"Episode 3: Timeblocking: Don't Let The Day Control You"

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Being an agency owner isn't for the faint of heart. Strategy, market conditions, building a team that lasts. This is From the Field, where Josh and Joe help you do it all without losing your mind.

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Josh, what is happening today?

SPEAKER_01 0:15

My man, always good to connect. Appreciate it virtually or in person. It's always good to see you.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Uh Ditto, Ditto, uh, first session coming off of Scaling Your Agency. We're going to roll in today to time blocking. Uh, there's, you know, funny enough, there's a lot of crossover there, right? Because if you scale correctly uh from a time blocking perspective, it makes life easier. But, you know, talking about time blocking, uh, we think in terms of time blocking as being more of a calendar tactic, right? So when we really look at it though, and we break it down, it comes back to where is the agency owner really spending their time? Where are their priorities? And then it comes back to the fact of whether or not um they're being reactive or if they're being proactive when it comes to their schedule. Uh, I recently read a study by the guy by the name of Cal Newport, who is a Georgetown professor, and he does all this work about being productive in a very distracting world. And he talked about people that actually time block um are three times more likely to be productive throughout the day compared to people that just have have place holders on their calendar. So he talked about the average professional today has about one to three hours of productivity throughout the day where their counterparts can sometimes double or triple that. So, with that said, we've talked in the past, you've talked a lot about a law that kind of governs around this idea. Do you want to expand on kind of what your thoughts are when it comes to time blocking and what you see it it does for individuals inside of our space?

SPEAKER_01 1:46

Yeah, the first time I heard time blocking, I didn't know if that was a pass play on football or any of what we were doing here. So uh really the idea of it is the intentionality, right? Show me the person, show me their calendar, and I'll show you their priorities, right? I'll show you what's on there and we'll see that. But I heard this, you know, the Parkinson's law, right? The work expands to the time allotted. And and really what this does is it was a long-term study and talks about psychology, but this is why everyone feels they were busy. If you go talk to your team member, you talk to your employee, they're busy, right? They're all busy. It takes all day. Oh, we were busy today. Oh, we're busy. And I don't believe that that small business owners, agency owners have as much of a time problem as we think we do. I think we have a priority problem. And I 100% believe we have a distractions problem, right? We we just we're like a mouse in a cage and we're waiting for the next thing to drop down and we turn and look at it instead of being intentional with our time. So I think Parkinson's law really drives that. First time I heard that, uh, I heard a thing and it said, if you put something on your calendar and you ignore it, you are teaching yourself that nothing you put on your calendar is important. You know, and I think that bears repeating. Like, think about that. If you put something on there and it's, I'm going to the gym, I'm gonna call so-and-so, and you look at it and ignore it. Reminder pops up and you choose to ignore it, you are teaching yourself whatever you put on there isn't important. You're putting yourself last, you're not going from a structure, you're just letting the day run you. But I think that is the the insurance application of Parkinson's law.

SPEAKER_00 3:20

Yeah. And this has nothing to do with it, but it reminds me, I I was working on intermittent fasting. And I told my wife, I I can't eat until two o'clock. And then at 11 o'clock, I'm rubbishing through the cupboards. And her response to me was, why do you even say these things to yourself if you're not going to do it? And again, you're exactly right. It's like once once you set something and don't follow it through, um, then you can break that agreement with yourself all the time. So so I got a question for you, and I've got an observation. I'm curious to hear your take on it. Uh it's kind of like we have a concept, and when you say a concept out loud, sometimes it's if people think you should just know what that means or how to apply it, right? It's kind of like if I said, if I said uh wire the bedroom or you know, build a deck, like those things sound easy, but I don't know how to do that. So when you we say time block, I'll have rep say, well, I should probably time block. But when you really, really dig into it, how how do you time block? What things should you be time blocking? Um, you know, how does it really look from start to finish?

