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How To Buy Back Your Time
114 Plays1 year ago
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The SOLARPRENEUR podcast is here to help you close more deals in the solar industry, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully, have a much better time and situation.
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Transcript
Taylor Armstrong's Solar Sales Journey
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level.
00:00:08
Speaker
My name is Taylor Armstrong.
00:00:10
Speaker
I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fell.
00:00:19
Speaker
I teach you to avoid the mistakes I made and bring in the top solar dogs of the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro, and closing more deals.
00:00:31
Speaker
What is a solopreneur you might ask?
00:00:33
Speaker
A solopreneur is a new breed of solopro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery and you are about to become one.
Efficiency in Solar Sales Through Time Management
00:00:41
Speaker
Hey, what's up, solopreneurs?
00:00:42
Speaker
Today, we're going to talk about one of the subjects that fascinates me maybe more than anything else, and that is how can we be more efficient with our time?
00:00:52
Speaker
How can we use our time more wisely and how can we buy back our time?
00:00:56
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So we're going to talk about that and how it applies within solar sales.
00:01:01
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My name is Taylor Armstrong.
00:01:02
Speaker
We're here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully have a much better time in the solar industry.
00:01:09
Speaker
Hope you're doing awesome.
00:01:10
Speaker
And I hope whenever you are listening to this, you are closing lots of deals, you are growing your company, you are having success.
00:01:17
Speaker
And hopefully these episodes can play a small part in that.
00:01:21
Speaker
Hey, we're free and available on Apple, iTunes, Spotify.
00:01:25
Speaker
And I appreciate everyone that has taken the time to leave us a review and share the podcast.
00:01:31
Speaker
That's what helps us grow this, the podcast and get it out to more people.
00:01:37
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:01:38
Speaker
And we appreciate if you haven't, go leave us a review, go share that episode would be much appreciated.
00:01:45
Speaker
Okay, so let's jump into it.
00:01:46
Speaker
It's going to be a little bit shorter episode today because we're busy, right?
00:01:50
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Don't have enough time because we're not delegating.
00:01:53
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But you guys have heard me talk probably many times in the podcast about how can we be more effective with our time and
00:02:01
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And the reason for that is I truly believe that the people that are having the most success in solar are the ones that have mastered their time and that are spending the time on selling the account on the most high value, high income activities.
00:02:15
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And because I've seen it myself, all the people that have won multiple Golden Door Awards are
00:02:21
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All the people that are crushing a ton of sales, they are extremely effective with their time.
00:02:26
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It's something that I have just been fascinated by and am constantly trying to improve.
00:02:32
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Okay, so a few of these principles that we're going to talk about today, I have mentioned in other episodes, but I'm going to expound a little bit.
Value of Time in Sales: "Buy Back Your Time" by Dan Martell
00:02:41
Speaker
Recently, I started reading this book called Buy Back Your Time.
00:02:45
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And it's by a guy named Dan Martell.
00:02:48
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Goes without saying, pretty self-explanatory.
00:02:51
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He talks about how we can buy back our time.
00:02:54
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And so there's a few things in particular that I want to talk about, expound on a little bit, and just re-invite you to do if you have not already.
00:03:01
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So first thing, we need to identify what is our time worth, or what should be our buyback rate.
00:03:09
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Okay.
00:03:10
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All right, so I read this, and hopefully you all know what your hourly rate is.
00:03:14
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I've talked about this.
00:03:16
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Calculate.
00:03:17
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What are your commissions?
00:03:18
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How many hours have you put into working?
00:03:20
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It is really valuable to know what your hourly rate is.
00:03:24
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And the idea with it is if you can hire someone to do a lower value task for less than what you're making per hour, you might want to consider doing that.
00:03:34
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But what was really interesting in this book was
00:03:38
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Dan Martell, he talks about really what should the rate be for the time we want to buy back.
00:03:45
Speaker
Can he has a formula in here?
00:03:47
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If you want a visual of this, you can Google it or you can pick up the book.
00:03:52
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I got it on Audible personally, but he has like workbooks and stuff you can download.
00:03:56
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So his formula is you put your income, you divide it by 2,000 hours, which is the time probably working in a year.
00:04:03
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And then you divide that by four.
00:04:07
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So one more time, you put income, divide it by 2,000 hours, then divide that by four.
00:04:12
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And the number it spits out is...
00:04:15
Speaker
what you should pay someone to buy back your time, right?
00:04:19
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And so the examples he gives, just for example, if you're making half a million, $500,000 divided by $2,000 divided by four comes out at $62.50.
00:04:29
Speaker
$100,000 divided by $2,000 divided by four comes out at $12.50.
