Maximizing Productivity: How To Create High Leverage Activities In Your Day With Shawn Shewchuk [Episode 118]

Maximizing Productivity: How To Create High Leverage Activities In Your Day With Shawn Shewchuk

I got a great guest for you. His name is Mr. Shawn Shewchuk. He has a company called ChangeYourResults.com. He is a gentleman who has built companies up to $133 million. We are going to talk about how you create high-leverage activities in your day. How do you take time and allocate it? How do you get more productivity out of the process? How do you keep the highest efficiency that you possibly can while keeping the highest effectiveness? Whether you are doing it yourself or you are utilizing other people’s talent, how do you do that? How do you make it work for you? How do you do that in as much of a stress-free process as possible? Without further ado, let’s talk to Shawn.

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Shawn, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Why don’t you tell people what you do so we can set the frame for this call?

I had a full head of hair. I know you and I share a barber. The reality is I get the privilege to work with high-achievers’ leadership teams and entrepreneurs throughout the United States and Canada. The focus is most people want to grow, expand, and scale. That is what it comes down to. The interesting part is most so-called entrepreneurs aren’t entrepreneurs. We will get more into that.

Michael E. Gerber in The E-Myth said, “Most entrepreneurs are not entrepreneurs. They are technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure.” The reality behind what he said is true because so many people are lured into the idea of being an entrepreneur because they can set their own schedule and they can do this. I know people who are not entrepreneurs and they will say, “I can’t go away this week. I can’t do something. When you own a company, you can do whatever you want.”

There may be some truth to some of that. But I still have a boss. My boss happens to be our client. When somebody wants to pay you for something, you have to be able to deliver and deliver in spades. We do everything we can to ensure we deliver a wow with every interaction. I don’t know if we are perfect, but that is the objective and goal. It is to deliver that wow.

There are a lot of people that put more time into their business than they put in when they had a job. Part of the role and what we do is look at this and say, “You’re a great electrician, graphic designer, consultant. Whatever it is you are good at, you need to be focused on those things that are high leverage for you. Download, delegate, and automate those things that you should not be doing. Let’s get clear on what you shouldn’t be doing.”

The reality of it is when you hit a certain level, you cannot scale or begin to scale your business without knowing what you shouldn’t be doing. When I ask people about HLA, High Leverage Activities, “How much of what you do throughout your day is high leverage?” They are like, “Everything.” That is not a reality. If I happen to be the owner or president of a company, and I’m the one sitting there hammering the keyboard, doing data entry for the accounting, that is not a high-leverage activity for me. That is a $15 or $20-an-hour job that someone else should be doing. It is an important job, and it needs to happen. That is the general go-to. People say, “I need to make this happen. I need to do this.” They are right, but you, as that leader, don’t need to be doing it.

I always believe that when you become an entrepreneur, sometimes you hire the worst boss you have ever had. That can be yourself. I left the corporate world and did the same thing. I realized quickly as soon as I got out of the corporate world, I was like, “I don’t have a human resources department, a collections department, a marketing department, and a sales engineer. What happened to my sales engineer?” I understood that this is all on me at this moment. I did get caught in that trap of high priority and high leverage do-it-all-yourself type thing. I wasn’t employing high leverage. I was employing low leverage in what I thought was a high priority, which was across the board. Everything was a 9 or a 10 when I filled out the sheet in the beginning.

One of the things that I love about your feedback on this, Shawn, is when people start up or even when they are at a place where they are doing okay in the business and they want to build another initiative. I find that people sometimes revert back to those low leverage activities because of a lack of cashflow. What is your take on that?

The challenge is most businesses operate because there is one person at the helm. If that person happens not to be there or be the face of the business, the business ceases to exist. The whole point in any of us going into business is to achieve freedom. Freedom is defined in three ways, the ability to do what you want, when you want it, and with whom. That encompasses everything. We forget that because human nature and entrepreneurialism have to be done. The entrepreneur syndrome is if I’m not doing it myself, it isn’t done right.

When I speak on stage and I say this, I see people’s faces smile. There are some people who hang their heads because every single person reading this knows what I’m talking about. We get up in the morning, and many people get far behind that their only job on a daily basis is putting out fires. Let’s be clear about something. If your only job is putting out fires, eventually, that fire is going to get out of control and you are going to lose.

