1637 – More time, More money, More freedom with John J D Munn’s John Munn

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now john jd munn john you are found on the web at john jd munn that's m-u-n-n.com you're a business coach mentor and consultant and you focus on time uh the one thing most of us can never get enough of. And time just keeps on ticking. But John, it's great to have you here. Yeah, thank you. It's great to be here, Josh. Thank you very much. Yeah, time, as you said, it's one of those things that it's the thing that people want most, but they use the worst, you know, nobody knows how to use their time properly. So that's something I specialize in, and I help people do more with their time.

1:43Yeah, well, I'm excited to have this conversation. I'd like to review my own use of time and see how I'm doing. But how did you find yourself in this role? Yeah, so as with a lot of people, I guess, it's been a long story. It's not where I expected to start out when I was a kid. But I ran a few businesses over time. So I started with a brewery when I was still at university, still at college. And that brewery went pretty well. I started it with the primary aim of just making lots of money. That's what I thought that I wanted, what would make me happy. The primary path that most people go down, I think.

2:29And eventually I realized that money wasn't really the thing for me. I kept meeting lots of rich people and they were all miserable. They had all the money, they had all this stuff, but they didn't have the time to enjoy it. and I think that's when I realized that yeah there's something wrong here with what I'm focusing on I think I'm focusing on the wrong thing here yeah I want to make money and be comfortable but what's the point in having a business if you don't even have time to enjoy it you know so after I sold the brewery I started looking into this and I started a social enterprise and some other stuff and eventually I started running my businesses and some of which I still run today and I run them on less than 10 hours a week and after you run a business on less than 10 hours a week people start asking you questions and my friends started asking and then their friends started asking I helped them do the same kind of thing and I thought hey I really enjoy this it'd be nice to help other people achieve that kind of lifestyle so now I'm a I do some consulting I still work fewer than 10 hours a week my uh I run an environmental business as well which takes me two or three hours a week to run uh we've got employees but on the consulting side of things I work fewer than 10 hours a week and I help other people get their business their six or seven-figure business running smoothly so that they can work less and make more.

4:03So just last year, I helped 18 people make$24 million more than what they were making before. And I reduced them from an average of a 60-hour working week to now under 20 hours per week. So that's what I do. So when somebody says, well, if you're only working 10, 20 hours a week, what are you doing what are you doing with all that other time? That's always a really interesting question for me. People ask that all the time. It's such a personal thing. What would you do with the time? If you only had to work 10, 20 hours a week, what would you do with your free time? It's probably different to what I would do.

4:44Yeah. No, I got plenty of stuff to keep me busy. I got hobbies. I love spending time with my family. I love doing stuff. I love doing stuff for me. I, you know, I've gotten into gardening, I've got an herb garden, I've got, you know, I get great enjoyment and pleasure out of that. And to me, you know, it's just, it's therapeutic. I love doing that. I love, you know, I, you know, so, so I'm keenly leaning forward. I'd say right now I probably work between 30, 40 hours a week. And I don't want to work more than, you know, I see a lot. There's a question in here somewhere. I, you know, I kind of take your message and I agree.

5:26I think that sounds great. And then I also hear this, you know, kind of this hustle, hustle, hustle type stuff. Not so much from top level leaders, I don't think so much anymore. but how do you kind of compare and contrast those two ideologies? Yeah, they sound diametrically opposed and I'm not sure they actually are. I think they're both trying to achieve the same kind of thing. They're both trying to make you happy. And I think the hustle hustle thing is trying to make you happy by making boatloads of money and going down that route, the traditional making lots of money route. and I think what I am more in favor of is just taking a moment saying okay what actually makes me happy and there absolutely is a place to be working 40 hours a week and if you're doing that and like you love that that type of thing cool man like I'm all for it you know there's no problem with that but let's make sure that those 40 hours that you spend are 40 hours doing things that genuinely makes a difference you know and it's a lot of people think that when you're working 10 20 hours a week that it's like oh you mustn't be doing much and that's not the case it's just you've trimmed the fat you know you've got rid of all that stuff that keeps you busy but that doesn't really deliver results so it's kind of to bring it back to that other question and what would you do at a time is i tend to see with people that i work with that they do those things like their garden and things like that.