00:04:33
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Okay, so depending on your income level, hopefully most of us in solar should be making at least $100,000.
00:04:41
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Hopefully if you're not, don't worry, you'll get there.
00:04:43
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I didn't make $100,000 for
00:04:45
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Quite a long time.
00:04:46
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Commissions were far less when I started back in 2016.
00:04:50
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But it took me really a couple of years to hit my first 100 grand.
00:04:54
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And I didn't know this at the time, but the idea with this whole buyback rate is, if you're using 100 grand as an example, can you hire someone, pay them $1250 to do a lower value task?
00:05:07
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So if there's a task you could hire someone for $1250, then you should do that.
00:05:12
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But if you're only making 100 grand and you have a higher value task that's maybe $15 an hour, okay, do that task until you can hire someone else, until you can pay them $1250.
00:05:24
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I just thought that was really interesting that you can break it down by your income level.
00:05:31
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This is something that I think we should all be teaching our people.
00:05:35
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I mean, many examples of this, it's like if you have a house, if you have an apartment,
00:05:41
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Could you potentially pay someone $12.50 an hour to clean?
00:05:44
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Right?
00:05:46
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Maybe not, depending on where you're at.
Tools and Tips for Solar Sales Success
00:05:48
Speaker
So some of you already know that I run my own door-to-door sales team here in San Diego.
00:05:53
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And as we are gearing up for the summer, I realized if we do the same thing we always did, we're going to get the same results.
00:06:00
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But if I want to increase my deal flow, I need to do something different to get an advantage.
00:06:04
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Then we discovered an app called SolarScout.
00:06:07
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But it's not a door knocking app.
00:06:09
Speaker
It's a data platform that shows us who is likely to go solar in our market.
00:06:13
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It shows us who has previously applied for solar but later canceled the deal, who has moved in recently, and even how much electricity the homes are using in a given neighborhood.
00:06:23
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It's been working for a lot of teams across the country, and now I'm on board too.
00:06:27
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I'm going to be one of the first to use Solar Scout in San Diego, so I decided to partner up.
00:06:31
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But I told them, hey, I'm going to talk about Solar Scout on my show.
00:06:35
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You need to give my listeners a great deal, and they did.
00:06:38
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So go to solarscout.app forward slash Taylor and book a demo with them, and you'll get 10% off your first month when you sign up.
00:06:47
Speaker
That's solarscout.app forward slash Taylor.
00:06:51
Speaker
Okay, back to the show.
00:06:52
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If you're making half a million, okay, I mean, you should be able to pay $62.50 an hour for just about any task you don't like doing.
00:07:02
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And then I'm going to segue right into the next principle, the next takeaway I had, just reading through this book.
00:07:08
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And that is this guy, he also talks about doing a time and energy audit.
00:07:13
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And this is something that's a game changer.
00:07:15
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It's something I invite all my clients and our coaching programs to do.
00:07:19
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I try to do one of these myself at least a couple times a year, which I think I'm about due for another one.
00:07:25
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But what this is, if you haven't heard me talk about it before, it's you audit your time.
00:07:29
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And he recommends in the book for a full two weeks.
00:07:32
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I've done it for two weeks before, but he breaks down every 15 minutes.
00:07:37
Speaker
What are you doing with your time?
00:07:39
Speaker
And I know it's a hassle.
00:07:42
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Right now I'm
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trying to get a few of our people in the coaching group to do this.
00:07:47
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Some people, they hate it.
00:07:49
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And it is a hassle because you're writing down every 15 minutes what you did.
00:07:54
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But the powerful thing about this is, number one, you see where your time went.
00:08:00
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But number two, you see what value activities are you doing.
00:08:04
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And this is something I learned from the book.
00:08:08
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I don't think I have done as well is after you do this time and injury audit for ideally two weeks and also weekends.
00:08:15
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So it does take commitment.
00:08:17
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It is a hassle, but you learn so much doing it.
00:08:20
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So once you do this, he has you write down the value of the tasks you did.
00:08:26
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So from $1 sign to $4 signs, what's the value?
00:08:30
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So examples he gives, it's like driving to the office, checking emails, meeting with your accountant.
00:08:38
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I guess in our case, what are some things we do daily?
00:08:42
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It's like managing accounts.
00:08:46
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talking with our installers, sending out proposals maybe to our customers, to our leads.
00:08:52
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Okay, so that's another topic, just writing out everything you do in your daily life.
00:08:58
Speaker
But then once you do this, you mark in the green things that gave you energy that you actually like doing.
00:09:05
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And then you mark in the red, what are things that took away energy, right?
00:09:10
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If you hate sending out proposals to customers, that's a red activity, right?
