2435 - Farming Your Business for Freedom and Profit with Tap The Potential's Dr. Sabrina Starling

0:03Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. If you're committed to growing your business by serving audiences with generosity and real expertise, you're in the right place. This is a daily 15-minute show featuring leaders who believe real impact comes from generosity, not hype, which means as a listener, you're going to get the good stuff. In fact, we created podverified.com to give thoughtful leaders like you free tools to show up better on podcast stages like this one. That includes your free podverified score, free podverified guest training, a free media kit builder, and so much more. It's the first ecosystem of its kind built by podcasters who genuinely want to help guests thrive and grow in podcasting.

0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it's Dr. Sabrina Starling. Dr. Sabrina, you are a podcaster. You are the founder of Tap the Potential. You're found on the web at tapthepotential.com. Your show is called Profit by Design. So for our friend listening, you can just do a quick search. We have the direct link to your show, over 400 episodes. Congratulations. Your book is The Four-Week Vacation, The Entrepreneur's Ultimate Guide to Taking Your Life Back from Your Business. What great timing. Dr. Sabrina, thank you so much for joining us.

1:32I'm delighted to be here with you, Josh. Well, before we get into your superpowers, I understand you're going to an auction tomorrow. I absolutely love when I can have a guest. It's got a really unique hobby or kind of thing that they do outside of work. And you do. Tell us about the farm. So, yeah, I'm an accidental farmer and we have 30 goats, three horses, two Anatolian shepherds, two barn cats, an Irish wolfhound and a schnauzer. The Irish wolfhound and the schnauzer live in our house and they they like to pretend to be farm dogs. But I tomorrow I am taking goats to auction. And when I say I'm an accidental farmer, my husband, Ned, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly a couple of years ago.

2:25And the farm was something fun that he started for our children to learn entrepreneurial skills. So they're very much a part of buying, selling, marketing. They negotiate sales. They're learning all the things. um when he passed away somebody had to step up and make sure the goats were vaccinated and um you know everything needed to be done to take care of the animals and so I trial by fire I learned how to drive a trailer um how to back a trailer how to load goats and my daughter is on the ranch team at Oklahoma State University so I've supported her in developing her horsemanship skills I've gotten a horse my youngest daughter is learning to ride I'm we're doing trail riding so these are I truly am walking the talk in terms of building a business that supports your life at Tap the Potential we believe work supports life not the other way around if I didn't have my business set up the way I have set it up all these years I wouldn't have been able to be there for my family for myself when Ned passed away I was able to take six weeks off fully unplugged to be there with my family.

3:40My team ran everything. I have A players who stepped up, even took over the podcast. And as I was sharing with you, we've never missed an episode in six years. We've recorded and dropped an episode every week. Well, I was in no place to podcast when I was dealing with everything that was happening after I lost Ned. And my team member said, I've got it. Just hand over the SOPs and your Asana project for the podcast, and I'll take it and run with it. And she has. And now I'm the co-host on my own podcast. So I get to be more, you know, just sharing and teaching now. And that's what I really love.

4:20And this is what I really believe in for us as business owners. When we start these businesses, when you're in the startup phase, like that, the business just takes over your life. It's, it's grueling. You and you and I were talking about that, what you're going through in some aspects with your new startup that you're doing. And we have to transition out of that and really start focusing on where are our greatest gifts that what do we have to offer this business. And what I have learned is every time I hold on to something, I'm creating an artificial glass ceiling in my business for my leaders.

4:59They can't elevate in the business because I hold on to things and think only I can do these things. Well, when we let go, and sometimes we're forced to let go, we learn, oh my gosh, other people have unique gifts and talents too. And sometimes they do things better. A lot of times they do things better than us in the business. So when I started my business over 20 years ago, I was very, I was burnt out from another job that I'd had. And I was very clear. I wanted to have a business that supported me as a mother. And I made a commitment that I would only work 25 hours a week. And I would grow the business on 25 hours a week.

5:38I didn't tell any of my business owner clients that because they were all working 60 hours or more a week, seven days a week, you know, evenings, weekends. But I was quietly just doing it in 25 hours. And what I was doing is I was focusing on every day, if I can only get one thing done in a given day, that's going to move this business forward. What is that highest value activity that will make everything else easier or unnecessary? And that's how I would start my day. And I would try to do an hour or two. And I started calling it my$10 ,000 an hour activity because it was so easy to give away the time on my calendar.

