I worked in the public accounting world for 5 years. In that world, there are very rigid promotion structures and roles. If you are a staff, you do a certain type of work. If you are a senior, you do a higher-level of work and delegate to your staff. If you are a manager, you manage clients, teams of seniors & staff, partners, technical accounting work, etc. Now that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some overlap every now and then. There were circumstances where staff level work needed to get done and the only availability was for a manager to step down and complete it. There are also going to be circumstances where people need to step outside their role and be a team player. 

Buy Back Your Time

So how does this fit into healthy habits? At some point, your time is too valuable to be spending it doing tasks that don’t fit your role. We’ve worked with gym owners who are truly trying to do it all. They are coaching, doing onboarding classes, introduction meetings, accounting, marketing, sales, and janitorial services. They are being run ragged by the demands of their business. This is when it makes sense to start buying back your time. If you’re new, I totally get it, you want to learn every aspect of the business. But at some point, decide what the value add items are that you bring to your company and delegate the rest. 

Value Add Tasks Add Value

While we excel at performance marketing, we also help coach gym owners into adding value to their company. One of the first things we do is look at where time can be bought back. Does this mean potentially increasing monthly expenses? Almost definitely. But does it also mean 20 hours each week that the gym owner now has to build her business? What if you took that 20 hours and turned it into 20 new monthly customers? All of a sudden, you are making more money than before and you have your time back to focus on value add tasks. 

Be More Present

Ok, I swear I’m getting to the healthy habits part. While this is easy to apply to business, it’s not always as easy to apply to your life. As small business owners, we know how much time it takes to run a business (even when you buy back your time) so we start looking for other ways to do this in our lives. Maybe it means I now pay someone to clean my house, mow my yard, deliver my groceries, and other tasks that would take me away from spending time with my family and friends. As you grow your business, you buy back your time there, why wouldn’t you do the same at home? Often what we find is that the financial freedom you gain from buying back your time through your business allows you to buy back your time at home. And that makes for more time doing the things you love.