What you need to be doing are those things that are high leverage. Let me explain what this means. How do we get to a place where those things we are doing on a consistent basis don’t allow us to have those fires? There are things that are going to happen once in a while. Here is the key to it. Do the things first that you don’t like. Don’t push them to the back of the desk, to the front of the truck, outside of your garage, or wherever you happen to work or your bay, do those things you don’t relish. Get them out of the way first because it is the things that we don’t like that we put on the back burner that we ignore that are going to ignite and become those fires.

Let’s be clear. It is an extremely high and bad use of our energy when all we do is put out fires and we are not leveraging our time in the right way to do those things or take those steps on those high-leverage activities that move us forward from a growth expansion and scaling standpoint. I will share a story with you. I share this a lot.

In 1999, I ended up buying a small little consulting firm. The gentleman who ran it is a nice guy. I still know him quite well, and I’m still friends with him. It is not a guy that could take a business and grow it. He was doing about $100,000 a year. That is not necessarily a lot of money when you have staff, lights to turn on, and all this office space overhead.

He came to me one day and we had 2 or 3 meetings. I ended up buying this little business from him. Between 1999 and 2007, I built it from $100,000 a year. The last fiscal year I sat in that chair, we did $133 million. I remember about $9 million annually, I brought on a CEO to run the company. At that level, I still had some of this entrepreneur syndrome where I felt I had to be touching everything, every piece of paper, every phone call. But at some level, you have to trust.

Here is an interesting thing. The morning after we had gone through a month-long process of interviews, vetting, and all these things with this individual, I showed up on his first full day. I was there at 6:00 AM. He was already there. He looked at me as I came in and I hung my coat up. He said, “What are you doing here, Shawn?” I said, “I’m here to work.” He said, “It is your company. You hired me for a reason. Stay out of my way.”

When this is your baby and someone puts a knife in your chest like that, it’s like, “What the heck?” However, he was right. Together, he and I took that from $9 million all the way to $133 million in a relatively short period of time in a matter of 4 or 5 years. That ended up selling to one of the Big 4. I had big failures and successes but the reality behind this is the hardest thing that I have ever had to do in business was to let go.

In business, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to let go. Click To Tweet

Let’s talk about that part because that is a huge problem. As you and I both know, doing what we do now, it is a huge issue for people. I always try to explain to people, “There is a difference between efficiency and effectiveness.” What I mean by that is a lot of people want to be effective, but they won’t let go. They don’t get the efficiency of being effective.

I don’t know, Shawn, because the first time I heard that story was that person who helped you grow from that point of $9 million to $131 million, that person had skillsets and had things they could do that frankly you weren’t as good at. You had stuff that you were better at than they were at so you worked as a team.

The other side of the coin is when you do bring someone in like that. This is an important distinction. When we start a business, there is a strong emotional attachment. That is our baby. When something goes good, it is a personal success. When something doesn’t go as good as we want it to, we also take it personally.

When you bring someone else in, that emotional attachment doesn’t exist. They are able to look at it from a different standpoint. I’m a simple guide at some level. This is something. I only take one-on-one clients at any given time. When I work one-on-one with people, one of the things we talk about, and people smile, is when I say, “This is an out-of-body experience.” What I mean is you being able to look down from a 30,000-foot level and being able to see what is down the road from you. If you are on the ground or on a freeway on a highway, you aren’t able to see what is 5 or 10 miles ahead. When you are up a little higher, You can see if there’s an oil spill, a bridge out, or an automobile accident. You can see all these things.

What someone does and doesn’t have that emotional attachment is being able to look at a little bit more pragmatically without that emotional attachment and say, “No matter what the situation is, in order for us to be successful at X, whatever that happens to be in your particular application or business, here is the route we have to take without that emotional attachment. Maybe we have to move, or it may be a difference with how we hire or train personnel.” Change comes hard for most people. Most people remain the same until the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of change. When you have someone who’s not emotionally attached, change is a little bit more fluid.

