How to Gain Control of Your Time and Your Life

As an entrepreneur you are paid in direct proportion to how you use your time. You are not paid by how many hours you put in at the office. Rather you are paid on how effective you are at producing results. Period!

Most highly successful business people are absolutely ruthless with their time.

To produce at a higher level you must learn how to more effectively control your scheduled activities.

There are 260 work days in a year (52 weeks a year times 5 days a week) After subtracting vacation days and various holidays most people work about 230 – 240 days a year. Many successful entrepreneurs’, on the other hand, work only 180 – 210 days a year. That’s an extra six to eight weeks vacation each year. How do they do it? Simple really. They don’t confuse busy with productive. When they work they are focused like a laser beam on accomplishing what they need to accomplish. They don’t waste time and they don’t do things that don’t have a great return on their investment of time.

To more effectively manage your time you should learn to break your days into one of three components: personal days, production days or planning days.  Each of your 365 days a year should be planned doing one of these three things.

Personal Days: are days that are free of any work related activity. They are for relaxation, rejuvenation and enjoyment. Successful entrepreneur’s who have managed to get control of their business and their life enjoy as many as 150 - 180 personal days off each year.

Production Days: are the money making days. These days are jealously guarded for activities that are directly related to making sales and producing income. Successful entrepreneurs typically spend 120 to 150 days a year in production days. It is not so much a matter of how much time you spend but what results can be produced during these days.

Planning Days: are the days devoted to planning, preparation and organization. Successful entrepreneurs typically spend 30 to 50 days a year in these types of activities.

The key element in successful personal organization is control. There is a personal organization rule that states:You can either be part of your plan or by default you will become part of someone else’s plan. Failure to take control ensures that you will find yourself in a reactive mode where your whole life is a 911 experience. Failure to take control of your life produces poor results, physical and health related issues, anxiety and loss of peace of mind.

 The first step to taking control of your life is to begin to plan you days and weeks by assigning each day of your life as a personal day, production day or a planning day and to keep your commitment to do only those things that are related to that day. In other words, don’t mix production and planning days together. Use the principle of focus to only work on things that are part of that day.

Taking control of your life results in increased rejuvenation, productivity and preparation. Those who organize their time according to the personal, productive, planning day’s concept experience a peace of mind that comes from having enough time to do the things that are important in their lives. They also experience the freedom of letting go of the unimportant and trivial things that most people seem to get hung up on and they experience an increased sense of control and confidence that comes from living a proactive life.

More free days leads to an increase in rejuvenation, energy, creativity and sense of well being. Production days lead to an increase in productivity by being able to accomplish twice as much in half the time. Planning days lead to simplicity and efficiency that provides peace and serenity that comes from having one’s life planned.
 

Somewhere between playing football in the heat of South Texas and the high altitude of the Air Force Academy, Wes Schaeffer lost the ability to BS.

In 1996, after serving his country in Korea and the Middle East, Wes jumped headlong into sales. With a new wife, a young son (and a second son on the way) all that mattered was closing sales - every day. In his first full year in sales, Wes broke six figures and was immediately promoted into management.

However, he realized that the intangible skills he inherently possessed were often difficult to explain or teach to the sales people he supervised. That is when his sales training journey truly began. Ten years later, in 2006, Wes connected with Steve Clark and New School Selling and got the education that he needed to implement a new, more effective sales methodology that catapulted his earnings.

After first becoming a New School Selling client, and seeing his own productivity and income increase over 50%, Wes, who lives in the San Diego area, joins New School Selling as the first trainer on the West Coast.

Since Wes first started down the rewarding road of sales, he’s added three more children along with a fatter paycheck to support them in style. Now, as a New School Selling Trainer™, he is ready to impart the lessons that he’s learned along the way.

Are you like Wes? Are you a really good salesperson? Do you have a desire to help people? Do you want to be a part of something that is more fun, profitable, and fulfilling? Then join him as part of the New School Selling Certified Trainer Program™.

This fantastic opportunity will allow you to enter into a world of rarified earnings. We are looking for a select few to learn, teach, and perfect the practices and methodologies of New School Selling developed by Steve Clark.

What’s more – you’ll learn the deep secrets not available on Steve’s CDs that will make you a better performer in your day job. And, yes, you can keep your day job for as long as you wish. We want your safety net securely under you until your income as a New School Selling Trainer™ allows your company to pay you to train your successor.

Make 2007 the year you commit yourself to real financial freedom by becoming a New School Certified Trainer. To learn more about New School Selling, the, other sales-related courses and products, please contact Steve Clark today.

Imagine going up to the airline ticket counter and telling the ticket agent you would like to purchase a ticket to go on a wonderful vacation, but you aren’t sure where you want to go or when you want to go. What do you think their response would be? Maybe something like “when you figure out where you want to go and when you want to go come back and I’ll help you. Now please step aside so I can help the next person in line.”

In Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland there is a wonderful passage where the Cheshire cat addresses this same issue by saying to Alice, “if you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there”.

