Your Most Valuable Asset – By Matt Lloyd

I saw this FB post today by my mentor Matt Lloyd. It really was incredible and to the point. So I thought I’d post it here for you all to read & benefit from it. Enjoy!

“When you’re struggling for money and your business is still in start-up mode, your primary focus is on getting more cash.

And rightly so.

Without that cash… you can’t advertise, you can’t hire, you can’t pay rent, you can’t pay for products… you can’t do much at all.

So everything is about getting the cash in, right now.

For me, that period of time was 2009 till mid 2011. There were moments where I did not know how I’d even afford next weeks groceries and rent bills.

My desperation for getting sales and being able to survive was about the only thing on my mind.

Once you get through that stage though and have consistent sales coming in, you have a whole new set of challenges.

You start to have to manage staff. Multiple projects. Oversee cash flow (critical) and anticipate your company’s needs. And a whole lot more.

Personally, I’d much prefer those challenges over having no cash coming in. But it can be incredibly difficult to stay on top of everything.

The bigger your revenue grows, the more constraints you have on your time.

If you think things are crazy when you’re at the $250,000 / year revenue level… then just wait till you’re doing $2.5 million / year!

And even that is nothing compared to when you’re doing $25 million / year.

I haven’t got to $250 million / year yet, but I imagine that is a whole new ball game.

My point is, once your business has consistent sales coming in, your biggest frustration won’t be lack of cash.

It will be lack of time.

You’ll look back on your life before you had a fast-growing company and be amused at how little pressure you had, and how much time you squandered.

The more wealth you accumulate, the bigger the premium you will place on your time.

And if you want to continue scaling to even higher levels, you must become very selfish with your time.

You must defend it against people who have not yet learned to appreciate their own time, and therefore feel it’s ok to waste yours (and that’s most of the population!).

You must learn to make decisions with time being your primary concern – not necessarily money.

At that level, you’ve discovered money is easy to make. You can always go get more.

But time… time is that one thing which you are always running out of. It truly is your most precious asset.

Anyway, today I had a choice to make.

I was in San Jose and needed to get back to my resort. On a good day, it’s 2 hours away. On a bad day with traffic, it can be closer to 3 hours.

I value my time at somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 an hour.

In 1 hour, I can make adjustments to our traffic campaigns that will easily result in an additional 50k in back-end sales over the next couple weeks.

Or I can study a new sales video we are producing and suggest changes, which might get a 1% bump in response – easily worth 10’s of thousands of dollars in the long run.

So I decided to take a helicopter to my resort to save time.

It was $900 one way.

10 years ago I would have been disgusted at the idea of paying that kind of money for a 30-minute ride.

That was more money than I made in 2 weeks mowing lawns and doing my gardening gigs!

But these days I focus more on opportunity costs.

Instead of sitting in a car for a bumpy 2-hour driver, I can be back in my office, producing.

I only had one question to answer: is paying $900 to get back 2 hours of productive time a good investment?

Absolutely it is.

The lesson for today is simple;

If you want to continue to scale to doing bigger numbers, you need to start appreciating your own time a lot more than you have been.

Always think in terms of opportunity costs.

You’ve got 24 hours in a day.

Same as Bill Gates. Or Warren Buffet. Or Elon Musk.

We all get those same 24 hours.

But the financial results we create in our business’s are purely a function of how we use our time.

In just 2 days, I’ll be 31 years old.

For some of you reading this, you may think I’m still very young.

But what I can’t stop thinking is… where the heck did the last 10 years go???!!

And I realize I’m going to wake up tomorrow and be 40. Then 50. And very soon after that… 80.

Time is ticking away. We’re all running out of it.

Do not waste yours. Do not let other people waste it.

And all throughout your days, never stop asking yourself the essential question, “is what I’m doing right now the best use of my time?”

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– By Matt Lloyd