it. Right, right. Like, you know, and I've, I've said this too. I've tried to delegate it. Just. They just come back to me and they're not done properly. So that's one. The other is it takes too long to train someone up to do it. It's just quicker for me to do it myself. Well, that is true. For the first time you're doing it. It's patently false if you're doing it day after day after day. And the third is I can't afford it. I can't afford it. Right. And it's like, that is ridiculous. Going back to the. You're robbing the business. Right. If you have an hour of time that you could be multiplying what your business is worth and the revenue that you're getting versus actually doing pure admin tasks, you are robbing your business. Yep. And just by chance, we have a tool for that too, which I'm sure we'll come to. I want to go right back to the beginning, though, and sort of look at, look at the sort of what the, what catalyzes now. What's the trigger that makes you think, well, I need to think about doing this. Even after you've implemented it, there's still work that you need to do around the buyback about the buyback loop. So the buyback loop is, is a CEO or someone identifies pain. Now they go through the audit, they assess with the, with the grids where things fall and then they take action. But the final step in that is filling it back up. Yes. Yeah. So it's identifying, okay, what am I going to fill back up with into the time that I have just liberated? And if you don't do that systematically, then, well, you're probably just going to fill it up with other rubbish. You're going to fill it up with other low value stuff. So this is a conscious decision now. I have cleared up this time. What do I do instead that is high value, either from a production or an investment point of view. Yeah. And there's, there is a little part of the workshop, right. That we work with, with clients on this. It's sort of the 95.5rule. It's not even a Pareto principle 8020, it's a 95.5rule. It's like, what are the 5% of things that only Jed can do that drive massive value? Write a list of those down. Write a list of those things down right now for the business. Right. And so that usually gives a roadmap. And they know, Right. And they also, if they're working with us on metronomics, they know what their priorities are. They know what they should do. Yes, they should do. They have a North Star usually about. And my experience with my clients in particular, Jed, is that the strategy is way ahead of the execution. Yep. Yeah, yeah, I'd agree. I agree. So they actually fall down when it comes to the day to day. I need to start executing against all the things I said. They've got a list as long as your arm of priorities and things that they need to work on. Their excuse and their fail safe is I just don't have time. Right. So what we're trying to do is get those 95. 5, the 5% things that they must work on. It's going to sit there on a worksheet and now we're going to say how we're going to create some time. Right. By getting the delegate stuff off your plate. And we'll talk about two real time hogs that we can do for that and you're going to start to work on those. But you have to do that. We'll talk maybe about the second Tool Time blocking. Right. So I think I've shared in the past and I think even Dan Martell talks about in his book, there's a high incidence of ADHD in the entrepreneurial community, way over indexed against the general population. So Attention deficit disorder, it wreaks havoc when you have people interrupting you all day. Right. Because you want to go for the shiny object, you want to work on stuff. It's stimulating, you're probably good at it as an entrepreneur. So I think time blocking, once we free up that time and having time blocks, I Recommend to my CEO clients 2 time blocks of 1 hour in duration in your calendar. One in the morning, one in the afternoon. Just block it, right? And now your priority list is going to actually say what goes in there. So you're very consciously filling in this time that's actually been, been taken away. And no one touches you during that time block. It's do not disturb is on, you know, so. So again, I think turning off slack, turning off teams, turning off app notifications, all the bings and bongs, right? So you can actually focus on stuff. It's unbelievable. The disruptions that most people when they look at their time, energy audit, day to day. The. Just got it. You just got a minute. Jed, I just got a quick question for you. And I can tell you, when I was running at least my first company, I got a little endorphin rush off solving people's problems, right? I'm like, yeah, I can solve that. I got you. I thought it was my job to unstuck everyone right now. Now you're creating a business that's reliant on you, right? So out the way. I can fix this out the way. Let me roll up my sleeves. Yeah, let me roll up my sleeves. Yeah, you got it. Right. And it's, it's not a good way. So I think the time blocks and filling those in very purposely with things that actually