this is meta
Today we're talking about prioritization. One of the biggest lessons I got from my business coach, Carrie, this year was: "If it's important, it gets an appointment."
Oon our team calls this week, Andrea brought up the situation where a client comes on a call and they have so many fires to put out, they're absolutely overwhelmed, and 40 minutes into the call you're trying to get them thinking about the future.
Their state of mind makes doing annual planning almost impossible. So we're going to start with a time audit.
We're going to do this on the call with them. Download the time audit worksheet.
The next thing you're going to do is have them block time to work on their business. The best time is morning. We often say "every day, do 1 thing to grow your business before you do anything else." But even that can be tough for someone in crisis.
Start with blocking 3 one-hour 'appointment' with them per week, like MWF. If they can't do that, book 1 hour on Sunday morning. they should open their calendars and block it right in there. Block 15 minutes beforehand for them to get into a quiet place and get focused.
This is really building hte habit of building the business. Playing offense instead of defense. Running their business instead of their business running them.
Every month, try to add a little more time - one more appointment per week to work on their business. This is a skill that some just haven't developed yet.
Now, back to the call. How do you pivot them?
Think of solving their current crises as playing defense. Fixing those things will keep them alive, but won't move them forward. If you're always playing defense, you never win the game. Doing the work you assign is playing offense. We all have to play some defense, but we want to go from spending 100% of our time playing defense to spending 30% of our time playing defense and 70% playing offense.
Following the momentum model, we want to get them out of past-focused state, into a current-focus and identify their greatest need, then future-focused and identify how they grow their business. We don't want to let a whole month go by just playing defense, so we DO need to try to score a few goals. Try this:
Let them vent. Find one actionable solution to one of their problems, knowing that you can't fix everything at once. List their problems and then use a decision-making bracket to decide which to tackle.
Have them focus JUST on that, all the way through to completion. Give them the work to do. Have them check in as soon as that's done.
Then you give them one thing that will grow their business. That's the next step, to be done before your next call.
So they're playing defense, and then they make a tiny little strike at offense. They move forward a little bit and do their future selves a favor. 90% defense and 10% offense for now.
The next call, you try to identify the next largest challenge and fix it for good. Then they get to the real work a bit sooner - 80% defense, 20% offense.
Now obviously this is not a great pattern in Stage 1 or Stage 2, when we need them to do the work really fast. But we start Stage 1 with the time audit. If you get on a call and they're buried and not doing the work, this is your 'triage' plan: find time in their schedule, watch them make an appointment to do the work, and use your time on the call to do the work with them. If that call is the only time they play offense...then score as many goals as possible while still on the call.
This is META, thank you for your service.
