$10,000 HOURS ARE REAL!

Time. One of our most valuable resources and currencies. We give it away every day in the hope that the return on the investment of our time will be greater than the cost in some way. We trade our time for income, we trade it for companionship and love, we trade it for good conversation, we trade it for reality TV shows and entertainment, we trade it for rest and relaxation, we trade our time for everything.

It's considered our most valuable resource and currency because of three big aspects of time, at least as it relates to our human experience of it: it’s limited, it’s non-renewable, and you never know when your last moment of time will be. When you’re in a moment of time, it feels like time is never ending, but we know that’s the case. We all only have so much of it from birth to death and none of us is guaranteed even the next hour.

No, this episode is not meant to be depressing. No, it’s not going to be about life and death. I started out this episode talking about the nature of time to set the stage for what we’re going to be talking about, which is how you should be thinking about it and how to make the most of it, at least as it relates to your business and your income, which, If I do a reasonable job of, will also help shape how you look at time in your personal life as well.

Several years ago I put out an episode called ‘How to have a $10,000 Hour’, in which I went over the mindset and understanding of how all hours are not created equal. If you make $100,000 per year and work a 40-hour work week, the math seems at first glance to be really easy. 40 hours per week times 50 weeks per year (two weeks off for vacation) and you have 2000 work hours. Take your $100,000 and divide it by 2000 hours and you get $50 per hour. This leads most people, especially people who are on salary, to believe that each hour they work is paid at the same rate, and why wouldn’t it be?

The big problem, at least for entrepreneurs, business owners, people not on a salary, and even those of you who might be paid hourly, is that it’s not how time works. The hour you spend right after waking up in the morning doesn’t have the same quality as the hour you spend just before going to bed at night. The hour you spend having a great conversation with a good friend or life partner is different than an hour spent pulling weeds from a garden.

All hours are not the same in our non-working life, so why would we treat them as if they were in our business or working life?

When I first begin a coaching relationship with someone new, I’m always looking to get an idea of how they see and feel about time, and then how they see and feel about time relative to revenue, income generation, and profitability. Why? Because every issue we confront when fixing a business, or helping a business grow and scale is related to time in some way, how could it not be. Time is the one thing that is the same across all boundaries. Every one of us has the same 1440 minutes in each day. One of the things that separates someone who makes $100,000 from someone who makes $1,000,000 is how they think about time.

How you think about time gives me insight into if and how you understand leverage. Leverage is the power to move big things with very little effort. If you believe all hours are equal, you’ll never look for leverage over the next hour in order to turn it into something more.

Yes, I know, there are lots of time management theories, hacks, and practices out there to help you become more organized and efficient with your hours during the workday. And yes, they can help tremendously if you’re really disorganized and inefficient. The problem with time management theory and practice is two-fold:

1. You can’t manage time; you can only manage yourself within the framework of time.
2. The law of diminishing returns kicks in at some point whereby every minute saved beyond a certain point doesn’t net any additional value and, in fact, may start diminishing the value of that hour or the task.

If you’re salaried or paid hourly, the problems are even worse because you’re rarely incentivized to have an hour that is worth more than what you’re currently being paid to have. I saw this every day over the last 3 years or so working for a corporation where all of the admin, leadership, and support staff were either paid hourly or salaried. When you’re paid hourly, why would you want to even try to become more efficient at your job? If you shave off time from your workday, you’re also shaving off income from your paycheck. If you’re paid a salary, you’re getting paid the same per hour whether you’re efficient or not, whether you’re working or not, whether you’re creating value or not, whether you care or not.

And to make things even worse for the business owner paying all those hourly and salaried employees, if any one of them comes up with a killer idea that creates additional revenue for the corporation, whom does it really benefit? It benefits the business owner, but not necessarily the employee, unless they’re incentivized in some way to come up with $10,000 ideas. If the typical $50 per hour employee comes up with a $10,000 idea, the company gets $9,950 and the employee gets their $50. If the employee comes up with an idea that brings in an additional $10,000 every month to the corporation, the company gets to keep $119,950, while the employee gets to keep their $50 from the hour it took to come up with the idea.

The employee had a $10,000 hour (or a $120,000 hour in the monthly example) but doesn’t get to benefit from that amazing hour beyond getting to maybe keep their job. And, for those of you who might be tempted to use the, ‘they get to keep their job’, as an excuse for why employees should be coming up with income generating ideas, that’s a very short sighted and uninspiring way to lead people and encourage them to help build your business.