create the economic value for the business. Usually it's revenue generation or sort of lead generation type stuff, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Earlier on you used the phrase you're robbing the business. And when a CEO does stuff that they shouldn't be doing, really, that's not really part of their role and someone else could do it. Now you use that expression. That's a powerful expression. You're robbing the business. Talk through the rationale there. So I think Dan talks in the book about buyback rate, right? Your buyback rate, it's part of the buyback of time, right? So you can calculate what your an hour of your time is worth, right? So let's just use a rough example. So you pay yourself $200,000 a year. You work roughly 2,000 working hours. Basically your hourly rate is 100 bucks an hour. Using that example. Simple math. Simple guy. I need fast math, right? So he's saying anything that's like one quarter of your hourly rate you should not be doing. So anything you can pay someone 50 grand a year or less, you should delegate it. And that gap, if you're doing $50,000 a year work, getting paid $200,000 a year, you are robbing the business, you're robbing it of the oxygen and time that it needs to grow. Right. And we do this as owners and operators because we think there's an unlimited number of hours in the day. I can just work 18 hour days and I can work seven days a week, but I don't recommend working that long an hours. But if you were, you should be working in your production quadrant that long, not on admin tasks. Right. So it's a strong statement. But you and I would also say you're robbing people around you who actually can do that and are probably quite fulfilled by doing those admin tasks as well. So you're robbing your team of stuff that maybe is their production quadrant for you. Yeah. Leverage their genius because it's probably not yours. Yes. So I think it's two dimensional robbing that all gets us to this broken system that's designed around us doing everything right. Yeah, yeah. Someone once said to me, if you haven't got an assistant, you are an assistant. Yes. Yeah. You know, and I think that maybe gets to. There's an example, pretty powerful example in the book. I really like it. It said like, so imagine you had your office off Times Square, right? Times Square. I think we all know it's just a zoo of cacophony of people coming and going and your office door was open right onto the time Times Square. And anyone could wander in off Times Square and say, hey, Jed, got a minute? Jed, I just need you to read this. Hey, Jed, I just need to book a meeting with you. We would never do that. But his basically analogy is that when we don't have someone else managing our email or our calendar, we are exactly doing that. We're letting anyone in, into our. And basically our time is our scarcest resource. We must build a moat around it. Right. And so this is, I think one of the biggest tools is not managing your own email and not managing your own calendar. And that's a hard thing for a hardcore entrepreneur owner to give up. Right. Or a CEO. Tough like, that's control. Yeah. That's one of the most frequent objections. You know, I can't, I can't delegate my email. I can't expose my email to someone else. It's like, why not? Yeah, yeah. There's usually no good reason there other than control, which then gets back to, we're not Delegating it properly. Right. So I think, you know, Dan outs lines, a really good system. I'll just really oversimplify it. Right. So my ea, Ann. Awesome. Love Ann. All my clients love Ann. Ann's a person. Right. She's not actually. There's lots of AI tools that could, that can do parts of what Ann does, but I've chosen. I think it's important to learn what you're doing before you try to automate it. And my clients like talking to a human. They like to interact with Ann as well. So Ann takes a look at my email. I only look at it three times a day. Right. Once in the morning, once at lunchtime, once at end of day. I have an email box that's Peter only. It's my priority. Only I can look at it. So I don't get very many emails that are peter only. Maybe 10 a day. Right. Out of the 150 that I get on average. Right. There's ones that Ann needs direction on so she'll respond. She just needs me to look at it. Maybe a handful. And those go way down over time as you train up your ea. And then the rest of them are Ann responded and took care of and you know, those are the most important three right now. What does that do? First of all, she's dealing with like the hundreds of emails that I don't have to focus on. And B, it's allowing me to focus on my unique abilities, on my 5% activities without being disrupted all day with the Bing bong. Bing bong. Right. So. And I get down rabbit holes like most people do very quickly. Right. If I'm looking at my email or Slack or teams all the time. So that's a huge one. Right. I think. And there's no excuse, no excuse for virtual assistants are out there. You can train them. Well, you know, there's playbooks for how to