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Yeah, and I mean, I think we all go through that. Uh it this was something I had to learn over a long period of time because I was, you know, you start off, especially if you're the the one man or one woman shop, right? You do everything. And then you might add yourself a second employee or first employee, and then second or third. And you just kind of feel like as the agency grows or the small business grows, that that's just how it's supposed to be. You're just supposed to be busier the whole time because everything else. So I started with with what, you know, the big rocks theory. We've all heard that professor, right, that gives the very famous speech. He stands in front of his uh auditorium of students and he has a jar up and he fills it up and he sits in there and he fills it up with uh big rocks first. Okay, he puts them in there and he says, Hey, is this full? And everybody in the room says, Yeah, that's full. The jar is full. And he says, Okay, hold on. Now he takes pebbles and he pours those over top of the big rocks and it fills up again. And he goes, Okay, now would we agree it's full? And the and the students kind of laugh. Okay, he got us. You know, he got us. And he goes, Now hold on. He puts some sand and he pours it over top of it. And now is it full? And they kind of, oh man, the old man got us again, right? And he goes, Yeah, they got it. And they go, Yeah, he goes, we're agreeing it's full. They said, Yes, it's full. He takes water, pours that over top of it. And they're okay, you're wrong again. Now he goes, let me show you the other way around. And I love this. Like if you haven't seen that YouTube video, it's fantastic. He takes the same amount of water, pours it in there. He goes, Would you agree it's full? Yeah. Now he takes the sand and the water overflows. Now he tries to put the pebbles in there, there's no room for the pebbles. And then he gets the big rocks, right? The thing he started with the first time pours them in, there's nowhere for them to go. They all fall out. Right? So the big rocks in this theory are the things that are most important to you. What do you have to have? Whether that's family, faith, whatever it is, you've got to put those things in the calendar first. So I've heard calendaring, I've heard time block. But when it comes to business, right, putting the guardrails on those things is good business. Whether it's this is when I'm doing my email, this is when I'm doing my prospecting calls, this is when I'm having appointments. It's okay to put the guardrails on. And and I think if you just think about if you started over and you were trying to explain to someone how to do your job, what are the most important things? And then start with those. Yeah. And then we can put everything else in. But if you go the other way around, if you let all the menial stuff, the stuff that just happens to you all day, fill it first, you'll never have time for any of the big stuff.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

So from the standpoint of strategy, it we know the menial stuff's gonna show up, right? Like I I take, you know, I take my position, for example. I'm gonna have 25 to 30 people. A lot of people are gonna need things I don't know they're gonna need at 8 a.m., right? But by the time 5 p.m. gets here, there's been a lot of things that have popped up. Um, and for you, it's the same situation. You've got you've got client situations, you've got employee situations, your own personal life. What do you do with that when things all of a sudden come out of that field and show up and you're supposed to be doing one of these tasks that you've time blocked for?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Yeah, I mean, as much as we've tried to be static and stick to it, like reality, things happen, right? There can be a disaster that comes through. It's storm season, we have a night of storms. Like you do have to be flexible. But for the vast majority of the time, like we just let things run us instead of coming in. So I start my day, I have a 15-minute time block every morning that just says email and triage, right? That term triage. The things that I didn't know happened last night that came in overnight that I have to disseminate and get to the right people so everybody can work on them. So I just give myself that 15 minutes to, you know, flag the emails I need, forward the emails to the right people, respond if need be, make that phone call if need be, but just see what came through the door that I wasn't expecting when I left the night before. That gives me that 15 minutes to then stay on task. It doesn't mean you're not gonna get knocked off. You know, someone can come in having a disaster. Those things all happen, but you want that general framework to frame your day, not let your day, you know, set your framework. I think it's just it's a mindset change. Like you have to say, this is our plan. We're gonna get knocked off it every once in a while, right? Famous Mike Tyson quote. What's my favorite Mike Tyson quote? Remember this one? Uh it's about getting hit in the mouth, right? That's right. Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. Yes. Close. It took it took that brilliant, wonderful man to come up with that. But you know, everybody does have a plan until one thing happens. By time blocking or by calendaring, you give yourself a better framework to adapt to those things and and to go back to your fundamentals. I think a day without a plan, right, is planning for a pretty bad day. And, you know, the this does help. I've I've now taken this from myself. Now I've taught time blocking to my management team. They're teaching it to the associate team. And it's amazing watching the productivity that can happen when someone thought this, you know, I I use my morning to call all of our lapses and cancellations, right? I use my morning. Okay, well, is that how long it takes? Yep. Well, let's sit down and go through it. And the last time we did that, we got done with everybody in 38 minutes. That was taking her the entire morning. If you want to talk about real agency ownership, right? Right. She would take all morning working on her lapse listings. Now she was very good. She got the money, she communicated clearly with the clients, was kind, was empathetic. But she got the same thing done in 38 minutes when I sat with her.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