The reality is that I found this to be true in my life. I’m going through this. I’m having somebody do something that I’m not that good at, but I could do it. They are way better at it than I am. They give me back the first rendition of this. I go back and correct it. They go back and do their magic. One of the things I have learned is when we outsource a task, we do not let go of the responsibility of the outsource but we have to let go of the process of letting them do what is good for them. That way we feel safe in the process of, “I’m still involved, but now I’m spending 10 minutes versus 10 hours.” That is what I hear you say.

Letting go and having someone else help you with something doesn’t mean that we micromanage. In other words, it doesn’t mean we look over their shoulder once the training aspect of this is over. They may not do it the same way you do, but as long as they arrive at the outcome you need to see, that is all that matters. Sometimes we have a hard time with that.

I know distinctly from my own experience in the years gone by. We would hire someone to do a specific job, task, or position. Part of us, as entrepreneurs, is we are looking over their shoulders to see what it is they are doing and if they are doing it our way because it’s not about right or wrong. We may say it is the right way and that is for justification but it is about our way. It is not about our way. If they are going to arrive at the same destination that you need and want them to, how they get there is less of a concern to you as long as it is legal, moral, and ethical.

That is difficult for people because they have their egos so far invested in this and that. I remember somebody saying something like, “I’m not going to do it your way, but I’m going to do it the right way. I’m going to do it better than you are.” She was right. She got this done in 4 hours, whereas it would have taken me 45 hours to get the same thing done.

Here is an interesting statistic for those people who are like, “I still don’t know.” We know a lot of authors and people. I have measured this. If an author writes a book and rewrites the book four times and it is the same book and they put out the 1st version and the 4th version out to sell, there will be a little, if any, discernible difference in the amount of sales that come out of that book. They spent three times as long putting the 4th version out as they did the 1st version.

What I have found is to let people do what they do. I have a responsibility to understand what they are doing, but I got to get out of the way and let them do what they do naturally. That is another big mistake that people make. I love your feedback on this. I see many executives and business owners go, “I handed that off to Randy. That is Randy’s problem now. I’m never dealing with this again.” All of a sudden, it doesn’t turn out exactly as they wanted it to, and they go back and blame Randy, but they disengage completely from the process.

I will share a quick story. A number of years ago, I was coming out of a restaurant with my oldest son. We were in a little strip mall. There was another restaurant. At the same time that we were exiting the restaurant, an individual that used to work for me many years ago when I was in university was coming out of the restaurant with his wife and one of his children. We waved and met in the parking lot where our vehicles were and handshake. We were like, “How are you? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

He ran a business that was in the construction world. I said, “How is the business?” He shook his head and went, “It is not working out the way I thought it would.” I said, “What is happening?” I’m passionate about business. When businesses fail, it affects and bothers me. Businesses fail because of mismanagement. There are exceptions to every rule. Maybe it is government regulations or COVID. There is a whole bunch of those little things. Generally speaking, businesses fail because of mismanagement. This guy looked me in the eyes and said, “My staff drove it into the ground. To be clear with every single one of you reading this, I looked at him, and I said, “That’s unfortunate.” I got in my car and left because that was not reality.

Generally speaking, businesses fail because of mismanagement. Click To Tweet

I didn’t work for him. He didn’t want my input, and I wasn’t about to throw pearls to the swine because it wouldn’t have been accepted. The staff didn’t kill his business. That is a guarantee. What happened is there was mismanagement. Somebody was not managing this business. As you alluded to a moment ago, Doug, when you let go and wash your hands of it, the challenge that happens is it is going to go in every direction. There still has to be a requirement for you to monitor what is going on at all.

They say, “Truly successful people have a maximum of three areas of focus at any given time.” That doesn’t mean they don’t have 100 areas. It means that they are only focused on three. The moment you exceed, you don’t succeed. You fail at everything. There is a reality here. I have a lot of irons in the fire, partnerships, companies, and clients, but I only have three things I’m engaged in at any given time.

I have people that come in and have a consultation and check in with me, report back to me, whatever those things are. I didn’t start there, but that is a reality. I had a meeting with someone who is part of a team that I’m engaged in. We sat for an hour and did a recap. Things that have to be done and completed within the next week or two. I have another one of those coming up.

There is a reality to the fact that engagement is key. It doesn’t mean you have to be hands-on, touch or read every email, take every phone call, or respond to every inquiry. That is not what it means. What it means is that you have a clear understanding and you are engaged in only those activities that move your initiative and company in the direction of your goal or objective. I know that sounds simplistic, but at the end of the day, we tend to overcomplicate.