train, train and teach up assistants to do it. And it's all about the quality of the delegation and the monitoring. It's not a light switch that you just flick on. Right. You have to actually train them. Yeah. What happens when someone says, well, I'm terrible at delegation now. I can't, I can't seem to train my people to the level that they need to be operating at, you know, and it doesn't, even if they acknowledge it doesn't need to be as good as them. Now they, and I've seen this a few times where CEOs are actually, they appear to be incapable of passing on their knowledge and their expertise It's a really tough situation. Yeah, that's a tough one, Jed. As you know with working with clients overall, right. An inability to delegate is going to be a very limiting factor on scaling. Right. Like very hard to build an A player team around you and sort of scale. Now there are some tips and tricks with regards to building these playbooks. Right. And AI has made this so much easier. Right. You can actually turn on your favorite AI and have it interview you about a task that you're doing and it will write an operating system for your assistant or whoever you're delegating for. You can also use tools to record a video on it as well. Super simply like even the keystrokes that you're doing. So I think to me a lot of times it's an excuse. The real underlying issue is I don't want to cede control and I don't trust. Yeah, I'd certainly agree with both of those. And I think the big one is I don't trust. Yeah, that's the issue. Right. So, you know, how do we create trust? We have to hire a players into the roles. We have to have really clear functional scorecards and we can't. You know, a lot of, you know, I've just kicked off a new client this past week and they've tried to delegate in the past and got really burned, but I think they went to some of the really meaty ones that were high economic value and really hard to delegate and they were just so glad as owners to get it off their plate and then it blew back on them and now they're once bitten, twice shy with regards to getting it off their plate. Yeah. So they abdicated, not delegated. Yes. Or delegated poorly. Yeah, yeah. But yes sounds like abdication to me. Very close to abdication. Yes. So I sort of touched that. The 80%. There's another very, very simple tool in the book that I love And I think CEOs don't use often enough. And that's the 1080, 10 principle. I mean, that to me is just gold. Because if you don't like giving up control, this is a way of still maintaining some control. And over time it might become 100%. But the 1080, 10 principle basically says that you own the 10% at the beginning, which is the definition of the activity or the task or the process, and then you hand it off to someone else to do the 80% and then you come back right at the end for the final 10% just to validate and address and confirm. So rather than something taking 100% of your time, it's now taking 20%. Guess what? You've just liberated 80% of that task value and you've probably given it to someone who's going, oh, I wish you gave that to me six months ago. I wish I'd been doing that for the last six months rather than sitting around just twiddling my thumbs, getting bored. I love it, love that you talk about the 10, 80, 10, because I think it's a good framework. Right. And that even on some more complex tasks, maybe it's 20, 60, 20 to start. Right. But this is again, the point of don't abdicate, right. You can't, you know, you need to trust, but validate. Right. On these things. Right. But, you know, I think I would say even in working with anne, my, my va. The things that I had to be 10, 80, 10 on now it's probably like 199 and she's done right. Like so. So I think it's a good framework to sort of say, yeah, you don't, you don't just, you know, throw these things over and hope. And hope. Like hope is not a strategy. Yeah. Is it worth just drilling down a little bit more into the, into the playbooks and how do we, how do we aid delegation? By giving people enough information so they can appropriately take on the role? Now, you talked about, you know, recording and using AI. I mean, all those approaches are valid, but do you have a more systematic approach as to how to do that? And maybe this is something in your workshop that I'm sure we'll talk about it. Usually, Jed depends on the task. Right. I would just sort of say some of them are simple. Right. You know, and I think Dan Martel talks in the book, right. About record the keystrokes. Right. Like, let's say you've got a complex accounting system and you want the bookkeeper to be able to do this. It's like, well, record a video and record the keystrokes, right? Record the narrative of what you're doing. And then he recommends doing it a few times, right. Not just a one and done. Because stuff always happens, right? There's exceptions to the rule. And then you just keep. Create a library of it. I think the beauty of these videos is you can feed them into AI and they can generate the playbook for you. So when I