And that's Parkinson's law and and and effect, right? Yeah. So we now gave her one hour. I didn't give her 38 minutes, I gave her one hour. But I took three and a half and turned into one. Yeah. Now we just freed up two and a half hours that gave her the grace and that to to accomplish more things and grow in her business. So it's it's these little measurements and small ones that add up.

SPEAKER_00 10:11

Yeah. I mean, the other thing too, uh, and I'm talking from my own personal perspective. Uh a lot of tasks I find I I work almost like rolling a boulder. And that is, I work off momentum. So once I get something rolling, I can I can see it through to the end. If I have to suddenly just stop midstream to deal with something that I I wasn't expecting, it's really hard to get that momentum back up and going. So I I think it's I think it's good when you can just let those things fall into you've already got a time block for the things you're not expecting that you can shove it into and you can continue with the task at hand. So, you know, expanding out on specifically what to do. So if I'm time blocking, and this again, as I've talked to team members and really dug into this, this is uh this is a big rock for them, is not really knowing what to put on the calendar. So they're not sure if they time block what should be on there, what should be a high priority, what things uh should be non-negotiables. So what what would you say if you started your list would be the the main things if you were time blocking, you want to make sure as an agency owner are is on that calendar each and every day.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Yeah. I think time to meet with your clients, right? So my appointment center knows going into a week, going into a time, what hours are available for me with clients, right? They're they're blocked off. You can see that she can book during that time freely without asking me. Sure. If a client needs a time out of there, she can ask and we can still approve it. But those, those, those client appointments are vitally important, right? And you know, I've got those. I've got my meetings. My meetings are on there, whether it's the weekly team meeting, if I have a one-on-one, like my my uh my main operations manager, I meet with her for an hour every Wednesday morning. Okay. Not Mondays, not Fridays, Wednesdays. I have my associate team meeting. That's all my associate agents and junior agents. We meet Thursday mornings at 8:30. I have my centers of influence meeting on Tuesdays. That's where I reach out to vertically integrated businesses, whether that's you know, mortgage lenders or um referral partners, realtors, those kind of people that I need to reach out to. I put these things on there to make sure I get them all done in a week. But client first, right? Client is the center of everything. And if you focus it around that, you're gonna be fine. So maybe you have to have prospecting calls, put those on there. Maybe you have client appointments, put those on there. One thing that I think that you're noticing that we're not talking about is email. Right? You you manage a large team across multiple states. Some people treat email like it's instant message. Right? How many times have you been in an email exchange when they send you an email and you reply, they reply right away again? Whoa. This is not a direct message. Yeah. We're not texting. This was a business communication. Right. Tim Ferris writes that book, wrote that book, four-hour work week. Right. I love it. Because it's all the way over here. It's like four hours, yeah, right, you know? But he's probably more right than wrong. And his take on email is fantastic. I think he checks it twice a day. Yeah. Right. Most of us have it open in the corner. I can look down at the computer, I can see it. There's a little little envelope that opens up. Right? If you're raising the you've got mail AOL age where you get an audible noise if you got a mail. Yes. It's teaching us to react to that and it's giving you, like you just said, it's giving you off of what you were doing. So minimize that. Turn off the notifications. There's no reason that an email needs to be responded to in 30 seconds. So we will have times where we can check email. So it's it's not an instant message in our office. It's a reasonable turnaround time if you check your email at 8 o'clock in the morning and again at 11. There's very few things that wouldn't have resulted in a phone call between 8 and 11 that need that urgency. For odd form. If I needed an answer from you by 10 a.m., it'd be odd that I sent you an email. What if you were in a meeting? And you'd have no way to get a hold of me. So I think it's it's not only what do we what do we include, it's what don't we include. Like you shouldn't be doing things that aren't included in that. You should be very purposeful and blocked off. If you find yourself not using that whole time that you've blocked off, shorten it. If you don't need a half hour to do emails, give yourself 15 minutes. Sure. And then see it again in three hours. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

