Free Time Through Smarter Systems with Jenny Blake: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down free time through smarter systems. To draw these value bombs, I brought to Jenny Blake in the EO Fire Studios. Jenny is an author and podcaster who helps entrepreneurs move from friction to flow through smarter systems powered by delightfully tiny teams. And today's value bombs are how you can measure things in your business and do nothing about them and how to learn to work the process rather than working on the tasks and how to do less and focus on the one thing that you can build a smart system around that can give you revenue, ease, and joy, and oh, so much more.

0:43And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Jenny and our sponsors. Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession-resilient businesses, and create legacy income for their families through franchising. Get started today with Franocity's Franchise Funding Guide, packed with real-world strategies to launch your business without draining your savings. Visit franocity.com. That's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y dot com. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software.

1:24Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Jenny, or as I say, J-A-B, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? I'm so delighted to be back. It's our 10-year listener-versary that we get to connect again. So thank you for having me, JLD. I've been thinking a lot lately about this line, what gets measured gets managed. We hear it all the time. I disagree. I think you can measure things in your business and do nothing about them.

2:09And the same for team members. Everyone can track metrics, stare at the metrics, report the metrics. That does not mean that they're improving. So I believe that what you design smarter systems and split tests for gets managed and improved, but just measuring it isn't going to do anything. And that's kind of the theme, Fire Nation of what we'll be talking about today as we go through free time through smarter systems. Because as I mentioned in the intro, Jenny's third book, Free Time, launches March 22nd of 2022. And we actually have a very special URL for you at the end. So stick around for that for sure.

2:47And I do want to start off with a bang, Jenny, because you have something called the Fiji test. Now, I will say I was fortunate enough to go to the island of Fiji a few years ago to hang out with some cool peeps, but I didn't know there was a test behind it. What the heck is this all about? Well, we can also rename it the PR test. And here's the thing. I've been in business now 11 years. And in the early days, I was so afraid of running out of money or being the bottleneck in my business, getting sick, having something go wrong. And I used to ask myself, what if I get hit by a bus? What's going to happen?

3:22And I kept saying, what if I get hit by a bus over and over? And I thought this is a terrible reality to manifest. It's a terrible thought to constantly obsess over. But it was a driving question for developing a more scalable business and smarter systems. So early on, I renamed it the Fiji test or the Puerto Rico test, which is that if any one of us were to get whisked away to an island vacation with no devices and no ability to tell the team. Could anybody else step in and do the job? And this happens, JLD. I don't have to tell you. Team members get sick of frigging global pandemic hits. Maybe the owner needs a creative pause.

4:00We don't always plan these absences or a team member has to leave on very short notice. And the pop quiz is, do you have the right documentation and systems in place so that each one of us is making ourselves replaceable every day? in the sense that if we get whisked away to that island, can someone step in and do the job without tremendous confusion and heavy lifting? See, that's crazy because back in 2017, we had a hurricane coming our way and I was like, this hurricane is gonna be a doozy. And I was going to stay on the island because I was just like, well, I just bought this house. I need to be here to protect it or at least when the hurricane passes through to quickly repair things and get all the water out, et cetera.

4:43but last minute it looked like it was going to be such a disaster, which turned out being that we got off the islands and we were not able to get back on the island for almost three months. And the reason I bring this up is because if I had decided to stay, which I barely was able to get off and I finally made the decision because I waited so long, I would have been stuck on the island with no power, no communication, no phones were working for months. And I really scratched my head and wonder what would have happened to my business during that time. I mean, I do have great virtual assistants, but if both Kate and I were stuck on this island, there'd be problems.

5:20There would be some pretty serious problems on that. And that didn't make me really decide to say, Hey, how can I make my business more hurricane proof, more Fiji Island test proof as we're talking about here. And it's something that you need to think about because it's so, so critical. So what's maybe like one or two things, Jenny, that people can start asking themselves to better prepare themselves for a situation that could happen? For starters, having an externalized business mind is what I call it. So no piece of data about your business should live in your head as the owner, nor should it live in any team members' minds.