started doing this two years ago, it was much more laborious to generate these playbooks than it is now. Like, I, I have CEOs sitting down and generating plate, like fairly detailed Playbooks, and they can do it in half an hour, 45 minutes. Now they want to just throw it over again and say, just follow the playbook. You absolutely need to do the task with the person and observe them doing it. Right. And again, they can record what they're doing. It can be asynchronous and you can give feedback on it. Again, we need to resist the urge of this thing being a light switch that we just flick on and it's gone off our plates. Right. And I think that, to me is some of the risk of just lighting up an AI tool without knowing what you're doing properly. Right. There are tools that can actually take a lot of stuff off, but we need to know it's being done properly. Yeah. And I'm getting this language wrong, but Dan talks about an approach which is something like do it and record it, show it, teach it, then delegate it. You do it yourself. So you know you're doing it. Right. And you record it whilst you're doing it. And then you show someone you doing it and then you teach it. So you mentor it whilst they do it. And each. Each time you step through this process, you're iterating the process, the procedure. Now you're tweaking it, you're adding things. You know, there's maybe. Okay, well, this time it's different because what's that decision point? How do we add that into the document? How do we add that into the playbook? And I think at the end of the cycle, if you follow that through. Right, which is good. I mean, that's just very logical process of delegation. Right. Like for whatever role we're trying to actually get off our plates. Right. He also recommends that the person that inherits it writes the playbook at the end of it. Right. They rewrite the playbook and sort of go back on it. Right. Because then their goal is they can teach the next person when they actually buy back their time and get it up. So it's interesting that I'm at that stage with Anne, my va, where I'm getting her to write the playbooks now, on how she does it, so that there's some things in her professional development she wants to focus on and we can actually backfill and get someone else tasks delegated to her. And isn't that great, right, that we can do that and have a framework. Yeah, yeah. Peter, I think we've probably covered off most of the tools in the book or most of the main tools in the book. Is it worth spending a few moments Just talking us through how your workshop runs and I mean, I know this is something you've created and iterated over time and there's probably a lot of value there. Yeah, probably one. One more tool. I'll just talk about calendar management. We did not talk about that. Right. And I'm not talking about having calendly, you know, or an online tool where someone can click and sort of, you know, reserve. It's like having an eava. You could migrate it into an AI tool potentially like an agentic web might be able to do this. But no one gets through that moat and can book something unless it's actually high priority. And it fits, fits into the working blocks that you have. Right. So again, I think again, it's syncing up with that. Your assistant having a weekly calendar sync. What are the hype? You know, they're going to manage the tasks for you and slot them into these working blocks, what your priorities are and really what's coming this week and next. Right. Because what I see when we do the workshop with CEOs is they turn from being reactive to proactive. Right. And when it's at its worst, when we're in this chaos, tornado, right. It's minute to minute, right. What's going to hit. Right. With regards to stuff, then they start to have this space where they're only looking at things three times a day. And again, if there's a fire burning, your EA knows how to get ahold of you. Right. They have the bat phone so we can sort of alleviate or ameliorate that concern. Right. So they have time to start thinking on stuff. The calendar, the proactive calendar planning is I think, another game changer. It's the next step up. Right. Which ensures that they're creating time to work on the important things, work on the business versus just in. So I just wanted to actually talk about that is you should not touch your email first and you should never book your own meetings. Again. Control, control issues. Right. And again, just really treating your EA like your part, your partner in business. Right. To protect your time. Their role, their critical role is protect my time for those 5% behaviors. Yeah. Which is what an EA always has been. You know, they were always the gatekeeper, you know. Yes. Yeah, for sure. We didn't always like it when we weren't being gatekeepered, but we were trying to get through, you know, we were trying to get to the CEO, either sales or within an organization because they made it hard. That was their job. Yes. And you know this, right? The A Players, instead of them coming and actually saying, got