When you understand that point, not only do you understand the reasons to start your own business, but you also understand why it pays to incentivize those that work for you to come up with time saving ideas and income generating ideas. The reason to start a business is not to make money, it’s to have more control over your time and benefit from your deep understanding of leverage. Why work for somebody else who will pay you $50 per hour for each of the 2000 hours you’ll give them when you could work 1000 hours for yourself and potentially earn the same or more?

Even if you only worked 1000 hours for yourself and earned half of what someone else would pay you, when you understand that all hours are not created equal, you understand that the remaining 1000 hours have pure potential to come up with one $50,000 idea, two $25,000 ideas, or five $10,000 ideas to earn the same amount of money. The greatest understanding emanating from the simple fact that it only takes one really good idea in one really good hour to match or exceed what somebody else would be willing to pay you. You can burn 999 $0 hours living on a deserted island or traveling around the country in a motorhome because you only need one $50,000 hour. 

As a side note, in my opinion, that is precisely why it is way too risky being an employee, despite the myth that working for somebody else is more secure than starting your own business. When you work for someone else, your income and growth is capped. As an employee, your upside is extremely limited! Your downside is buffeted, to a degree, but you end up losing ground and time, and time is our most valuable resource! 

So, to clarify, understanding your dollars per hour in business is vital for understanding what to focus on, but it pretty much stops there. Dollars per hour is a great filter and lever for knowing what NOT to work on because that thing might be a $10 per hour task, but it should not be the thing that keeps you from seeing the random $10,000 hours that are swimming all around you. And that, my friends, is the big limitation of dollars per hour. When you back into a ‘dollars per hour’ calculation based on last year’s numbers, or even this year’s stretch goals, you get tricked into believing that all hours are the same and it keeps you from even thinking that there is such thing as a $10,000 or $50,000 hour.

Thinking in terms of dollars per hour can help to limit the downside and keep you from spending too much time doing $10 per hour work, but it severely limits the upside potential and blinds you to the opportunity to have a bunch of random $10,000 hours throughout the year. The greatest risk financially is not that you ended up doing some $20 per hour stuff every now and then when you could have been doing $50 per hour stuff, it’s that you miss the $10,000 because you don’t know what they look like and you’re not looking for them. In fact, for all the $100 per hour people listening, let’s stop normalizing that as a flex on social media. 

If you find yourself in a Facebook forum arguing over fees and your dollars per hour, my recommendation is to stop that, it’s not a flex. For all of the ‘I don’t even get out of bed for less than $400’ people, if you knew what you sounded like to really big thinkers, you’d be embarrassed. It’s not a flex to argue about a hundred dollars here and there. What is far more impressive is to hear someone talk about how they gave an office talk to 30 people and ended up with 3 orders and a new lender client. That one or two hour office talk will end up becoming a $10,000 hour over the next year.

When you tell yourself that you’re worth $50, $100, or $200 per hour, you are simultaneously telling yourself you’re not worth $1000 per hour. You’re also telling your subconscious mind that all hours are created equal, and they just aren’t, not by a long shot! There is simply no way that turning some of your $10 and $20 hours into $50 hours can compensate you enough for the missed $10,000 and $20,000 hours.

So, what’s the answer? It’s quite simple. Thinking in terms of $10,000 hours is backward compatible in terms of helping your subconscious grasp the idea of how bad those $10 and $20 per hour activities are. This means that if you’ll just learn to identify what activities can lead to exponentially higher dollars, your brain will start to be on the lookout for bigger and better opportunities over an extended period of time.

Does that mean you can never do the $20 per hour stuff? No, it doesn’t. But it does mean you’re going to have to become aware of when you are doing that kind of work and then formulate a plan to limit that kind of work by handing it off, hiring it out, or eliminating it altogether if it’s not productive and unnecessary. The three words to remember in the low dollar per hour work scenario are automate, delegate, or eliminate.

Automate absolutely everything that can be automated, eliminate everything that you’re doing that simply doesn’t need to be done, and then delegate everything else that simply should not be done by you. I know this will fall on lots of deaf ears, and I also know there are more than a few appraisers out there lighting their torches and sharpening their pitchforks. Their first response is almost always, ‘so, you’re telling me to outsource or delegate my comp selection, or my adjustments, or my whole appraisal process?!’