5:57I use Notion for this. It has replaced Google Docs, Sheets, Airtables, Evernote. I had a whole Franken-string of systems that is now in Notion. So the first thing you can do is get in the habit of writing things down. And probably JLD, most of your listeners know about SOPs and standard operating procedures. But there's so much more to that of just how do you run every aspect of the business, not having to remember links. I use TextExpander for all kinds of stuff, links, guided email responses, the hex codes for the brand colors of my business. There are so many ways to capture information about the business and the operations that even if a hurricane does not hit, you know, what you described is such an interesting flip of the island test of what happens when the power goes out or you have to be out of your home for three months, that we can all sleep better at night knowing if something happens, if I need to step away, it's all there and I'm ready.

6:56And then when people do come in, they know where to find things. So I have found it also makes onboarding new team members so much easier because any question they could think to ask, it's already captured. Let's talk about scaling systems, because we all want more time while simultaneously scaling our business. I mean, we want our businesses to be growing, but we don't want to be these little keyboard rats, which are just hunched over our keyboards, tap, tap, tapping away for 12 hours a day. I mean, we eventually want, you know, to live a lifestyle as well. I mean, that's why people are going down this entrepreneurial path.

7:29Is it possible to do these things, scaling your business while having more free time? Well, you are featured in free time twice for this exact expertise. And I thank you, JLD, for living by example, because you do two things. And I know this isn't a plant for me to just celebrate you, but I'm going to do it anyway. I'll take it. You talk about batching. You're like the most epic batcher that I've ever met in terms of consolidating your interview days for a show to just a couple days a month and then creating free time with the rest of it. But the thing that's more surprising about you, that is what I celebrate you for in the book, is that growth at all costs is not really what we're aiming for here.

8:10You have hit over 100, you can tell us the exact number, consecutive months of six-figure profits in your business, and yet you are happy with your delightfully tiny team and your setup. I think it's so important for us to realize that, yes, we want to scale in the sense that we want to decouple time from money. That's something very familiar to your listeners. But we also want to create scalable products, scalable systems in the business. We want to be ready for a big break. If one of you listening gets on EO fire, you want to be ready for the influx of traffic that's going to come your way. And so scaling for me is about not always growing in terms of the size of the team, but it is thinking about how to scale the amount of inputs and effort that goes into the business, your zone of fire, if you will, how much can come out.

8:58And then what are you going to be happy with where you don't put pressure on yourself to always have the revenue be up and to the right? Like, I think you have found such a brilliant sweet spot of totally abundant revenue and totally abundant time without continuing to increase the complexity of your team. There's a lot that I want to talk about here because I really do believe that if Jenny's amazing photographic face was not on this book cover, that it honestly could be mine. Because like this is the lifestyle business that I wanted to create when she wrote this book. I mean, it really is because I really love this concept of being able to do the work you want to do when you want to do it and then to explore your other passions, desires and fun when you want to do that as well.

9:44So when you use the word batching, of course, you know, like one thing that I love to preach from a pulpit is batching like a baller. Like I'm a big believer in just batching like a baller because when you do that, it frees up so much time. Those other 29, 30, 26 days of the month, whatever it is you're doing to do other things. And it doesn't mean not work per se, but it can mean work on other things. And four years in a row, pre-pandemic, Kate and I went on 75 to 90 day European trips where I had every one of, you know, like my 90 to 100 Entrepreneurs on Fire episodes. It's prerecorded, scheduled to go out.

10:24The show notes pages were all ready. And I could just go on that trip and say, man, even if, God forbid, this plane goes down into the ocean on the way over there, like there's 90 more days of entrepreneurs on fire going out, whether people want it or not, like it's just happening. And I could just enjoy the vacation for what it was. And going back to the delightfully small teams, I haven't always had a delightfully small team and I paid for it. There's been a couple of times where Kate and I have looked up and we've been like, how'd this happen? And there's like this creep that happens where all of a sudden we have like 12, 13 people on our payroll, which doesn't sound like a lot for some people I know.

