150. Create Freedom with Delegation - Day 1 of the 3-Day Weekend Challenge

Hey everybody. Wade Galt here, author of Put Your Money Where Your Soul Is and founder of 3-Day Weekend Club, where we help entrepreneurs, employees, freelancers side Hustlers create an abundant and sustainable 3-day weekend life lifestyle so you can fully enjoy your family, your friends and your life. Today we're going to be doing is the first day of our 3-day weekend 4-day challenge. And what we're going to be doing in here is I'm going to share some strategies with you, some very simple beginning strategies to help you start creating the life and the lifestyle you most desire. Now, it's not really that critically important whether or not you want to have a 4-day work week with a 3-day weekend.

Or you say, Wade, I don't have a 4-day work week where I take Wednesdays off or Wade, I even want to have a different work schedule. I want to work the days my kids are in school and have off during summers or whatever. The main focus of this is about helping you create the life and the lifestyle where you get to enjoy your work. You do meaningful work, impactful work, but you also get time outside of work to enjoy your family and your friends. That's the main focus here.

So today on the first day we're going to focus on freedom. And there's a lot of different ways you can define freedom. I'm just going to simply today talk about work freedom and the freedom to create not only the type of lifestyle you want outside of work, but to do the type of work you most enjoy. And those two really tie in together. And so what I'm going to first suggest to you is in order to create time freedom to free up some time, whether it's through delegation or through other means, we need to be already considering how are you going to generate more income?

How are you going to make more things happen? Because the support you're going to want if you don't have it already is going to come from usually people helping you, being able to delegate, whether that's you delegating a long-term project or a short-term project, it's going to come from income. And income comes from impact. And so impact is another way of just saying creating really big value for other people, so big that they'll pay you for it. Now, it doesn't have to be fancy.

It could be simple. So in just about any business model, there's done for your services and because it's done for the person that's impactful. And so that's a big deal. So it doesn't have to be something nobody's ever heard of. It doesn't have to be unique, it doesn't have to even be creative, but it has to create value for them.

And so when you look at people who are not making a big impact, usually the reason why that's the case is they're selling something that's not making a big impact, or anybody can do it. And it's not that powerful because of that. Very often people who are offering low impact commodities are making low incomes. And so higher impact people eventually when they can figure out the marketing and how to meet up with the right people, make higher incomes. And the impact comes from the people delivering it from the actual people making that impact, not just the product.

Sometimes it comes from the product as well, but usually it's not just the product. Otherwise that can be, again, easily replaced with somebody else. So to create a high income, which is going to allow us to free up some of your time, we're going to want to be able to create high impact. And so if we look at delegation, which is at the core of any entrepreneurial journey or journey from, let's say, employee to side Hustlers to freelancer to solopreneur to business owner, somewhere in there, there's some part that has to do with delegation. Now, delegation allows you to make more money and work less hours and create free time and even have more impact.

And it's based off of the desire to reach and help more people, and it allows you to really focus on what you do best. So when I say be the dentist. If you are a dentist in a dentist office, at least in North America, in the United States, you'll have a situation where the dentist does the highest difficulty work, the cavities, the root canals. And even though they could clean teeth, they don't do that. The dental hygienist does that.

And even though the dental hygienist and the dentist could do the administrative work, the administrative person does that. So there's a natural hierarchy to this, and it allows the solopreneur, the dentist, the person with the most impact, the highest impact, to be able to get support around them. And then also, as a wonderful side benefit, it helps create jobs and employment for others. So what you want to delegate is really anything and everything you can properly delegable. Now, if you're an employee, you say, Wade, I don't know that I can delegable yet.

Well, have you ever bought food at a restaurant? You delegated. You had somebody Cook for you. If you've ever had somebody cut your hair or mow your lawn, you've delegated. So delegation can happen in a lot of different ways.

And not every delegation has to be a really high commitment relationship, like hiring somebody to be an employee. It can be a one time contract. It can be anything of that nature. And so you want to find that low dollar activity that's still important. So things that need to get done.

But maybe you could hire someone to do that for a lower dollar amount, and you could be doing something that's a higher dollar amount. Very often it's going to be work that's already assigned to you or to your employees would be something that you already delegate, it might be repetitive work. So after you create a process, after you initiate a new way of doing things and you've done it a few times, you might say, okay, now I need you to do this and continue doing it. So it's maintained. It could be administrative work, it could be work you don't enjoy doing or you don't wish to do.

And it could be work that could be done by technology. So you can also delegate through technology, which is sometimes more precisely called automation. And where you're going to delegate again, at work and at home, you've already probably delegated at home. As I mentioned already, if it's mowing the lawn, cleaning the pool, anything that needs to be done, having your groceries delivered, that's a form of delegation. And so it's often easier and safer to delegate at home from a financial standpoint, because it's usually smaller commitments and they're more independent contractor or short term jobs, if you will, rather than long term situations.

The goal is to free up time in your life. And then the other reason why just going back to one here, it's safer to delegate home is if somebody makes a mistake and they mess up the delivery that doesn't reflect on your business brand. Later, when you involve people in your brand, you want to make sure things are done really accurately and you have to have a little more certainty that things are going to turn out the way you like. And again, the goal is to free up time in your life and to have more time and more freedom to enjoy life outside of work. So this is not so much about working less, although we want to do that, but it's really even more so about playing more.