And for someone that's not used to letting emails sit, it's it's a learned behavior to to adjust that, right? I mean, uh, my wife's in leadership as well. And there are times at dinner where um we have to cognizantly decide we're not, we're gonna focus on each other, we're not gonna focus on emails because they don't stop. The other thing I find that's funny on the leadership side um is when you time block. So let's say, let's say I'm I'm not gonna check emails until till midday, till noon, and I pick up four or five emails between eight and ten, three or four of those, I'll end up getting another email saying, hey, I got it figured out. So it's amazing how often things get fixed if they just sit there for for an hour or two, um, compared to if you're always on top of it. And I think you're right. I think email throws us for the biggest loop because it's it's constant and it's something that can tick our attention um all day, every day.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Well, I mean, let's talk about this meeting could have been an email, right? One of the most famous sayings of the last 10 or 15 years, we've all been to those meetings that's just brutal. Right. You're like, this could have just been an email, but we feel like we should have them. Right. That's how a lot of people run their day. Sure. Like their day could have been an email. Like if they summarize it all, they could have summarized what they did in less than an hour, but they spent eight and a half hours doing it. And it's like this day could have been an email. Like if you just compartmentalize that the way it needed to be, you could have been done with work in an hour. You know, and we'll get mad about meetings and we'll say, oh, corporate doesn't know how to run meetings. This this meeting could have been an email, but then we'll run our day that same way. Just kind of, this is how we did it, this is how much time. And you're weird. You're always gonna be full for your day instead instead of being strategic and being down on it. So if, you know, this can be applied to meetings as well. Like you need to put on your meeting the time on your agenda. So when you're running an effective staff meeting, and I know we're gonna have a session on this down the road. It is something we get asked about a lot. I know you run very effective meetings. I know that you're very purposeful with your time, right? You want people to show up, right? Not show up once and never come again. Right. And that's the big indicator whether you run a good meeting or not, right? If if half the people don't come to the next one, whatnot a good meeting. Yeah. That's a good point. We're not purposeful with your time.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

Yeah. So so let me ask you about uh a couple things with your actual business. So the first one, do you go into the day? You've got your time blocks. Do you have a list of things for the most part that you need to have done that day? So when you leave the office, you can say, hey, I completed the tasks at hand. Um, is that part of what you do each and every day? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:02

I mean, I I think to-do lists in general are you know provide a high level of satisfaction. If you're an ADD person like myself and you, you know, can pick up and let go, it's very important that you have that list. It there's something to be said for checking something off or marking through it, physically striking through it, whether it's electronically or or on a sheet of paper. But your to-do list can be something that you're, you know, making notes on your phone. And uh, I can't tell you how many times a day I will just open up, you know, AI and just add something to my notes and keep a running list. Then when I get back to the office, I'm heading back, I'll email it to myself and I've updated five or six things that I need to do. Yeah. You know, at night I've gotten into the habit of emailing myself. So I'll just send my work email an email that just has a word on there or something to do. And if it's a weekend and I'm at my kids' game and I don't want to worry about it, but I need an idea, I'll just email myself and then Monday I'll deal with it. So to-do lists are great, but I think that can be done, like I said, during your email and triage time, during your um, I have a a uh a business planning 30-minute block every Monday morning where I just strategically work on the business. I'm looking at everything from revenue to payroll to our numbers. You know, how are we looking? What do we need to have? That's just my time to work on the business. So, you know, there are times where you can collect those, but there's difference between time blocking and a to-do list. A to-do list is a traditional write down everything you can think of you need to do and then work through it. It's not organized, it's not strategic. Some of those things would be better grouped together. You're just going one after another. So I think you can find a sweet spot between a traditional to-do list and a time block. And I think that's by putting your to-do list inside of the time block.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Yeah, it's like a supplement. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So I I'm curious on an observation I've had to hear your take on it. Uh, one thing I I tend to find are people that are really good time blockers, they tend to be great producers. And and what I find is they control every part of their process, right? There's nothing left to chance. So if you were thinking in terms of a franchise, their quality control is through the roof. So any part of the business, whether it be how an appointment's run, how they onboard people, how everything is done, they can tell you what the process is. And a lot of the times they actually have it documented. I find the people that have the day come to them, they tend to be the ones that just do everything on the fly, right? Like they've got a client coming in and it's it's 1050. That's the first time that they've opened the client folder for the 11 o'clock appointment. I mean, so it just feels like everything is just helterskelter all the time. Do you find that same thing? Because I know, I know you've got a group of people that you're you're with across the entire industry that are very high-level producers. Do you see that as a common trait?