10:58But for us, it was like it wasn't where we wanted to be. And then we were able to, over time, take it down to where we're at now. And we've been for years now, which is myself and Kate and three full-time virtual assistants. And it just works delightfully for us. And we love that. And one thing that you mentioned about the 100 months, we're actually now officially at 101 months in a row of over$100 ,000 of profit in our business is we noticed that the smaller our team is, the higher our overall net profit is to gross revenue, which is a percentage that we track every single month right at the top of our income reports.

11:35we had that number. And it's gone from the low to high 50s when we had a bigger team to now the high 80s. And even the last few months, we've been in the 90s, which is absolutely insane. So you need to think about this, Fire Nation, when you're building the team you want. And we have so much more to talk about with Jenny when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Okay, let's talk about a platform that's completely changing how entrepreneurs are running their business, and they are also our featured partner, HighLevel. If you're an entrepreneur, coach, agency, or course creator looking to grow faster and smarter, HighLevel is the all-in-one platform that replaces your entire tech stack.

12:15Seriously, think ClickFunnels, Calendly, MailChimp, Kajabi, and even your CRM all rolled up into one powerful white label solution. You can build funnels, send SMS and email campaigns, schedule appointments, manage pipelines, run memberships, and even launch your own branded mobile app. It's drag and drop simple, incredibly customizable, and built for serious growth. My favorite part, you can resell high level under your own brand. That means recurring revenue, loyal clients, and total control. So whether you're tired of duct taping tools together or ready to start offering high value services with ease, high level is your unfair advantage.

12:51On top of it all, their support team is second to none and has your back every step of the way. Seriously, every question that pops up, they will have your answer waiting. And if you visit my special partnership link, you'll get a free trial. So visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial and see why thousands of businesses are switching. That's highlevelfire.com, where marketing, sales, and automation finally come together. High level, join the revolution. Starting your own business can feel intimidating. Where do you start? How do you grow? when will you start generating revenue? All valid questions.

13:27If you love the idea of creating wealth and freedom, but you're not sure if starting from scratch is the way to go, then I'm excited to tell you about Franocity. Franocity has helped hundreds of people leave unfulfilling jobs, invest in recession-resilient businesses, and creates legacy income for their families through franchising. Their clients come from all walks of life, executive veterans, first-time buyers, and multi-unit investors, and their mission is simple, to remove the guesswork, reduce the risk, and help everyday people become business owners through franchising. Don't know anything about franchising?

13:57That's the beauty of it. Franocity provides personalized one-on-one coaching at no cost to you, and they have access to over 600 franchise brands. And Franocity just doesn't help you pick a franchise. They help you understand the business model, investment risk, scalability, and operational reality. Get started today with Franocity's franchise funding guide packed with real-world strategies to launch your business without draining your savings. Visit franocity.com, that's F-R-A-N-O-C-I-T-Y.com to download your free franchise funding guide today. Now, Jenny, you trained me in our pre-interview chat, but I still may get it a little bit wrong.

14:34The Scythian system. What is it? How is it? What does it apply to what we're talking about? Tell me more. Sisyphus was a Greek mythological king. He was a trickster, punished for cheating death. So the myth is that Zeus sentenced him to an eternity of futility, rolling a giant boulder uphill, only to have it roll all the way back down once he got close to the top. So I would consider Sisyphean systems are anywhere in the world or your business or your life where you're participating in never ending unwinnable games, essentially, and to call it a game is even a stretch. So for example, email, email inboxes, or all the inboxes multiplied across social media platforms.

15:18In a sense, they're Sisyphean because no matter how good you get, like JLD, no matter how good you get at responding to email, you have no control how much comes in. And in fact, the better you get at answering email, the more emails are probably going to come in. So it's really important. Another metaphor I use for thinking about where in our business we're stuck in Sisyphean or never-ending systems. Think of the game, The Floor is Lava. And there's a Netflix TV show that released in 2020 about exactly this. So when you're kids, the floor is lava. If you step on the floor, you're out. So you have to jump from pieces of furniture because the floor is lava.