No! That’s not what I said. I simply told you to start thinking like a real business person with a real business and to look deeply and critically at everything you do during your days and weeks, and then to automate, delegate, or eliminate all of the business tasks that don’t need to be done by you specifically and can be done by someone else earning less than what your dollars per hour are worth. 

You are the most expensive person in your business and for good reason. You’re the owner and likely one of the most experienced people in the organization. You’re likely the one who brings in the most revenue and also paid the most. That makes your hours more expensive and more valuable than your assistant’s hour, your trainee’s hour, your other appraiser’s hour, and if you don’t think so, you probably shouldn’t be the owner. Yes, I have people in my organization who bill out more top and bottom-line revenue than I do or ever did. But here’s the important point I hope to get across to you; there is nobody in the organization who is more responsible for ensuring the success of the organization than me. That means that my hours, simply be default, are more expensive than everyone else’s.

If you’re a one-person business, then 100% of the responsibility for 100% of the revenue is on you. 100% of the responsibility for creating efficiencies in your business is on you. 100% of the responsibility for ensuring the ongoing health and wellness of the business is yours. Every hour you spend doing $20 per hour work is an hour you can’t be doing $100 per hour work, and it’s also an hour you aren’t focused on the $10,000 hour opportunity that is likely staring you in the face.

So that you’re not completely in the dark as to what potentially constitutes a $10,000 hour, I’ll leave you with some ideas to ponder. Once you have a better idea of what these high value hours look like, you’re much better suited to see them in your environment.

The first one, and maybe one of the most important because of its high value is high level networking and relationship building. If you’ve listened to this podcast for any length of time, you’ll know that relationship building is one of the most important things any business can be doing and the act of building great relationships always ends up being far more valuable per hour invested than most other activities. I’m going to share some other high value activities with you shortly, but this one is paramount.

I highly recommend you take some time today to write out a list of 20 people, minimum, that you could and should start to network with starting this week. Networking, by the way, is a catch-all word that can entail a variety of different activities. Networking can simply mean sending out a short video introduction to this list of 20 people to start. A simple 30 second video basically saying, “Hey Sue, Blaine from Real Value Appraisal, I’ve been noticing the great work you’re doing in our market and just wanted to say thanks for being one of the good agents! Hope to cross paths with you in the near future, and don’t hesitate to reach out if I can ever be a resource for you on the valuation side of things. I love talking appraisals and really enjoy helping great agents like you solve problems so you can close more deals. Thanks again for what you’re doing out there, Sue!”

It really is as simple as that! I also recommend on your list of 20 having some of what we might call ‘industry influencers’ on the list. These are people you know are well connected and doing big stuff in your market. The reason it’s called networking is because it’s about the network. A net has hundreds of little connections that make it work and all of those connections are, by default, connected to each other. Every time you add someone new to your net (or network), you are simultaneously part of their network as well. The key is to make the connections and then consistently nurture your network with high value content, answers, problem solving, free services, connecting them to other people, and so on. 

If, when you heard me say come up with a list of 20 people, you cringed because you’d have a difficult time even coming up with 10 people, consider this a good thing because it should be an awakening for you. If you can’t list out 20 people you could reach out to in the real estate community that have the ability to either refer someone to you directly for an appraisal, or they have the ability to connect you with other people with whom you can have a positive impact on or who can have a positive impact on you, it’s time to start building up that list.

I don’t know how many times it has to be said that your network is your net worth, but I suspect that the amount of time it needs to be said is directly correlated with the number of times you need to hear it before you finally wake up and realize it’s not just a fun little saying. It’s a saying because it’s true! The more people you know, the more chances you have of creating a community of people you can have a positive effect on and who will sing your praises to their own networks and communities.

This leads us to the next $10,000 hour, which is time spent creating high value content. Friends, I can’t emphasize this enough; if you aren’t known, recognized, and visible, you barely exist in today’s business world. The best way to become known and recognized is to make yourself more visible, and the best way to do that is through content.

Content is anything that your followers, network, constituents, clients, and/or customers can read, listen to, learn from, and/or watch that helps them to get to know you better. It’s from your content that they get to know what kinds of problems you solve, how you solve them the best, and why you’re the one to choose when it comes to solving that kind of problem.  