Shawn, the company is ChangeYourResults.com. I wrote down a word, and the word was feedback. What happens with people is you take this and they have no feedback or ability to understand how to create a feedback loop, and fear kicks in. They then try to go and micromanage that process. What is your take on that?

Feedback is imperative, but I will also add to that if I can be bold. What it comes down to is communication. Understanding something needs to be rationalized. It cannot be in one direction. If we take a look at the corporate world, there are a lot of companies that operate in a way where communication comes from the ivory tower down. It never goes back up.

Size is not relevant because it could be a multinational or a mom-and-pop with five employees working somewhere in any city in North America. Communication has to be two-way. That is where feedback comes in. When you have a team and you are willing to sit down, have conversations and accept feedback, including some of you may not want to hear, or suggestions about improvement around growth. That doesn’t mean you have to implement every one of those, but I want you to understand something. Empowerment of a team is leadership. When you validate someone’s input, criticism, and feedback, it changes the dynamic in your organization and their perspective of you, including respect.

When you accept or validate what someone says to you, no matter what it is, no matter how it hurts, and even if it’s critically damaging to your ego, your company may not necessarily benefit in more ways than you at the time. If you are willing to accept that, you may not always implement it, but leadership is about empowerment and allowing those opinions and thoughts from your team to come to you. That is how growth happens. We all heard the statement about what’s validated grows. Here is a reality of what we are talking about today, Doug.

We are speaking to Mr. Shawn Shewchuk. He has a company called Change Your Results at ChangeYourResults.com. Shawn, I have a question about time management and time allocation. I hear people all the time. They were like, “I want to manage my time.” I don’t think we can manage time. I love your feedback on this. You only have 24 hours a day. We can allocate time. We can’t create more time. When people talk about time allocation and productivity, what are they talking about from your perspective?

For a few generations, we have been told and taught that we have to manage our time better. There is a flaw in that because, as you put a moment ago eloquently, if you cannot manage time, you get all the risk. You cannot stop this thing from turning. Managing time is a misnomer. You cannot do that, but you can manage the activities in the time you have been blessed with. That is an important distinction.

We only get 24 hours in a day, but 24 hours is a lot. If you want to break this down, you realize that for the average person in the United States, there are only 4 hours of productive time out of 24. That is not a lot. One of the questions I ask leaders when we go into an organization is, “What would happen to your bottom line at the end of the fiscal year if every one of your team members increase their productive time by one hour?”

If we went from 4 to 5 for every one of your team members, what would happen? Their eyes light up because this idea that four hours is the output of productive time for most people is a stat. A lot of people know this. What we focused on is, do you know that the average company doesn’t know what their staff is doing?

That does not surprise me.

Why don’t they know? It is because they haven’t created something for their staff to follow. They said, “You are the director of HR in a small to medium size company.” The person goes, “Yes, I was hired as a director of HR. Here is my salary, my pay stub, my office, and my desk. My business card says I’m this.”

Because you have a title and a business card doesn’t mean you’re good at what you do. I was a young man many years ago. Within six months of working for a retail chain while I was in university, they made me a manager. I was a horrible manager. I sucked because I didn’t understand. I thought I was a manager because my business card said I was a manager. That still happens. It is prevalent now, even in the corporate world. You are good at something and they bump you up but that doesn’t mean you are good at that level.

This is important. If we are going to start to understand the time and how to help people with time, let’s get clear. What are your obligations and responsibilities? Let’s work together. Let’s empower them to execute those when in a specific period of time. Instead of saying, “You have to have this done by Friday at 5:00,” you say, “As a team, we need your help to get this done. I’m going to give you all the tools you need to ensure that you get this done successfully in the timeframe that our client requires.”

What do we do? We approach this. It is the old adage that real leaders don’t say, “Do this.” They say, “Let’s go do this.” What we have done is adapt it to the modern world and say, “Let’s work hand in hand and side by side to ensure we are able to deliver what we promised we would.” There is a vast difference.