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Yeah, you do. Um, they say, you know, ad libs are for amateurs, right? Uh the other thing is once you develop, you know, my three core tenants, right? It has to be scalable, repeatable, and profitable. So when we're developing anything and our team comes up with something and wants to make a change, if it doesn't meet those three core tenants, we we don't adopt it. Okay. Like if it's only two of those three, we don't do it. Like it doesn't make it through muster in and gets put in our employee handbook unless it meets those three. And I do that because I don't want to recreate the wheel every time something happens. If a client comes in for an appointment, we already have the agenda, we already have this, we already have the time. We know exactly how that's gonna go. Um, we'll, you know, I know in the future we're gonna talk about client reviews or getting in front of clients on an annual basis. You and I had that wonderful meeting with your team where we talked about, you know, a 20 to 30 minute annual review. Right. And we we got the, you know, no, it takes an hour and a half to sit down and run a professional in-depth review. You're like, we are the doctors of the insurance industry. And it's like, get out, get over yourself, man. Like, we live in the Amazon world. People don't want to walk in and sit there for an hour and a half while you talk about life insurance and, you know, everything I need to do. They they want to be treated like clients, you know, not walk in here and let me show you how smart I am and all these things I know about these things. Right? We're there to ask clients how we can help them and solve their problems, not how they can solve ours. And that old hour and a half death march, man, that is for the birds. We got to get past that. But you saw people lose their mind over it. You can't do it in 20 to 30 minutes. For sure. Absolutely can. I do it four or five times a day. And the clients, you know what's interesting about that? If they know that they're coming in to be treated like a client, to be thanked for their business, to have a quick overview. They they have things to go home with that they want to review it. If something is brought up, we set up a follow up or a communication, they'll come back in because they know they're not coming in to get sold. They're coming in because we want to see how they are. Is anything changed? You know, make sure we have the best contact, make sure you have our best contact. Are we keeping up our end of the bargain? You know, how was that recent claim you had? I know your kids turning 15 this year. Do you have any questions? You know, so many of these things we talk about. About by blocking and being a professional, we can improve our process. And when you do that, you can fit more into the day and even more into part of the day and free up a little bit of that time that we all say we don't have.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Yeah. And that's the number one thing that I hear uh most of the time, and is I just don't have enough time. There's not enough hours in the day. Uh, but you know, it's funny, it goes back to episode one of what we talked about, and that's that scalability. A lot of the times when um I have somebody come to me and tell me that, you know, they're managing a large book of business and they've got one part-time person, or there's two big books of business and they're splitting one person between them. And if if you're not staffed properly, it doesn't matter if you time block, right? Because there is not enough hours in the day. If you've got 2,000 households and you're running everything, uh, it changes things up a ton. So I do think it's a give and take on both of those to make sure you're staffed properly and then you're time blocking and you're efficient in all the processes across the board.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yeah. And you manage people that have plenty of staff that that have not enough, you know, quite frankly. Very true. And and while technology and AI, you know, are coming and are here and are helping us, you know, maybe we can manage more households with fewer, but I think most agencies are underfed. You know, their clientele is being starved a little bit. They're trying to do it with too limited of expense. And, you know, they they view everything as an expense, not an investment in that client experience. So they're they're trying to be understaffed, right? If you really think about it, we live in that Amazon world. All right, Holly and I were just up north for the fourth. We're in Hackensack, Minnesota. Hackensack. This is not a large, large town. No, in the summer is awesome. You know, shout out Hackensack. Uh gone up there my whole life. And we showed up in the uh, we shared the cabin with some family members and we kept some Dunkin' Donuts uh K cups up there. Holly and I like Dunkin' Donuts. And we we pull it down off the top and uh it was replaced with Starbucks kick ups, which you know, you'd be like, oh, that's nice. Your aunt and uncle left good. We don't like Starbucks, we liked our Dunkin' Donuts. So she goes, Oh, gosh darn it, I don't like this Starbucks. We got on Amazon on a Sunday. It was there by 10 a.m. on Monday. Yeah. That's the world we live in, right? Like in remote cabin and miss. So when clients call and have a problem, like I I don't think it's unprofessional that I may not answer every phone call. Like the client wants the answer. And if the answer is Joe is in an appointment right now, or Josh is with a client right now, that they're okay with that. They want a reasonable expectation of turnaround time. They want their problem to be addressed, whatever it may be. They want to know that we understand the problem and they want to know when it can be fixed. They don't necessarily expect everything to be fixed right now, but they want to know when to expect it. Right. So if it's, oh, I'm sorry, Josh is with clients, you know, this afternoon, looks like he'll be open around four. Is there something I could help you out with before that? Or, you know, can I let them know what we're what we're asking about? And most of the time, like you said with those emails, they didn't really need to talk to me. Oh, yeah, I'm out in a car. Oh, actually, you know, I I handle those here in the office. I'd love to help you. And now the client gets taken care of immediately, which is what they ultimately wanted. They didn't really want to talk to me. Right. And they got a better overall experience. They developed another contact and the system worked. So, you know, I think sometimes we make it busy on ourselves for no reason. Yeah. Like the the solution really is the client wants their problem solved. They don't just necessarily always need to talk to you.