6:57And by spending that time doing those things, it makes the work that they do more productive because they're relaxed. They don't make as many mistakes. They're more focused in the work that they do and they feel happier doing it. And so sometimes they work more. So they work 25, 30 hours a week. Sometimes they choose to work less and get more done in that time that they actually work. So I'm not here being like, yeah, let's just do 10 hours. and if you want to scroll on social media or do whatever, cool. I'm more saying, okay, what's the stuff that you do that makes a difference? What's the stuff that has high leverage that you spend an hour on this and it drives 80 % of your results?

7:42What's the 20 % that drives the 80 % of your results? Let's do more of that. Let's cut out all this other stuff. Let's eliminate it, automate it, delegate it, whatever, create systems let's get rid of this other stuff but let's do the stuff that you can do that makes a real difference yeah what might be the first steps uh that that i think any of us could do uh uh regarding if we feel like we are overworked we're just doing way too much it's maybe it was sustainable for a short time but now we're starting to be like you know this just isn't fun anymore Where do we go from here? This is the common position that most people come to me.

8:25This is how they feel when they first come to me a lot of the time. So they feel overworked, overwhelmed, overloaded, really. They've done too much and you can't do that forever. The absolute first step is understanding what it is you actually do. so a lot of people will come and they say oh i've worked 60 hours a week this week or 70 hours a week i'm totally overloaded i said okay um how do you know you work 70 hours a week well this or this or i i work these hours okay during those hours of those 70 hours how many hours did you spend doing this thing like what things did you do during those 70 hours how many hours did you spend doing each one of those things?

9:10And a lot of the time they have no idea. And when you know that, it's super powerful. If you know, hey, I'm spending 10 hours a week on email, for example, or I'm spending five hours a week asking my team and delegating projects or whatever it is that you're doing. If you know how much time you actually spend on that thing, you can make a judgment is that worth that much time why does it take that much time like is there someone else that could do that instead of me is that worth doing in the first place you can ask these kinds of questions and start to improve your own workflow and very very quickly you can start to remove tasks that you just say hey that's total garbage so an example of this is one of my clients runs garages across Canada.

10:07And he was doing roughly 60, 70K per month with it. And he was taking calls from clients. Every single person that booked into that garage, he's the one that took the call and did it. And not only that, is a lot of these clients, some of them were, oh, how are you today? How are things going? I was hoping I could buy some windscreen washer. you know it's like a five dollar sale and when we looked into his time he was working 70 70 hours a week he was spending so much time on these calls and on these little things and it was returning such little value to him but also the clients they didn't really need to speak with him when we changed that and finally eliminated some of those calls and some of them were held handed by somebody else the clients were very happy speaking with somebody else about it so as we looked into his time and we said hey this big chunk here we can get rid of that so to summarize like a very simple answer of okay where do we start when we're overwhelmed you start by tracking your time.

11:21What do you do? Where is that time going? What tasks take up your time? That is the number one piece of advice I can give to anybody who runs a business in general, but also when you're overwhelmed, track your time. What do you do? How long does it take? How long are you working for? How does it work? You know, until you know that you can't change anything. Yeah. What are some things that you see that maybe leaders may undervalue the importance of that they may not be doing enough in their week to week schedule because maybe they're just kind of busy putting out fires constantly?

12:07yeah firstly just about that that time side of things this is something that leaders don't know enough if i asked you how much you made last year you could probably give me a reasonably accurate answer of how much you made last year if i asked you how many hours you worked last year or what those hours were spent doing you probably have no idea you know time is your most valuable resource and it's something you can never get back. What you spend your time on in the business is critically important to whether or not that business grows. Have you spent that time training your staff or hiring the right people or doing outreach or sales or making the systems work properly?

12:47All these kinds of things. I think that is the most criminally undervalued thing when people run their business. They do not value their time. They do not factor their time into their costs. They do not think about how they're spending their time. That is what's massively undervalued here. Yeah. And how do you work with folks today? What does that look like? Yeah. So in a few different ways. So I work primarily with people on a personal basis. So people, we have video sessions regularly, normally one-to-one. and we talk about what your specific situation is at the moment, what the roadblocks are and how we can overcome that.