From talking about content, we come to the next high value activity, which is to always be building exclusive membership groups and communities. When it comes to networking in the 21^st century, social media has made it considerably easier to network with exponentially more humans than in the decades before social media. With platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn, you can create private groups and communities of like-minded people with whom you can collaborate, add value to, promote your expertise through your content, and have conversations with to deepen the relationship. It’s through these relationships that real business gets done.

The last two things I’ll mention in this episode as it relates to what a $10,000 hour looks like are public speaking and hosting events. 

Remember what we’re talking about; we’re talking about a belief system about our time that says all hours are not created equal and that, to have a really high value hour, we have to be willing to open our minds and our eyes to the activities that may not bring in dollars today, in fact they may even cost us money in the short term, but they pay off in exponential fashion in the long term.

Another way to put it is that you can spend an hour choosing comps, writing some narrative, or extracting market adjustments for an appraisal and that might be a $100 hour. You can do some base level data entry and answer some emails for an hour and that might be a $20 hour. You could watch Netflix or YouTube videos for an hour and that is a loss for you in financial terms if you could have been doing some other higher value task, or you could work for an hour on one of the activities that we’re talking about right now and, maybe in 30, 60, or 90 days, that one activity nets you an additional $10,000 dollars for that hour worth of work.

Standing in front of a crowd of people educating them, answering their questions, making them smarter and better equipped for showing up to your event has always been a $10,000 hour activity. Again, any time you can get in front of a multitude of people and make a positive impression on them, you’re deepening the relationship and you’re closing the gap on what Google called the Zero Moment of Truth, which is the time we all spend researching something prior to a purchase.

In the days before the internet, the ZMOT happened at the store while you were shopping. You’d pick up a product, study it, make some mental notes about it, and then maybe set the product back on the shelf so that you could go home and do some more research. Since the internet’s inception, we’ve had the ability to research a product or person long before ever making a buying decision.

Your job, at least as it relates to marketing yourself, is to be in every place you can at the same time so that, when someone wants to research you, your product, your service, or your industry; your content, your voice, your face, and your perspective comes up over and over. The data shows that people need to consume, on average, seven hour’s worth of content on something or somebody before they feel comfortable making a decision. 

When you spend time speaking and teaching in front of a crowd, that time counts toward the seven hours needed for somebody to feel comfortable choosing you. I would take it a step further and say that one hour of in person connecting is worth two or three hours of internet content because of the law of proximity.

The law, or principle of proximity in social psychology simply says that the closer you are to one another, the greater the opportunity to form bonds, make positive impressions, and create community. When you’re at an in-person event, you have the opportunity to display social proof, which is when other people observing from a distance get to see how others react and respond to you. If you see someone responding favorably or talking positively about another person, you’re more likely to accept as true that the person they’re speaking about is safe to let your social guard down with.

Any time spent honing your skills of public speaking will eventually return back to you an exponential return on that time. Get out and meet people on their turf and show them why you’re the go-to authority in your area of expertise.

The last $10,000 hour for this episode is hosting events. My recommendation for every one of you listening is to simply schedule a quarterly happy hour for 10 or 15 realtors, lenders, title professionals, attorneys, estate planners, and/or financial planners. Your budget should be between $300 and $500 for the event, which is almost always guaranteed to come back to you in the future as a $10,000 hour activity.

Let’s break down the budget: if you invite 15 people and each one of them shows up, you give them 2 drink tokens or tickets. This is what your budget pays for. You’re going to buy them two drinks, which average around $8. Most beers are around $5 to $7, and most mixed drinks are between $6 and $9. That’s $16 per person for two drinks. 15 people times $16 is $240. The remaining $4 per person, which is the remaining $60 from your $300 budget, buys some appetizer trays for everyone to nosh on. 

For $300, you’ve got 15 people in a fun atmosphere on your dime and they’re all chatting, networking, and thanking you for the good time. You’ll end up spending around 2 hours making the rounds with everyone and deepening relationships, which turn into referrals and other business opportunities in the months ahead. It’s really that simple.

Once you do one of these events, if you’re like me, you’ll increase your budget to the $400 to $500 range so that you can have more people, more food, or some other activity or entertainment during the happy hour that brings that group of people closer to you in your network.

There you have it, my friends, a better way to think about your time, a growing list of activities to increase your hourly return, and several ways to add an additional 5 or 6 figures to your annual income.

If you’ve yet to download my free video training on building up your non-lending appraisal business, just head over to www.coachblaine.com/diversify and download it today. It’s completely free and packed with steps to increase that portion of your business.