a minute, got a minute, they're going to start to figure things out. Right. It's the. What do you recommend? Another Metronomics trick, right? Of, of sort of. When they do actually get through, they better be coming with a set of recommendations or a preferred recommendation. And it better be High Stakes Poker, right. Not something that was. That's within their purview that they can normally make a decision on. So I think it's just good training to get off that founder treadmill. Right. Everything's, everything's dependent upon the entrepreneur and the founder. All passed lead to their office for key decisions. Yeah. What you recommend is gold, isn't it? Anyhow, that just flips it back onto the other person. This is your job. You sort it out and if you still can't, then come back. And I like the approach of one problem, three potential solutions, one recommendation. Here's the problem. These are three options out of these three options. I reckon we should do why exactly. Off you go. Off you go. Yeah. And don't shoot their recommendations. Like, like listen to them. But as the CEO say, ah, I've got it. It's this. If you do have a better way, it's like, what questions could you ask to reframe that, right. So that they will consider things that maybe they've missed. Okay. So just wanted to touch on, on the calendaring and action items and follow throughs. Right. The critical role. So let's go back to the workshop and I thought it might be interesting just to actually talk about the learnings. Right. Having taken CEOs through this, the Time Energy audit in particular, like what are the AHAs, right. First of all, remember we're doing 15 minute increments where they're actually logging their behavior. They all say by about the third hour of logging time, they're changing their behavior. Because we know this, right? What we measure we can manage. Right. And they're just like, I never realized I was spending so much time on insert blank. They didn't realize how addicted they were to Slack or email or monitoring it. They actually didn't realize how constantly they were interrupted throughout their day. Right. So they could not actually finish a thought or finish something that they're working on. So those that, that I think was the first one, one is a behavior change. We gotta change the addiction to always being in the know. You've got good people on your team. Trust them, give them a good scorecard, give them a mandate, delegate properly and let them do, let them do Their role. So I think that was the big one. Another one was, you know, the eat the frog that they actually realized that they're really putting off the stuff that they don't want to do because it's hard and they're hiding in administrative tasks and it's okay. I even had one CEO say, I sometimes like little menial distractions. It's like, I can get some stuff done. I get a sense of accomplishment. I'm fair. Fair. I think that would give you energy, right? You're actually saying it's low value, but it's giving me a little bit of energy. Fair, fair. But you can't put it off forever. You've got to eat that frog. At some point, you got to eat the frog. It's okay to do some menial things so you get a sense of accomplishment. Time of day is another one. Things that people find are okay for energy in the morning and they can get done. If they have to do those same tasks later on in the day, they find them to be a real time suck. So this goes to the eat the frog right? Sort of thing. Okay. This is one that's. That is near and dear to us at Metronomics. They realize how much they're covering for B and C players when they actually look at why am I doing this? Right? So this is part of the workshop and I'm saying, jed, why are you doing this? Like, why are you doing. Why are you doing that task? And it's. It usually comes up that the person that is supposed to be doing it is not competent at the role. So they're either a B that needs to be upskilled or they're a C player and they fall into the. It's just easier and faster for me to do it. I can't deal. I don't. I can't. Can't deal with it. So we start to get some data points on people and you're starting to rob the business again because you're paying C players to do no work or do bad work. That has to be redone. Yes, exactly. Right? So now that easier and faster for me to just do it. Right. Rather than training. The other is they realize they're wearing too many hats. Again, the context switching. Right? And we know this when we go through and we kick off with a client. Many of the owners, CEOs are wearing 3, 4, 5 hats, right? And they realize they can't be successful because they're actually context switching and doing too much. Right. They actually can't focus on stuff and the last is the drama inside the business. I can see a real time suck is the drama. People issues when they just want it. You know, Dan calls it gsd. Get stuff done. Right. They're just focused on getting stuff done because they're working so many hours. And the drama that comes up, and it's usually from unclear