13:35So at the end of every session, you come away with a simple step-by-step action plan, you know, exactly what you need to do next to have the most impact, to optimize your week, to improve your business. What thing is going to take you the step forward? So that is the primary way that I work with people. And then that is complemented by group sessions, such as masterminds and other training materials I've got as well. Yeah. And what stage business? Tell me more about like who normally you're working with. yeah i'm normally working with service-based businesses primarily i do work with some products but service-based businesses usually in the 250 000 to 2 million dollar range annual revenue that's kind of the the primary people that i'm working with a lot of the time we're taking people from being a small startup style business where the founder is doing a lot of the stuff themselves they are kind of the bottleneck in the system and then we grow it to a point where this the business runs smoothly the founder can go away on holiday for two months and the business isn't going to collapse you know that the business becomes a real business it's not a job it's not freelancing it's an actual business so i take people from from that early stage to to being a real business.

15:06Yeah. Your website, johnjdmun.com. What resources do you have there for folks that want to dig more into this topic? Yeah. So the first place to check out that I'd recommend is the TimeSense Toolkit. You can find that right on the website or it's johnjdmun.com forward slash time sense and senses in your see smell here etc and that is a a step-by-step guide so you can perform your first time audit so you know how to track your time what tools to use how to analyze your time after as well so you can see where the gaps are and where the the easiest wins so a lot of the time you can go from working those 60 hours a week to 40 hours a week within a month just by getting actually looking into your time and doing those quick wins yeah um and let's talk about maybe some um i want to ask you about maybe some very very typical time sucks uh one of them may be social media and we may justify it uh by saying oh you know i'm just out here you know getting visibility for the company.

16:20What, I guess, you know, how could you, are there any tools that you'd recommend or just any way that we can start to, if we find ourselves just wasting way too much time and if you were to have an honest conversation and say, well, how productive does that make you feel or how much joy and satisfaction does that give you? And then they kind of shrug their shoulders and go, you know, probably not much. What would you rather do at the time, I'd much rather do that. But yet, you know, I still feel myself kind of defaulting to just, you know, kind of doom scrolling or just mindlessly scrolling. How can we disrupt that?

16:59That's a common thing for people. I think, firstly, there's no shame in doom scrolling in doing these kinds of things. Like many of the smartest people in the world work for companies like Facebook, et cetera. And their job is to make that as addictive as possible. So, you know, the system's kind of against you with that. On the flip side, you said something really interesting there. Does this bring you joy? And if not, what would you rather do? I think people don't appreciate the fact that if you just take that scrolling out, it leaves a vacuum. And that vacuum is going to be filled with something.

17:36And that thing that it's filled with is probably just going to be the easiest thing for you to grab. so it's going to be filled with you watching tv or something like that something easy because it's difficult sometimes to think about it i think the most valuable tool for overcoming that is your calendar and just using your calendar and scheduling things and saying hey i want to do this thing and sign up for it in advance you know have it this is a hard commitment i'm going to go do this thing i'm gonna go play badminton or i'm gonna play guitar at this time or whatever that is is super valuable to prevent the scroll like just just mindlessly scrolling i would say that's kind of a very strong place to start there making sure that your calendar aligns with your priorities and that you're not just leaving time that a time vacuum that's going to be filled with doom scrolling.

18:36Yeah. All right. Well, good. Well, again, your website, johnjdmun.com. And again, there's a button right there. There's free clarity call. You have the other, you have a time sense toolkit and anything else that we missed, John, that you'd recommend for next steps? I know I kind of asked you about this earlier, but just want to underline this before we say goodbye. Yeah, next steps is just you as a person, the listener here, just track your time. I promise you that it will be one of the most valuable things that you ever do and you will be shocked what you find. It takes a little bit of time to set it up, but it's so, so worth it.

19:20I very strongly recommend that you do that. Awesome. All right, John J.D. Munn, your website, johnjdmunn.com. John, thanks for joining us. Thanks, Josh. It's been a pleasure.

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