SPEAKER_00 25:28

Yeah. Great, great point. Great point for sure. So we had talked about on the back side of this in the description of the video, listing out all the different things, the main things that agency owners that maybe aren't certain on what specifically to time block, what it is they should be looking at, and then kind of a description of each one of those. So we'll have that at the bottom of the video. Is there any others of those on the list that stick out to you as something you want to make sure that we touch on?

SPEAKER_01 25:55

You know, I I think that it's important when you start to not worry about being complete. Okay. So put the biggest blocks on there first. And if a lot of your calendar is open, that's better than overfilling it. Right. At best, 70 to 80% of your calendar should be full because things happen, right? We we we have to be reactive. The Mike Tyson, you're gonna get punched in the face. But even that can be scheduled as open, right? It just doesn't have to be be regimented. But I would say less is more. And you know, if you again, you show me the agency owner, you show me their calendar, and I'm gonna show you their priorities. You know, I'm gonna show you the things that are ultimately important to them in their business. So, you know, if we were looking at you, if you called us up and said, Hey Josh, can you consult? Can you help us? Can you coach us? I want to see your calendar. What's it look like? You know, are you consistently meeting with five or six clients a day? Are you do you have time to meet with prospects? What's the turnaround look like if a client calls today and says, I want to meet with you? You know, what is your expected turnaround time? Are they being, is there a problem being addressed right now? Can they get a face-to-face with you within 24, 48 hours? Can they get a phone call same day? You know, what does it look like to you? Because when we put the client at the middle and then you build your calendar around your business, like you are setting it up for for success. Um the other thing I would tell you is your meetings are important. Right? I don't like meetings, just in general. Right. So having a structure um for how and when to have meetings, to have reviews, to have, you know, checkups with your team so that everyone is on the same board about how everyone is doing. Most of us in insurance feel that we can take more on ourselves. That's what draws drew us to the business. You know, we I can do more. I know one of the shortcomings I have is if I see somebody doing something and they're not doing it right and it's it feels nitpicky, I'll just do it myself. Right. Well, what happens is I get 2% annoyed and then now I'm 4%. Then I see another one, I get to be 150% annoyed and then I blow up. And we've like I talk to more and more people that can relate to that versus if I just would have addressed it when it was coming up, we never would have gotten to that point. And so that's why I feel that meetings are very, very important. You know, I know that on a future one um of our episodes, we have we have Troy Corregon coming on. And and you know how I feel about Troy. You know, I think he is the industry icon. And he has a system out right now um on meeting management that has allowed me to basically run AI, let AI run my meetings for me. And what I mean by that is it tells me when I I I set up the template and then I let it run, and I get a thing, hey, you have a meeting tomorrow. Here's all the reports you wanted, here's the agenda, it's pre-filled, it's got the new data on there. So I show up and run the meeting. So technology is jumping in at a pace that we couldn't have even thought about five years ago. I mean, no way could my meetings be built for me five years ago. Right. And now I can walk in tomorrow and run a meeting that would have normally taken me three hours to prepare for. So when this gets to be client data, I mean, we could be the point where you can look very, very proficient very quick. Um, so there's a lot of stuff coming on the pipeline that I'm excited to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Yeah, and I want to expand on that specific one. Um, you know, I I go back about a year ago with an agency owner. And before I jump into that story, if if I was looking over the course of maybe the last 90 agency owners that I have um oversaw, I would say of those 90, I would say probably definitely less than 10 of those had weekly meetings with their staff. I'd say, I'd say 80.