accountabilities as well as decencies in the organization. Right. So that sucks the life out of them. These operational fires that are burning, and they got to jump in and fix it. And it's usually a symptom of a much bigger issue inside the organization. And last but not least, once we get the data in, we can actually point AI at people's calendars and say, what should I get off my plate? Like, it's pretty good, right? At sort of analyzing your calendar. If you're keeping a good log at stuff, what should I be delegating? And you can get. You can actually get some pretty critical opinions from. From an AI tool as well. Yeah. Yeah. I did a time audit over the entire month of January because often our working patterns change. So I did it for the entire month. And I got. I got some incredible insights from that process. And one of the things you said really resonated with me, you know, that people start changing their behaviors within the first three hours of logging their time. And that exactly happened to me. I was like, why am I spending all my time doing this? This just makes sense. What was it, if you don't mind me asking, what was it that I was doing? Some tricky expenses that my EA should have been doing, my assistant should have been doing. And just because I was. It was another currency, you know, it was. You know, and it was. It was just easier and faster for me to do it, you know, and when I look back at it, I was doing that because there was a particularly tricky thing that I needed to focus on, and that was the frog I just did not want to eat at that point. Yeah. But other. Other insights came out as well. I mean, I didn't realize how much time I spent walking the dog. No, no, that's. Now that's. Maybe. That maybe falls in investment quadrant. I don't know. It could. Yeah. And I. And another thing that really surprised me is I spend less working on the business than I thought. Interesting. Yeah. And we haven't defined like we're. That's another thing. I think that is a frustration that we have to level set as what is working in versus working on. And usually when we start this process, the working in the business is usually 80% of people's time. Right. And they're really consumed with the day to day operations of the business. Right. They're just in there things. If they, if they didn't go to work, things would stop. Right. And they honestly can't see another way. Now when you say to them where, you know, the, you know, their reaction is, well, yeah, that's motherhood, of course we should. But I can't, I can't, I can't. So you can, you can't see. They can't see a path to get started. Right. And so I think that's the trick in this, right. Is finding the quick wins. Because I think it is once they feel some small measure of release and just like, okay, yes, I can do this. It's like, okay. And having a light system, like not something that's a lot of work to actually get done. It allows them to focus on leading, coaching people, working on the vision, working on the strategy. Right. Working on sales and big deals, not on firefighting operations. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Peter, take us through the workshop because it's quite an extensive. It's not, it's not time consuming but it takes a while. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's. I think the framework is, there's usually, you know, a task to read the book, right. To start. Because a. Players like to read, they like to learn. Yeah, there we go. So we read, we read that and usually I'll break it up into two one hour working sessions where we go through the concepts in the book. Right. And there's some really good frameworks in there. We've talked about, you know, the, the 95. 5 sort of construct and usually this is done for the CEO or owner first and foremost. Sometimes they get really bought in on it. They want to bring their leadership team in. But first and foremost we're doing this for the business owner, you know, so running through the key concepts off it, then usually that. What comes after that is that list of 95. 5 which we talked about. What are the 5% things? Right. Then we're going to actually jump into the time energy audit. Right. And they need to run that. And I will, you know, as part of the workshop usually get together during the first week because they've got some huge aha moments. I'll start to get the emails coming through saying we need to talk. I've just found this trend and that trend. Right. So then I think it's actually getting them honed down to which of the delegation tasks. Right. And it always is. Email management, calendar management, time blocking. How can we do that? Right. And overcoming, I think those writing a really clear functional scorecard for the EA and then starting to write the playbooks and the roles. Right. The email management one's pretty self descriptive in the book about how to implement it, but actually just working with the ea, you know, hiring an A player ea, training them and getting them working on that. Right. Then I think we get into the more