You referenced this earlier, Doug. You talked about where there are some financial stresses. When there are financial challenges, we go head down on the other end in the air, and we miss out on what is happening, including opportunities and those nonverbal cues from our team members and staff. Even if it is having one person, an assistant who sits ten feet away from you, who is sitting in your office, answering your phone, and setting appointments, that individual is the first point of contact.

I remember giving a presentation. I was in Reno, Nevada. We did an interactive component with the audience. They were all entrepreneurs. From the stage on a microphone, I called a guy’s office. The poor gentleman’s face was about 30,000 shades of red because of how his staff member handled the phone call. She didn’t know she was being heard on stage in front of 700 people. What she knew was there was a guy calling from an unknown number asking to set an appointment. She said, “I have no appointments left this week.” I said, “What about next week?” She goes, “Call back on Monday.”

The whole staff went “wow” and the poor guy was like, “what happened?” It is not her fault. It is what happened prior to the phone call. How many phone calls like this have happened? How much money are you spending on marketing only for those people to pick up the phone and then call someone else because they got shut down by your company? We start to understand that if there is a problem in our business, it is not the employees. Let’s have a look in the mirror. Bob Proctor used to say, “Let’s have a checkup from the neck up.” Sometimes that is important.

When it comes to allocating, I love that you said something to the effect of, “We can manage the actions within a timeframe.”

We can manage the activities. We are talking about high-leverage activities. If we can manage those predetermined, high-leverage activities within the time we have been given, you have 8 or 9 hours at work on average. One of the things I talk to entrepreneurs about, especially when they are starting out, is this. We do those things we enjoy. We may write copy for our website. We might call the sign maker and get a sign made for the front window, truck, van, or car. We may do those transactional activities. The transformational activities were the ones where we had to pick up our phones and start calling people to book appointments or to sell. That’s where the difference happens.

You only have eight hours to call clients. You can’t call them in most cases at 10:00 at night. It will come back to me being that simple farm kid. I will share this with you. If you wait until the snow falls and the grain is lying flat, it is a loss. You might as well plow it under. You have a small window of time in which you can harvest your green crop. It is the same for all of us. In your business, you have between the hours of 8:00 and 5:00. If you don’t engage with prospects and clients during those hours, you have lost those hours. They are precious. Do those things during those hours that are going to move your business, move the needle, in the direction of your goal or objective.

For those transactional things like if you have to review some accounting documentation or your profit and loss statement, you have to write copy for a website, write an email, or respond to somebody that is not time sensitive, do those things after dinner. Do those things at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning when you get up because you only have so much time in which to engage a client. When the time is gone, you can’t engage them. You can regret it, but that doesn’t change what transpired. One of the things we talked about is this. Clear out where you want to go on and work with people. I share this openly because I think it’s great.

Clear out where you want to go and work with people. Click To Tweet

Let’s figure out what that destination looks like. Where do you want to be in two years, including the financial component of that? Together, we are going to reverse-engineer it. When we reverse engineer it, we understand what has to happen every year, month, week, and day. For guys with undiagnosed ADHD like me, every hour.

What are those high-leverage activities we have to be engaged in every one of those time increments? If we know what we have to do, we are going to hit that destination or that target. It’s like saying “I want to hit $2 million in two years.” If you have never been there, your mind doesn’t know how to absorb that and do what it takes.

You can eat a whole apple, but you can’t do it in one bite so we break it down into bite-size pieces. It is the same thing here. If we take what it is you need to do and break it down into something you can assimilate and your mind understands, you execute. In two years, you are going to be here. Sometimes, it is human nature to overcomplicate things. We get busy and head down. The other end of the year focused on things that we say need to get done, but we don’t necessarily need to be doing that.

I called a former client several months ago. I said, “How are you doing? What’s new?” It was a touch-base phone call. Every day, I call three people without any agenda other than to just say hi. They could be a former client, a prospect, or someone I met somewhere, but I phoned three people to say hi. They will pick up the phone like, “Shawn, how are you?” I’m like, “Good.” They were like, “What can I do for you?” I was like, “Nothing, I wanted to say hi. How are you?” They were like, “That’s it?”

I want every one of you reading this to do that because you become a go-to. If you are top of mind and a tip of the tongue and that individual you called to say hi is having dinner tonight with a friend of his or her, this person says, “I’m looking for X, whatever it is you do.” They are going to say, “I got the guy for you. Here is his phone number and email address.” This is how you build the story.