SPEAKER_01 29:32

I bet that's very accurate.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Yeah, 80 to 85 percent, they have no type of meeting. And I watched one individual, funny enough, go through Troy's practice management and I watched them implement uh the process of sitting down every Friday with their team. And over the course of about six or eight months, I was so inspired by watching those meetings that I would block my time to simply come sit in the room. I wouldn't even partake. I just watched this entire transformation of the office from the standpoint of I watched team members feel valued. They felt they knew what was going on, they knew where they fit into the puzzle. Um, it allowed the agency owner to be able to coach and to redirect and to praise. And it just got everything so cohesive that honestly, every time that meeting ran, it was probably every other week. I said, look, I want to roll over for that 30 minutes to an hour and just go through this. And you would think, you know, 45 minutes of your time is a lot, but when you see the return on investment for doing that, it's it's mind-blowing to me that uh so few agency owners have those type of meetings and get everybody rowing the boat the same direction.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

It's huge. I'm so glad you used the word investment in that because I think anything that we're talking about with improving your business, right, is an investment. And if you you are scalable, repeatable, and profitable with the changes you make, like if it meets those rules and you implement it, you're gonna, you know, reap those dividends quicker and longer than you, I think most changes that we do normally. You know, you go to a meeting, you hear a sales idea, you know of a product, you want to go, you know, push or do whatever, that's great. But changing the business, the structure and how you spend your daytime and week and freeing up more time for yourself, whether it's like we talked about with scalability or talks about this with time blocking, these create more of the most precious resource that we have, and that's our time. Like that is that is the secret sauce, right? No one has enough time. Well, if I can free up some hours, I can do the things I want and start working on the things that I I really want to, not just feel like I walked in, what came through the door? You know, and most people in this industry go home. Looks like they lived four years today, right? They're they're shell-shocked because it just uh Jimmy was mad because his rate went up 2% and I ruined his life. You know, Johnny's mad because uh this happened and this and so and so, and somebody said they can go there for a dollar a month for you know everything, and the internet told him this, and ChatGPT told them they should only be paying $80 a month for everything no matter what. You just you could let it all go. Right. But ultimately, the day will control you or you're gonna control your day. And what we try to do with time blocking, whether it's an agency owner, you know, management level position, producer, service person, if we help and coach them to do this correctly, they're gonna get what they used to get done in a day done in two hours. And then we can get to all the good stuff. That's how these mega agencies grow as fast as they do. They don't have more time. They don't just work 80 hours, they just work way smarter in the 35 or 40 they do. Sure. Makes sense. Well, very good. Do you have anything else you want to expand on? It's one of those things, right, where people say this is what's important to them and then they don't spend their time or effort on it. You know, you you see this over and over. You you you hear about, oh, this is what's supposed to be important to me. Atomic thoughts, right? We love that book. Like, what a what a fantastic read. And it talks about like the craziness of saying this is what's important to you, but then not focusing on it. Like, why would you say you want to be a boss, you want to do this, and then not not spend your time, energy, and thoughts doing it? Um to me, it's if you say I don't have enough time in the day and you're not doing anything to fix that, like that's that's now on you. You've said this is the problem. This is if only for this, I would be good. We're giving you the solutions and you're choosing to be like, well, that's not true.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