15:54The equivalent in our businesses is where are you working in a task? Like you're in your email inbox versus, so AKA in the lava versus building the blocks, the scaffolding that's going to get you out of it. So that's the difference between working in a task versus on a process. So JLD, if you sat in front of your inbox and instead of just never ending answering emails, you actually said, what are the categories of emails I get? I'm sure you've done this. I know you have. What are the categories? What is the process for these different categories? Who's going to respond to different types of emails that come in?

16:27What's our turnaround time? What's high priority? What is it? And you design the scaffolding. You design the system. Then over time, it will become more manageable. And that growth to profit ratio that you talked about, that net revenue to gross revenue, grows because you are getting more efficient. But if you just stay stuck in the tasks, even charting out content, if you had continued with your early format of interviewing, you wouldn't have had 90 days. Like it's such an interesting, the hurricane test or the traveling through Europe test. You had already designed with a positive vision in mind, a 90 day plan.

17:04You knew how to do that. So with your hurricane test, you would have already designed the approach to know how to do that. And that's what I'm talking about here is that intentional because you very intentionally designed your batching systems because I would consider you high net freedom. Like, yes, you are earning very abundantly, but you designed those systems to give you maximum freedom. There's something that was coming up for me while you were talking that is something that I apply to my business that a lot of people probably don't even think that much about. But for me, it's something that I think about every day because it's these small things that I've done over the past decade that have added up to massive amounts of time, energy, and just mental bandwidth freedom.

17:44And one of those things is like a lot of times when you have a team and like say you're included on this email and there's like yourself, somebody on your team is included and somebody else is included. and then of course your original sender and that sender you know sends the email to to all of you guys and then you know the person who needs to handle it handles that email i would have that person on the team would always reply all when they would go through and finish that task to let everybody on that email chain know that hey like this has been done and at first i was like i needed that i thought because i was like a little bit of a micromanager and so i needed to have that proof that that task was actually done.

18:25But over time, I'm like, wait a second. I've trained my people amazing. My team's amazing. They're better at their jobs than I am. So why am I micromanaging this? And then I just did this little thing where I said, hey, when you reply that you've accomplished that task or given the person what they need, don't include me on that email. Now that sounds like a little thing, but think about my inbox now. When I'm going through my inbox in the morning, maybe my person on my team's replied to like 10 people. That's meaning that I'm opening the email. I'm literally, or I'm getting the email in my inbox.

18:57I'm opening the email. I'm having to kind of like mentally go back and be like, oh, this person wanted that. Okay. Yep. My team member accomplished that and it's done. All right, good. And then go to the next email. That may not be a lot of time in that moment. It might be a minute or even 30 or 45 seconds in that moment, but multiply that by 10. Now we're like at 10 or 15 minutes. multiply that mental bandwidth me having to go back and actually just regurgitate in my mind what that whole thing was about And then multiply that by 365 days this stuff adds up massively. So now My team is not allowed to cc me on anything because I trust them And now they even take more pride because they know that i'm not checking up on them So they're like I really got to make sure i'm on this and get this right and I see so many less emails.

19:45I have so much less bandwidth being tugged at because of that mental stuff And it's just, this is the way, Fire Nation, over time, you can continue to improve your overall situation. And you actually do believe, Jenny, that business owners need to relinquish their roles as, quote unquote, chief everything officer and all-seeing question answerer. Why do you believe this and how do we do it? I think that we all know we should delegate. Again, it's not new for your listeners. But it's hard, as you described, it's hard to kind of release your grip of all the little things or think we need to be CC'd and in the loop and in the know.

20:23So chief everything officer is that stage of business where we're still in charge of everything. And it's one thing to delegate tasks, but it's another to delegate responsibility. And that's what you did with your email. Instead of you delegating for your team to check things off, they were responsible for the outcomes and for corresponding with the person until the job was done. And so one thing I also want to highlight about your example is you noticed an area of friction in your business, in your day, and then you solved for it. So one way to relinquish our role as chief everything officer is to notice where is there friction?