To back up your point, that happened to me. I was traveling. A former client hadn’t talked to me in a little bit. I picked up the phone and said, “How are you? I’m going to be out in your area. I want to know, do you want to get a cup of coffee or lunch?” They were like, “What do you need? What do you want?” I’m like, “Nothing. I just wanted to say hi.” They were like, “Sure.” They get a couple of members together. They go to lunch with me and we get talking. They are trying to work on a new initiative. I give them an idea. I’m not pitching them on anything. They go, “That is a brilliant idea. We’d like to do this.” I said, “I think you should.” They go, “Who do you know who can handle this?” I said, “I know a lot about it.” They said, “Write us a proposal.” I said, “Before I do that, let’s talk.”

We ended up talking, and back then, when I was doing consulting, it turned into a $180,000 consulting arrangement. For those of you who do consulting, you go, “That is not bad for a nine-month engagement.” The point is that the reaching out you are talking about is a human-to-human connection, which most people aren’t doing. It is brilliant because you are reaching out with no agenda whatsoever, but it will materialize into something somehow.

I didn’t think it was going to. It worked out good for them too. They ended up doubling the size of the business and selling it for what the owner told me was stupid money. He is happy with that. The reality is that we never would have worked out if I wasn’t being a genuine guy like you are picking the phone up and saying, “How are you doing?”

At the beginning of COVID in the first week of April 2020, I was invited with a whole bunch of fairly well known people to an event. Most people are going to know who some of the people are. There were about 5,000 or 5,500 people on this thing. One of the speakers, who pontificates a lot about how amazing he is, got on and made a statement. I took offense to it at some level because he said, “COVID has changed the world.” He was right, but he said, “We are never going to hug and shake hands again. We are never going to meet in a boardroom again. Business as we know it has changed forever.”

There is some truth in that statement, but we are social beings. Going back to what I was saying a moment ago, when you are the go-to and you have people that are reaching out to you, think about this. You leverage your time in a different way. Dr. Nido Qubein of High Point University, some of you may know who he is, is a mentor of mine and a brilliant man. He manages or blocks his time in five-minute increments. I’m not there yet. I do it in 30-minute increments but he is a brilliant guy. We have all heard this. It is old news, but you don’t get a rerun. It is not a test drive. It is the real thing.

If you start to understand that every minute needs to lead to something, maybe it is to you having a better relationship with your spouse or spending more time with those people you care for and loving your children and whoever that happens to be. Maybe it is investing a specific amount of time every week into building strong, powerful, and high-trust relationships.

For those of you reading, I get asked a lot, “How do I get big deals?” You were talking, Doug, about a $180,000 deal. One of our former staff members phoned me a few months ago and said, “I got a referral for you.” We closed a $200,000 consulting deal. It is similar to what you did. I’m not complaining, but we have a lot of business to do and deliver for the next several months. It is because of relationships.

You don’t do $100,000 and $200 million deals because you posted something on Facebook or LinkedIn. It comes from having a coffee or a glass of wine or from going for dinner. This is where these deals come from. I was at an event in California. Unfortunately, I had to fly home early for some personal stuff. But I was there for one day and I made six contacts. Those six contacts will translate into about $250,000 worth of business.

I didn’t close it there. I shook hands and we went for lunch. Understand that you are there to build relationships. I want to be clear. Just because somebody isn’t someone you think is going to do business with you, they have a network. When they turn 40, 50, or 60 and they have a birthday party, you are in their high-trust network, they invite you to their party, and they expose you to 200 of their best friends, there is trust involved. Trust is the transference of those relationships.

The actual cost of reaching out to 200 cold prospects and developing 200 of the relationships over a period of time compared to that one introduction you were talking about is far more efficient for that one relationship and far more effective because there is a transference of trust immediately. Now there is a different level of conversation that is going on.

I’m asked once a week at least, maybe more, “Why do I do what I do?” Many years ago, Bob Proctor said something to me, and he was my first coach. He wrote the foreword to my first book, Change Your Mind, Change Your Results. He said, “None of us are getting out of this alive.” He is right. I have also been told that it is my turn to checkout.

