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you still get much of your plans accomplished. Next
week, start over and try to improve.
There are many excellent resources on time manage-
ment available. I’ve used several systems over the years
and am fairly disciplined with my time. But the most
effective time system I’ve ever found I didn’t discover
until 2008. At that point, I was well into my career and
enjoyed a significant income. But by adopting this new
set of methods, I doubled my income in just two years.
If you’d like to learn how that system works, you can
purchase Dan Sullivan’s book The Entrepreneurial Time
System® on Amazon. Regardless of how you go about
it, serious planning and discipline with your time will
result in a rapidly growing agency!
Having briefly discussed time planning and man-
agement, let’s come back to my statement that you
should devote half of your time to building your busi-
ness (at least in the early years). I recall a conversation
I had with an agency owner five years after he began
his agency. He was frustrated because he was stuck at
about $200,000 of revenue and he wanted to double
that. The first question I asked him was, “Tell me about
your work week.” As we talked about the things he
was doing, I responded, “With all those things you’re
doing, how many hours a week are you working?” After
a moment’s thought he said, “About fifty.” My reply to
that shocked my young friend when I said, “So you’re
working part-time, and you’re getting part time results.
What’s the problem with that?”
For the business owner, a fifty-hour workweek is a
pretty light schedule. For the founder of a new business,
it’s impossibly short. The first thing you’ve got to plan on
when you’re the only person, or one of just a few people, in
your brand-new business is to work long hours and long
weeks. There is no such thing as work-life balance. That’s