Stephen Bartlett
speaker
413 appearances
7 recordings
5 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Stephen Bartlett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
And I want you to set a timer, easy timer, kitchen timer, like for cooking, for every 15 minutes. And every 15 minutes, I want you to, when it dings, I want you to write down what you did. One or two words, doesn't take a lot. Now, as soon as I say that, people are like, oh my God, I don't have time for this.
I will promise you, it will be the most productive week of your life because you will be aware of how you're spending your time. Every time I do this, I immediately think I should do this all the time and I don't. So just do it. Just do it for the one week, okay? And so what happens is you'll do it for a whole week
And then what the second step of this is you'll look at that and you'll say, okay, wow, I didn't know that 40% of my time is dealing with this thing. And I can hire a role to handle 40% of my time for this amount of money, right? if I had 40% of my time back, I could double this business. And that would be worth significantly more than what I'd pay this person.
And then you look at the next 15% of your time and you're like, okay, is this something that I can give to somebody else? Can I push this down? Can I create some process around this that can correct it? Or do I need to keep eating it for a little bit until it's enough that it's a full-time role? And so fundamentally, I see the entrepreneur as...
the many-headed fractionalist that you continue to pull things under your plate until you have enough that you can ship it out to somebody else full-time. And being aware of, again, the one resources we have, which is time, how we're allocating it so we get the highest return. And so if you look at the stack of time as an entrepreneur, we are always getting paid for our time.
Kind of the premise of the whole talk here is that we trade our time for dollars. And so we always... The whole process of entrepreneurship is continuing to trade up what you're trading your time for. And that's like at the most foundational level, that is all we're doing. And so to take this as a hypothetical, your business doesn't need you.
Right now, you spend whatever hours you do working and you do these things. Imagine a world where you could hire somebody who could spend the same amount of time doing all of that stuff. Now you own the business. And whatever you have to pay them, you take out of the profit and everything else is now distributions that you own as an owner. That's it.
Now, the entrepreneur who's mission-driven then stacks their plate with even more things that they need to do and then just continues that process over and over again. Now, this is the part where the pushback comes, which is no one can do what I can do. And I want to say, you're right, and. If I wanted to, let's say you're a unicorn. So we can imagine this mythical unicorn.
We've got this white horse, got the horn, tail, everything. And the little pixie flies for the magic that's around it. Okay. You probably won't find a unicorn, but you can find a white horse. And you can find a rhinoceros to get the horn. And you can find some fireflies to give you the twinkles. And so you may not hire one person who has all of these things, but you can hire three.
And then those three together can potentially do everything that you're doing better because it's all they're doing with all of their time. And breaking it up into basically understanding that you're not going to find that unicorn, but you just break it into pieces and then you can partition it out to people who can just do those parts makes it a lot easier
more manageable from an emotional level to think like, I'm never going to find this. Of course you're not. And that's okay because we can find, we can solve for parts of our calendar. And fundamentally, when you buy back the time, you can then do what you're like, basically take the next step in the business.
Adapte. And I think that it's important. So, you know, Google has their, you know, I think Sergey like solved this mathematically, but I think they called it 70-20-10. So 70% of resources get allocated to the core business, do more of what we're currently doing. 20% goes to adjacent businesses.
So things that are high likelihood success that are, you know, one step removed from the existing core business. And then 10% goes to moonshots. Totally like off the path, like let's just see, maybe we'll get 100 extra turn. We probably will lose on most of these. He proved it with math. He's smarter than I am. But fundamentally, that is the concept of more, better, new.
And so that's one of the chapters in the Leeds book, which is, okay, now that you have the core four, right? These are the four things that you can do. You can post content, you can run ads, you can do outreach to strangers, you can do outreach to people you know. Those are the four things any person can do to advertise. the first thing you do is you do more.
And for most small businesses, they're doing so little and think they're doing so much. And it's a huge gap in understanding. And so I'll tell this story that's probably the easiest way to explain it, which is when I had my first gym, I called up a mentor. He had 20 locations. I said, how do you advertise? He said, I use flyers. I said, okay. So I put 300 flyers out. It didn't work.
I called him back. I was upset. I said, WTF. He said, slow down. What was your test size? And I said, what do you mean? He's like, well, your test size. So like, I mean, the 300 wasn't the only amount that you put out. And I was like, well... Yeah. He's like, well, our test size is 5,000 flyers.
And then once we have a winner, then we do 5,000 every day in terms of flyers that they put on cars to get people in. And so over a 30-day period, he would be putting out 150,000 flyers. And over a 30-day period, I put out 300.
And so he was in a very real way doing whatever the math is there, but like 300 times or whatever, I don't know, a lot more, 500 times the math, sorry, 500 times the flyers that I was. And of course he was getting a better result. And so one of the fundamental misconceptions of small businesses is that they mistake low volume for volatility.
Meaning, if you're not sure where your sales come from and you get one sale here and then two weeks later you get another sale and it feels sporadic, it feels volatile. Well, there is a certain amount of advertising activity that is occurring over that period of time. And we know that a month passes and you get one to two sales.
And so the companies that are in your space that are doing one to two sales a day, take what you're doing in a month and they do that every day. And I know that you can get this, and I want to put this in context here. I hear, I would like to build a personal brand. And I say, cool. And then I ask, how much content are you putting out?
Showing 241–260 of 413 · page 13 of 21
← Previous
Next →