Question 3 and 4: Ins and Ons (10:00)

Let’s go into Ins and Ons please Ben.

BEN: Yes. What those two dots, the In and On mean is time spent in the business versus time spent on the business. This concept is shared in a book written by Michael Gerber called the E-Myth where usually people spend too much time in the business that they never get time to build it and look at those systems and fill the holes where they need to.

HARVEE: That’s right. If I could just add there too Ben, the rationale behind that is, and if you’ve read Michael Gerber’s stuff you’ll understand, is that most people go into business because let’s say they’re a great smoothie maker or they’re a great accountant, or architect or marketer. They’ve got a technical skill and they think, you know what? I could run a business and they don’t realize all the other pieces that are involved in doing that. What ties you all, gives you a tendency to want to work in the business is because you can actually do those technical pieces. I understand the struggle, it is in actually taking your hands off. Have you found that Ben in letting go of some of the tax and technical stuff in the last six months?

BEN: Yeah, that’s right. You’re always learning what you need to get out of the way from. Yeah, business is great. You need to prioritize the on time and it’s just such a default, like a human condition default. Where we resort back to our technical or where we came from. We must take time, really disciplined to work on the business.

HARVEE: Understood. I read a book, Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and his recommendation was to straightaways go Mondays and Wednesdays are off and out of the business. Now, Ben and I won’t know exactly how to pull that off straight away, but what we’ve been doing consistently for the last, let’s say four months would you say Ben? Is our unique thing of what we call WOW, or Work on Wednesday. That’s the day that we’re out of the office and we’re specifically working on the business and on projects based around creating systems or creating marketing content or strategizing new product lines or ways to improve our existing product lines and letting the team members keep running ahead with working in the business side of things.

For the context of this, let’s get a predefined goal of what are the days you want to be working in the business and what are the days you want to be working on. For the days you are in the business, what are the times that you want to aim for. This is helping us be able to construct what an ideal week might look like for you. Ben, let’s get onto the final point in this really important considerations and that is Retreats.