6:21A client would need something, something would go wrong, and I would be sucked into the weeds of everything again. And my best intention, I'm sure you felt this, Josh, like you start the day with the best intentions of this is what I'm going to accomplish today. And you get to the end of the day, that didn't get done. And you put out 100 fires along the way. And meanwhile, you're exhausted. And then the other thing that I was doing, and maybe you can relate to this, is I was beating myself up at the end of the day, like, oh, Sabrina, you're a terrible business owner, you didn't do those things that you were supposed to do.

6:57And so as I started thinking about my time that I was working on on the business, doing things that would set us up for growth and scalability and identifying that as$10 ,000 an hour time and blocking it that way on my calendar, now all of a sudden it was much harder to blow past that time and respond to emails and put out fires. It was much harder to give that time away. And even if there was a crisis that came up that pulled me out of my$10 ,000 an hour time, if it was on my calendar and I had to re-block it and move it, I saw that it was happening more. It was happening like 70 % of the time and then 80 % of the time and 90 % of the time.

7:41And that's the beauty of$10 ,000 an hour activities. We don't have to execute it perfectly a hundred percent of the time for it to be effective for us to grow our business. As long as we're doing 80 % of the time of our$10 ,000 an hour activity, we are doing things that are moving the needle and our businesses will be stronger and better a year from now because we did that hour of$10 ,000 an hour activity on that given day. And so I created a chart for myself of these$10 ,000 an hour activities. And what I did is I identified, well, when I'm spending my time in the business and I'm working so hard, what is the value of that time?

8:28And so I identified what are$10 an hour activities, $100 an hour activities,$1 ,000 an hour activities, and$10 ,000 an hour activities. And then I printed this chart out and I laminated it and I put it on the wall behind my computer monitor so that every time I would look up from being in the weeds, I would fall on that chart And I would have to be confronted and ask myself, was I doing$10 ,000 an hour activity or wait, oh, was that$10 an hour work? And so talk about creating natural accountability for me. That really helped me get so much more intentional with my time. But then the crazy thing happened as I started delegating more and really getting intentional about making more and more of my time,$10 ,000 an hour activity, that meant I was growing my team and I was delegating to them.

9:26And then I was hearing things from them. Like I can't do any more. My I'm overloaded. I have so much on my plate. What do you want me to stop doing? Because I'm doing, I've got too much. And so, you know, the saying about things roll downhill, there's, there's a bad word in there, but things rolled. Um, that's what I had done to my team. And I thought, oh my gosh, they need this$10 ,000 an hour thinking just like I do. So I started teaching them and I said, you know, and here's the thing, we all do this when we delegate, we give things away and we forget how much we've put on our different team members and they are doing things.

10:08Like I have one team member who's been with me 20 years. If we didn't repeatedly review what she's doing, she might be doing tasks that were outdated from 20 years ago. And so we have to constantly have our team members evaluate how they're spending their time doing time audits and looking at are they doing their highest and best value for the business. And so, by the way, I want to give the link to the chart of$10 ,000 an hour activities. It's tapthepotential.com forward slash 10k. So you can download this chart for yourself. And I also recommend you share with your team members, print it out, put it on your wall behind your computer monitor.

10:54But what we want to be doing is identifying the sweet spot of the business. This is where our profitable revenue lives in our businesses. So the 20 % of our clients that are responsible for 80 % of the revenue in the business, and it's not just numbers wise, we also want to look at the best people, the people who we are a joy to serve, they're a joy to work with. So that's the part of that 20%. And that's where we really start to hone in on the sweet spot and then identify what it is that we're delivering in this business that they appreciate most. and we need to hear it directly from them. So there's a process that we teach around how to interview your clients to get to that sweet spot and get it in their own words.

11:42It's never what we, the business owner, think it is. So we want to identify the sweet spot. We want all of our team members to understand the sweet spot of the business. We want all of our team members to understand from their given role how they drive profit. So you either make money or save money. That's how you make profit in a business. Ideally, you're doing both. And they need to be able to say, if I can only get one thing done in a given day or a given week, that makes everything else easier or unnecessary for myself or others, working from my strengths. What is that? So they need to know what that answer is.