In my coaching practice , the single biggest issue I am presented with is that business owners and salespeople don’t know the answer to the questions: “where do you want your business to be and when do you want it to be there”?

When I ask these questions the answers I hear are things like: “I want to make more sales/money, or I want my business to do better or we want to grow our sales and profits”.

Those answers are not good enough because they are vague, hazy, non specific or measurable. Consequently, they are not realistic or attainable. Before you start trying to figure out how you must first answer the question where and why. Failing to do this, your efforts and activity will produce the same results as a dog chasing his tail.

How do you begin this process? You begin by spending some quality time developing a blueprint for your future.

Start by thinking of how you would like to be spending your time. Of all the kinds of work you could be doing, what do you want to do the most? How many hours do you want to work each week, and how would you like to divide up your working time? Then think about what kind of people you would like to interact with. Who are your ideal clients, customers, colleagues and employees? Next imagine the physical environment in which you would like your business to operate. What would it look like? How large a space would you want? What would it look and feel like? What level of business would you have? How much revenue and profits? How many clients, billable hours etc. would you have? What would be the mix of clients or services that you would provide?

Write your answers in present tense. Don’t worry if your picture is a little fuzzy or you can’t answer all of the questions. You are striving for process not perfection. This process will help you develop the focus necessary to achieve your hearts desire. It takes a lot of time and effort, and some deep soul searching. It is not easy. That is why only 3% percent of people will do it.

You have a choice. You can consciously choose to be one of the 3% that pursues personal excellence or by default you will become part of the 97% mass of humanity that spends their life in mediocrity. I hope you choose to become one of the 3%.

Good Selling

Steve Clark

According to accepted neuroscience, we have three brains: our brain stem, which controls motor function, our limbic or emotional brain and our neo cortex or rational thinking brain.

Our limbic, emotional brain, which is some 400 million years older than our neo cortex is primitive. Its purpose is to ensure survival, and all the complicated emotions and behaviors that survival implies. It is here that our basest of instincts thrive: sex, fury, fight. It is short term oriented, visual, concrete and self centered, and it is not designed to deal with abstract, complex concepts and ideas.

Ruled by the limbic brain, our ancestors were obsessed with consuming vital resources to keep them alive. They were consumption oriented not savings oriented. They were short term, immediate gratification oriented. They never thought about storing and saving because they never knew if they were going to survive from one day to the next. Consequently, they consumed not saved.

According to Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University, “There isn’t necessarily a stop mechanism in us that says, Relax, you’ve got enough. We’ve evolved to be maximizing machines.”

For our ancestors the best way to save for the future was to consume now. Eating as much as they could, whenever they could, they were able to store extra calories in their bodies, in the hopes that this would carry them through any lean times that lay ahead.

This ancestrally dominated mindset has created many modern day problems: the tendency to spend and consume without any regard to the long term consequences, the addiction to instant gratification and the rejection of self denial and sacrifice, lack of patience and civility in society, micro term decision making by business and political leaders and on and on and on.

According to some Evolutionary Psychologists, our thinking, analytical, neo cortex brain has not evolved to keep pace with our complex, break neck speed society. Consequently, we are trying to cope in a complicated, frenetic world by using a brain that was designed to deal with much more basic human needs.

If our rational, analytical, thinking neo-cortex were truly in charge of our behavior we would engage in rational, intelligent, and civilized ways, but one does not have to look far to see the consequences of a society void of rational thought and dominated by the short term, emotionally motivated limbic brain.

Next time you make a decision, any decision, ask yourself is this a thoroughly planned, rationally thought out decision or am I making a decision based on short term, emotional gratification? If you are truly self aware and honest your answer will astound you.

Unfortunately, we live in a modern culture that does not emphasize personal responsibility. The result is an epidemic of excuse making. It is not my fault is the prevailing attitude of the masses. The sales manager is charged with the responsibility of setting proper expectations, developing systems to track and record sales activities and results and eliminating any excuse making when results are not achieved. Some of the sales activities that should be tracked and monitored weekly include:

• Dials - How many calls is the sales person required to make daily?
• Conversations - How many dials does it take to reach a key decision maker?
• Appointments Scheduled - How many conversations does it take to schedule an appointment with a decision maker?
• Appointments Kept - How many scheduled appointments are kept?
• Proposals - How many first time appointments result in a proposal?
• Sales - How many proposals result in a sale? What is the revenue per sale?

The goal for the salespeople is to reach a point where they know what each call, conversation, appointment, proposal and sale is worth. When a salesperson knows this they can accurately forecast their current situation and set realistic future goals.

Knowing this information the manager can explain to the potential new hires exactly what is required and expected of them. This can be addressed during the pre-hire period and the sales candidate will know in advance what is required to succeed.

A salesperson cannot perform without knowing what is expected of them. Expectations spell out what is required to succeed, and it’s best to explain this to the new hire during the training process.

For the more seasoned salespeople, other expectations might include:

• Number of new customers
• Dollars of revenue per period
• Gross profit margins
• Retention rate of existing customers