Let’s be clear. I’m not looking forward to that anytime soon. I have far too much left to do, but I want to make sure it is a movie worth watching. I will share this with you. I wrote my first book many years ago, and this is my first book, we did a tour. I was on the radio, television, and podcast. I received an unsolicited message on Facebook from a young girl who I had never met, have never met, and never had any further communication with.

It was 2 or 3 sentences, but it was to the effect of, “Dear Mr. Shewchuk, thank you for writing your book. I read it and it changed my life.” This is why many of us persist in doing this. Bob Proctor said something many years ago. He said, “It is the hardest business you will ever get into.” There are challenges because you are selling something intangible. When I get to watch people’s lives change, their businesses, relationships, marriages, and relationships with their children, everything that may be considered challenging is all worthwhile. That is what this is all about.

Shawn, if somebody wants to get ahold of you or get ahold of the company and learn more, where do they go? What do they do?

You can go to ChangeYourResults.com. If you like to get a copy of the book or any of the books or journals, you can go to HighProductivityStore.com, and on the website, you can reach out to us. This is an interesting one. I get a lot of this. You can text us and the phone number is (403) 457-4002. We have an 800 number, but that is our main phone number. When I do a lot of these interviews, I get a lot of text messages and people asking questions. Feel free to do that.

Shawn, thanks so much for being here on the show. I appreciate you being here.

It is a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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Manage the activities within a timeframe. I love that because that’s the reality of it. You cannot make more time. You cannot even manage time. Time is not a manageable asset for you. You only have so much time. Time is a quantity given to you every single day that you are alive. You can manage the activities within the timeframe that you are given.

How do you take that and make it the most effective? How do you make it the most efficient? When you make it the most efficient, that gives you more time space within that day. Now, not more time, but more space to reallocate things. In other words, if it takes you twenty minutes to do something now and you can get it done in ten minutes, that gives you back ten minutes to do something else more productive.

As a selling entity, which all of you are and you must be in business, what is the number one priority that you should be looking at on a daily basis? How do you get new clients? How do you get existing clients to buy more? How do you expand that revenue within what you are doing in a consistent and never-ending process? That should be priority number one.

One thing I’d like to give you that Shawn and I didn’t have a chance to talk about is if you drew a circle and you started slicing that circle up in a pie, you looked at it, and you said, “These are activities that are giving me clients. These are activities that are not giving me clients.” What would that ratio be during the day? Take a good look at that because based on your plan, that ratio should be equal to that plan. In other words, if you had a $2 million plan in two years, are you getting to that number by allocating that time, doing the activities, and managing those activities within that timeframe to get you new or existing clients to buy more, and get you to have clients who hadn’t bought for a while to reengage?

Are you spending your time going out and getting revenues through the door for high profit? In other words, doing high profit, high value, and leveraged efficiency. Are you spending the majority of your time on things that are pulling from that? When you do a simple little pie chart like that, you will see where you are spending your hours or time in a percentage capacity. You can readjust as you go along.

If you love this subject matter, please give it a five-star review. Please tell your friends. The more people read, the more our rankings go up, the more people we help, and the more experts we can bring on here. If you know someone or yourself who is an expert and you have a subject matter, and you would like to say, “I’d like to have an episode done on this,” reach out to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com and let us know. We will answer all inquiries.

If you are looking to get yourself into the top 1% of sellers or someone you know in the top 1% of sellers, we are rolling out our academy. We are also rolling out a SaaS product, which is an automated prospecting and meaningful, relevant follow-up system to help you convert more sales. We are starting a waiting list for both of those. If you are interested in that, send me an email at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com.

Until next time, this is Doug C. Brown saying, “Go out, sell something, sell a lot of it, play win-win, and make someone unhappy.” In other words, if they have a problem or an opportunity they want to resolve, you can help them resolve that. They will make you happy too by paying you for that. Do it over and over again. Make a lot of friends, expand that circle, get referrals, and continue the process. Until next time, to your success.

Important Links

• Change Your Results
• Change Your Mind, Change Your Results
• The E-Myth
• HighProductivityStore.com
• YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• https://www.FreeBookFromShawn.com/
• https://www.Facebook.com/ShawnShewchuk.author
• https://www.Twitter.com/ShawnShewchuk
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/ShawnShewchuk/