So we don't want to just create freedom so we can do other work we don't like, or to just make the same amount of money. We want to free up time, create higher impact work, or do higher impact work and create some more results for our clients, more income for ourselves, and also some more free time. Now one other thing to keep in mind here, and if you've been in business or you read enough books, you'll hear this a lot eliminate before you delegable. Some activities simply need to be gone. They're low impact activities.

They are wasteful activities. Nobody should be doing those. You shouldn't be paying someone to do those because that still cost you money and you have to make that money. Those should simply be dropped. So any activity that loses you money should go.

Unless maybe if it's a loss leader, if you say, well wait, I have this loss leader where I give a little bit of my time and I don't make money and then I make a sale after that, okay, I'd still say minimize those loss leaders. If it's an idea you share or a coaching session or a strategy session. See how much of that information you can share ahead of time through YouTube videos or through a Podfest or whatever it might be so that you're spending less time of your own doing something for somebody without knowing for sure that you're going to get paid. And so there's a simple framework that I like to use, probably not unbelievably original, but it's really powerful and it's dropped. Delegate and double down so first thing again, we want to eliminate your useless and unproductive tasks because again, delegating saves time, but eliminating also saves the money to have somebody else do it.

So you're not going to have somebody else do that. So that saves you the money. There ignore irrelevant items. These are the things you just keep putting in the back of your list and maybe you never fully delete them. Maybe it feels weird to delete it because it's a customer that you think you should be helping or you're not sure.

Just keep pushing those things that are less relevant to the back deal with the most important ones first. And maybe those events should go away. Maybe they don't automate with technology as much as you can. You want to automate with technology. You're probably doing some of that in some form already and then delegate to competent stewards to people that you can give your work to and know that they're going to do it right.

It takes a while to make sure that's done, but that's something that can definitely be done. And then there's going to be some work that's important, but it's a little boring. You have to keep doing that, of course, because that's just the nature of some of the work you have. And then this is the double down part. Eventually we want to scale up the amount of time in your profitable and your exciting projects so that you're generating more impact, which is creating more income.

And that's really at the heart of all of this first day challenge. And so what I'm going to suggest to you is you want to delegate any work that you can hire somebody out for a quarter of what you make. So if you average $60 per hour now, this is really important. Not what you bill per hour because you might not bill. Most people don't bill every hour of their day.

So the income you average. So if you make $120,000 a year divided by roughly 2000 hours, 40 weeks times 50 hours, times 50 weeks, that's $60 per hour. So again, this is not what you bill for. This is what you average. But if you average $60 an hour, then you should be delegating all work as quickly as possible that you could hire someone to do it and you can pay them $15 per hour or less.

You want to make sure that you're earning one out of every 4 hours that you delegable. So if you eliminate, let's say, excuse me delegable four of those hours and then one of those hours you make in this example, $60. When that 1 hour, you've now earned the ability to pay for those 4 hours of delegation. And then the other 3 hours, you can either reinvest in high impact, high income work or you can simply rest or just enjoy time, whatever you want to do, have free time those hours. And so for the first part of this challenge, as we look again at this concept to eliminate, ignore, automate, delegate, maintain, and scale up for the first day of this, what I'm going to suggest you do is use our delegation worksheet.

And this is a tool that you're going to see. There's a link to it if you can't see it or there's access to it somewhere below here. And what you're going to do is identify what are the things in your current work situation, all of them you're going to categorize. What do you do? And then what needs to be eliminated, what needs to be ignored, automated delegable, maintained or scaled up, and then average hourly income earned.

If it's something, let's say on the scaled up side, how much do you make per hour when you do that? If it's something on the eliminate or ignore sign, you would basically simply get rid of those. If it's on the automate or delegate, how much would it cost you either per hour or per month to delegable that? So this is going to be your framework, your worksheet. We're going to use this.

I'm going to suggest you use this going forward, regardless of whether you continue after this challenge with us or not. But basically, this is going to set your framework of what you're going to be delegable. And then for day one of your freedom challenge, take action on one item today. And what I mean by that is find something. So even if you say, wait, I've got this list and they seem like bigger things, find something that you can either eliminate, it will free up some time for you, something you could delegate.

If you're not sure how to delegate, you can put some questions in the comments section and we'll give you some feedback on that. But it could be anything. It could be. Again, you say, you know what, one day a week I'm going to buy dinner out and that's going to cost me less than I make, whatever it might be. But to have that be where you're creating, at least again, one new thing that you're delegating that you weren't before.

So you're creating some additional freedom. And then if you please report your progress in the comment section and share that with us and let us know how that goes. Now, if you're seeing this on a platform and you're not already in our member community, you can go to 3dayweekandclub.com and you can join our community. It's an online community where we have trainings like this. Some of them are free, some of them are part of our premium offerings.

You can go to 3dayweekendclub.com to join there and become part of this and see more of these as we do these. So again, thank you for taking the time to come out today. I hope this allows you and helps you to see how you can create more freedom in your life. As always, I look forward to helping you impact more people and make more money and less time doing you do best so you can better enjoy your family, your friends and your life. Thanks so much for coming out.

I look forward to seeing your feedback on the first day of your challenge.