20:56Where are you the bottleneck? Are you bored? Are you burnt out? Are you buried by bureaucracy? I call those the burdensome bees. We've got to notice those things and start to hand those roles over to other people, not the tasks, the role. and really clearly communicate what are the outcomes that that person is responsible for. And as you said, try to get out of the way. What I realized, even after I had started doing that and delegating and building my own delightfully tiny team, I was still what I call the all-seeing question answer. I was so proud to have a team and to be delegating, but they would all ping me with questions all day long.

21:34And what I noticed was, I call it question ping pong. They would just ping a question over to me and there's this famous management book of, gosh, now the one minute manager meets the monkey. That's the title. Whether it's a ping pong ball or a monkey, the parable of this management book is that people come into the manager's office with a monkey on their back. That's a question, a challenge, a problem. And then they leave it on the manager's desk and they walk out of the office. And at the end of the day, the manager has a zoo on his desk or hers or theirs. So at the end of the day, you, the owner, are stuck with everybody's monkeys.

22:08And when you are the all-seeing question answerer and you take pride in answering everyone's questions, what is going to happen is people ping their question over to you and then it's on your desk now. So I had to be very deliberate telling my team, don't ask me questions. Make recommendations and give me a deadline. And if I don't answer by that date, keep going. And I will take the consequences of me not answering in time. but don't let me be the bottleneck. Don't let me hold things up. And also don't just ping me an open-ended question. Make a suggestion, make your recommendations, and then I'll weigh in as an advisor, but I cannot be the all-seeing question answerer.

22:45I think that's a fantastic point at the end there, Fire Nation. No open-ended questions. I mean, they're the people in the actual trenches. They should hopefully have the best solution or at least an idea of a solid solution to get that process rolling going forward. And this all leads into your third book, Jenny, which is Free Time, launching March 22nd of 2022. Talk to us about Free Time. We've gone through a lot of the processes that you talk about within the book. Of course, there's many, many, many more. And so honored that I'm, you know, mentioned twice in this book because it's something that I believe in so much.

23:25So take us there with Fire Nation. I know you have a special URL for us as well. In honor of you, JLD, and our 10 years of ongoing conversations, I would love to give all of you listening early access to the audiobook. I'm a longtime EO Fire listener as well. And I always love when you have interesting guests and fun little freebies. You do a great job with that. So listeners, you can visit itsfreetime.com slash fire. And just submit if you pre order the hardcover, you get early access to the audiobook via private podcast feed. And you can gift audiobook access to a friend. So we just keep spreading the love of free time.

24:01Spread the love of free time. I mean, if you spread the love of free time to people who you love, Fire Nation, guess what? You get to spend more time with those you love. And I think that just makes this world a better place. And let's end with a bang. What's the one key takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about from our chat today? Do less. in the early days of starting an online business, everyone was saying diversify your income, multiple streams of income, all these dreams about passive income. And at one point I ended up with 12 or 13 streams of income.

24:36Fire Nation, that's 13 different areas of the business of complexity, of process, of systems, of things that get out of date, of a rickety house falling apart. Like it's too much. Yes, it's good to have diversified streams of income, but I would say at this point, pick three. That's it. Focus, double down. John always talks about your zone of fire. Really look and say, what is the one thing that if I did this and this alone and I built systems and structure around it would have the biggest impact on the business? And I also like to ask that's at the intersection of revenue, ease, and joy. And that yes, we can prioritize abundant time and abundant earning.

25:17They are not mutually exclusive as our society would have us believe. So many powerful value bombs here, Fire Nation. It is time for you to choose your focuses, to choose your zone of fire. I love that you talk about how you've gone from 13 revenue streams down to maybe three. I mean, I look at the evolution of our income report. We have a bar chart, not a bar chart, but one of those circle graphs or a pie chart actually is what it's called. And that shows you like how much percentage of each one of our revenue streams. It used to be like seven or eight kind of all evenly matched. And I was kind of happy about that because I thought that was the right thing.