12:22And then they need to be able to connect it to how does this serve the sweet spot? and how does this drive the profit in the business? When every member of your team has that dialed in, things are humming along. And what I wanna talk, I wanna share with our listeners here, I really wanna clue you in on something where business owners are getting it wrong day in and day out unintentionally. And that's where we're focusing on how many hours our team members are working. and especially when we have a remote team, are they showing up, clocking in? Are they really present? Stop it. Cut it out. We're undermining our teams.

13:04We need to focus on results and serving the sweet spot, driving profitability. Every team member needs to have a key performance indicator that they own, that they're responsible for. It's a key result and they're responsible for delivering that, no matter if it takes them 40 hours, if it takes 30, if it takes 25, focus on the delivery of the key result and continually improving how that is happening. That is where we can build these businesses. At Tap the Potential, our entire team works 25 hours a week. That's quite amazing. Dr. Sabrina, I'll just speak for myself. Yes, as I said, shared before we started recording, you know, I, yeah, my influence has been a great company.

13:56We've been wonderful clients and we just saw a real opportunity and a need to launch verified, you know, which is our other company. And, and this is not for the, for the, the, the weak need, you know, or the, the, the, the, the weak and hard it is, it's, it can be very, very challenging, particularly, I think, for a lot of founders who have very high and perhaps unrealistic expectations of themselves. And that said, you know, I definitely went through, you know, a sprint. And how can we recover if we are feeling a little bit burnt out? And maybe it's not burnout. Maybe it's just, maybe it's something else.

14:46Maybe you need a vacation. Maybe you really got to fix some stuff in your, you know, in your work and in your business for your role, which it sounds as though you're a big fan of that. But help me and maybe someone else who may be in this situation. You can even hear it in my voice. I feel a little ragged. Yeah, yeah, you are definitely not at your full speed today with how you're feeling. And I am sorry that you're not feeling well. The thing that we have to realize is it's not about taking a vacation because you may take, and I know I've written a book, The Four Week Vacation, so that may sound kind of counterintuitive.

15:24You may take a week long vacation and you might even fully unplug, but then you're going to come right back in and go full speed again. And what's happening, especially when we're operating in the startup phase, is we are going constantly fast, fast, fast. So our adrenaline is kicked in. All the stress hormones are kicked in. And that is slowly eating away at our bodies. I, um, going through the grief process, I'm two years into my grief and the intense stress that I've experienced over two years and the way that it has taken a toll on my body in some very surprising ways. Um, even as I was highly intentional around meditation and massage and yoga and just physically taking care of myself.

16:14So that level of stress is very similar to the level of stress of somebody who's running their business 60, 70 hours a week, go, go, go all the time. And so what I want you to hear is you have to fully unplug daily. Daily. And I know that sounds like, well, I don't know if I could do that. When you set a set time to stop work each day, 3 o 'clock, 5 o 'clock, we don't recommend 7 o 'clock. but somewhere around three to five is a great time to stop. And you fully unplug, you put your phone away, turn it off so that you can be present with yourself and with your family, the people that you care about the most.

16:57You're giving yourself an opportunity to fully recharge every day. So have a start, a set start time for your workday. That's where you turn your phone on and a stop time. And then evenings fully unplugged. Then you go to the weekends. Weekends need to be fully unplugged. Amen. Yes. And so what starts to happen is your creative thinking will open up again. When we are in go, go, go mode, that is squeezed. We are not doing our best creative problem solving. And so we think we're putting out fires and we think we're making things better. Meanwhile, we are missing lots of opportunity over here because stress narrows our focus and our vision and we are missing all the opportunities that we have to make things easier or unnecessary.

17:52So that starts to free up your time and then work on taking a week off fully unplugged and two weeks off fully unplugged and building up to that four week vacation. every time you fully unplug from your business, you're creating an opportunity for the business to become less and less dependent on you and for team members to step up and for systems to be put in place so that the things that you're doing now get delegated out across team members. And, and I know like you're in a startup phase. A lot of our listeners are not in startup phase there. There's bigger businesses. But this happens regardless of what phase you're in.

18:34We think it's always less expensive if we do it ourselves. Yeah. But meanwhile, it's costing you opportunity over here because you don't have the mental space to even notice the opportunities. Dr. Sabrina Starling, your website is tapthepotential.com. If you go to tapthepotential.com forward slash 10K, you can download your chart of the$10 ,000 an hour activities. Highly recommended. You are also, again, your book is The Four Week Vacation Entrepreneurs.