You know, right, right.

SPEAKER_01 33:37

I think everybody in in agency, whether you're in leadership or in the field, you know, needs to go out there and think about, you know, what is taking up my time? And then, you know, number two, what's important? And if those aren't the same, right, we need to reset the the calendar, start back over, big rocks first, revenue producing things, things that drive the agency and the things that are important, you know, your faith, your family, and put those things all in there and then see what time is left. And I think you'd be amazed if you run the day instead of the other way around, how much more you're gonna get done in in even fewer hours.

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Yeah, I love that. And I think the other thing is to encourage yourself when you do something different than you did before, right? So it's it's celebrating like I actually stuck to this time block, right? I had all these distractions, but today I didn't buy into them. Now tomorrow you may you may relapse, right? And that's just part of the process to to eventually where you get to where you're sticking to what it is that you're setting up. So it's uh it's got ups and downs to it, but you're exactly right. I mean, long term, there's there's a ton of upside to it. So that's great.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

There's a mentor of mine, and you know him, by the name of Mike Weber. This gentleman is is an industry icon, um, instrumental in my career and in so many others, and has had an impact larger than he'll ever know. Um, this is just a a good father and person and and and an amazing guy. But he talked about when he was a new agent, and he said, you know, Friday afternoons, I was usually pretty scarce around the office. And I was like, what do you mean by that? He goes, I had a certain amount of things that I knew I had to do during the week. And when I got those done, Friday afternoons, I was pretty scarce. And it was just kind of a like a humble way of saying, like, I went out there and kicked butt all week and I gave myself that carrot at the end. He knew what unconditional standards he had to do to get there. He was being a little coy with us and just kind of making up aweshks, but he had written them down. He had his week out and he knew what he identified as a good week was, and then he gave himself that Friday afternoon. And I think that being kind to yourself, right? How many times have you and I talked about that's such an important part of our message? Is there's enough bad stuff out there, right? Be kind to ourselves, be kind to others. Like you doing well or somebody else out there in the world doing well takes nothing away from me. You know, there's no light in the darkness. Being mad about somebody else's success does not take anything away from you. But I love the idea of putting a carrot out there. You know, if there's something you want to do and time would allow for that, whether that's the gym, whether that's, you know, something at your church, whether that's volunteering, we can show you, and this this can show you how to free up that time to do it. And what a reward. You know, time is the one thing we cannot buy. We just can't buy it. Yeah. And this can allow for more of it. And and I just, to me, it's crazy to want and then not do something about it. And it's just, it's it's the atomic habit there, man.

SPEAKER_00 36:30

We got to go for it. That's a great point. And one of the only industries where we can actually do that. There's so many people that wish they could have a carrot, but uh the time clock doesn't allow them to, where we can actually set that up for ourselves. So that's a that's a great way to end the session. So, you know, with that said, uh, we really appreciate you taking the time to join us. Like we said, if you were willing to subscribe, like, and comment, we are open to any feedback that you have, whether it be future guests that we can bring on or specific topics that you would like to see us cover. Uh, we're here to do the best we can do to make your life better and get you the great information that you need. So thanks again. And Josh, as always, it was a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Noops, everybody. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

See you now.