00:09:14
Speaker
You don't, maybe you don't like doing that.
00:09:17
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Okay, so this gives you some insight.
00:09:19
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And then on the other side, he puts the value of it, right?
00:09:22
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And so really the big thing with this is if it's a low value thing and you don't like doing it, then immediately you should figure out a way how can you potentially have someone else do this, pay someone else to do it.
00:09:35
Speaker
Okay, there are things that maybe they're low value activities, but you like doing them.
00:09:39
Speaker
An example is maybe you like mowing the lawn, maybe like whacking weeds outside.
00:09:47
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I don't know.
00:09:48
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I've actually heard from some like bigger name entrepreneurs that they still sometimes do lower value tasks that they could hire someone to do because they like those things.
00:09:57
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Yes, that's a different thing to consider.
00:10:00
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But it's powerful just to see what are the value of the tasks I'm doing.
00:10:05
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And then do I love it?
00:10:06
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Do I hate it?
00:10:08
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If you do this for a full two weeks, you're going to have just a whole library of things, a whole book of things that you probably didn't know you were doing.
00:10:16
Speaker
I've talked about it in other episodes, but when I first did this whole time study, there were so many things like, you know, checking Instagram, checking social media, was spending way more time than I thought on those things, playing games on my phone, right?
00:10:31
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Just stupid things that's in my head.
00:10:33
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They were like,
00:10:35
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I was doing them for five minutes, but when I did this time audit, it ended up being way more time than I expected.
00:10:41
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Just a reminder, I want to invite you guys to do these things again.
00:10:45
Speaker
If you have not, figure out what's the value of your time.
00:10:49
Speaker
Do the buyback rate formula.
00:10:51
Speaker
Put your income divided by 2,000, then divide it by 4.
00:10:55
Speaker
That is the rate you should be trying to buy back your time.
00:10:58
Speaker
And then the second thing, just consider doing one of these time audits, figure out where you're actually spending your time.
00:11:04
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And I know it's painful, but you're going to have some big revelations if you actually do that.
00:11:08
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Hey, so quicker episode.
00:11:10
Speaker
If you want to learn more about the subjects, you can check out that book.
00:11:13
Speaker
It's called Buy Back Your Time.
00:11:15
Speaker
But this is something that we should be always figuring out, OK, how can we be more efficient with our time?
00:11:20
Speaker
How can we speed up the process?
00:11:23
Speaker
How can we get in front of more people, right?
00:11:25
Speaker
Because the time that we're spending, maybe it's sending out proposals, maybe it's washing our car, maybe it's feeding our dog, maybe it's cleaning our house.
00:11:33
Speaker
If we use that time instead on higher value activities,
00:11:37
Speaker
knock on more doors, generating more leads, getting in front of more people, how big of an impact would that have on your income?
00:11:44
Speaker
Ask yourself that.
00:11:45
Speaker
So make sure you consider that.
00:11:47
Speaker
That's part of being a solopreneur is figuring out how we can be more effective with our time.
00:11:52
Speaker
And I believe buying back our time is a big part of that.
00:11:55
Speaker
So hopefully this helps.
00:11:56
Speaker
Send this to someone that is using their time poorly right now.
00:12:00
Speaker
Hopefully that inspires them.
00:12:02
Speaker
And we'll see you guys on the next episode.
00:12:04
Speaker
Peace out.
Introducing Solcitee: A Learning Community for Solar Professionals
00:12:06
Speaker
Hey, solopreneurs, quick question.
00:12:08
Speaker
What if you could surround yourself with the industry's top performing sales pros, marketers, and CEOs and learn from their experience and wisdom in less than 20 minutes a day.
00:12:17
Speaker
For the last three years, I've been placed in the fortunate position to interview dozens of elite level solar professionals and learn exactly what they do behind closed doors to build their solar careers to an all-star level.
00:12:29
Speaker
That's why I want to make a truly special announcement about the new learning community exclusively for solar professionals to learn, compete, and win with top performers in the industry.
00:12:40
Speaker
And it's called Solcitee.
00:12:42
Speaker
This learning community was designed from the ground up to level the playing field and give Solar Pros access to proven mentors who want to give back to this community and help you or your team to be held accountable
00:12:54
Speaker
by the industry's brightest minds for, are you ready for it, less than $3.45 a day.
00:12:59
Speaker
Currently, Soul Society is open, launched, and ready to be enrolled.
00:13:07
Speaker
So go to soulcidity.co to learn more and join the learning experience now.
00:13:15
Speaker
This is exclusively for solopreneur listeners, so be sure to go to soulcidity.co and join.
00:13:22
Speaker
We'll see you on the inside.