complicated stuff. Right. Which is, you know, working on what they're spending their time on, the time blocks. Right. And, and that's overlaid with the larger Metronomics process. Jed, which is what's your top priority for the day? What's your, where your weekly milestones are for your quarterly priorities, etc. Right. Coaching, building functional scorecards. Right. So I would say the workshop probably runs between three and four weeks with a once a week check in. Like it's not. And we're not. It's not a lot of time investment. It's probably about an hour a week. It's just behavior change has a longer tail on it. That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so this is something you run with your existing clients. I mean, do you offer, do you offer it as a separate workshop? Because I can, I can see that maybe not you delivering it, but you know, there's probably value in, in someone offering this as a workshop. It's interesting. I have, I have only done it and I don't do it for all my clients. I do it for the clients that I see are under significant cognitive load. And it's usually they've capped, you know, and the cap isn't always at a certain level. They're at, you know, 20 million, they're trying to get to 30 or they're at 10. And you can see there's just entrenched behaviors, usually control issues and trust issues that we need to break, break the cycle on. So I've only done it selectively. I haven't offered it as a, a broader workshop. I just have found it just a very good tool when used specifically for clients that are in this particular situation. Yeah. And maybe offering it outside your client base is not something that gives you energy, so you shouldn't do it. But I think there is a place for it. Right? Definitely a place for it. Yeah. Yep. So before we wrap up, I've just got a couple of questions because what happens when you start to see these behaviors coming out as an identity crisis? We talked about it very briefly earlier on, you know, sort of now I'M the person that can. I'm the only person that can do this. It has to be me. No one else can do it as well as me. How do you address that specific challenge? I would say my client that chooses me to be their coach typically wants to be challenged. Right. That's sort of what I bring to the relationship. Right. I'm probably not dissimilar to you. Right. Like, with regards to. So I will ask them, do you mind if I challenge you on this? You have a blind spot here. You have a real block. What would need to be true? Right. So again, not dealing with the emotion of it, but what would need to be true for us to actually move to the next step. And it typically is. Again, around. Let's build a really good scorecard. Let's build a playbook around stuff. Let's enter gently. Right. If you do want to talk to another couple of CEOs that have done this and see the results that they've got, like, you are not alone in your opinion of. This is how it starts. Right. These limiting beliefs are pervasive in the entrepreneurial community. So I think it's just pushing through. And that I think is part of having a coach that can actually hold you to account and also guide you through the process. Right. So you're not just trying to knee jerk into the change. Yeah. Because it takes time, doesn't it? You know, if you have someone who sees themselves as the only person that can unstuck things, then you've got to change that behavior. Yeah. And that's not, that's not an overnight switch. Yeah. And I represent that comment. That was me as a, as an earlier CEO. So I will, I'll tell them, I'll tell them where it goes. If you continue on this behavior and it's not a good outcome. Right. With regards to. Yeah. You have direct experience of the damage that that can cause, don't you? Yeah. Yeah. So it's like we got to change this. If you want hit your three year goals, we have to change this or you're plateaued and your health is going to decline. Right. So, so, so we need to change something. That's why I'm, I'm here as your coach. So let, let's start pulling on some simple tools. Yeah. Okay. So before we close, Peter, if there's, if there are any people out there that would want to contact you or find out more about your work as a coach in Vancouver, how would they do that? Yeah, my website is oxygenadvisory.com right. And again, I'm a certified Metronomics coach. You can even go to the Metronomics website, and there's lots of really great coaches that you can click through on profiles. And again, find. Find someone that actually fits with what you're. You're looking to accomplish. So those are the two ways. My website and through the Metronomics website. Yeah. Awesome. Peter. I love our chats. This is your second time on the podcast. I'm sure there should be a third. We just need to find a good topic, don't we? Nice. Yes. Yeah, it's great, Jed. Thank you. We always enjoy the discussion with you. Okay, well, thanks. That was a great one. I'm looking forward to watching this one back. So thanks for your time, Peter, today, and see you soon. See ya. Bye. Bye.