Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Your Second Act isn't just about starting over; it's about starting smarter. You’ve left the safety of a structured career to follow your passion, and while the opportunity is exciting, the uncertainty is real. You have the vision and the drive, but without a roadmap, that leap of faith can quickly feel like a freefall.
Welcome to Second Act Business Owner, the podcast dedicated to ensuring your new venture lands on solid ground.
Hosted by Lee Gray—an award-winning ActionCOACH, certified executive trainer, and serial entrepreneur—this show is for the courageous professionals who are trading corporate stability for entrepreneurial freedom. Lee understands that being an expert in your field doesn’t automatically make you an expert in running a business.
Each week, we strip away the fluff to provide the real-world MBA training you need to turn chaos into clarity. From navigating the emotional rollercoaster of ownership to mastering the mechanics of profit, Lee brings the structure and strategy required to build a legacy.
Hit follow and let’s get to work.
Ep02
===
Importance of Time
---
[00:00:00]
Speaker: Well, hello and welcome to the second Act Business Owner podcast. I am your coach, Lee Gray, and today we are going to be talking about the one thing, the one thing in life that you can never, ever get more of, and that is your time. Time is the most precious commodity, especially for a second [00:01:00] act business owner because we might be trying to do something in 10 or 20 years when in our twenties we have 40, 50, or we think a hundred years to get something done.
So I'm gonna give you some tips and strategies today to help you.
Identifying and Prioritizing Your Time
---
Speaker: Number one, identify where you're spending your time. Trust me. I've been a coach for a long time, and I know that we think we spend time on important things when we really don't. So we're gonna identify, I'm gonna give you some strategies for figuring out where you spend your time, and then I'm going to give you some strategies for creating an ideal week by using a default calendar.
And then I'm going to give you. Some concepts and ways to look at the way you spend your time. But the one thing if, if nothing else is remembered from this episode today, remember this, you need to be spending your time on revenue generating activities. And [00:02:00] that is not things like typing an email that doesn't need to go out.
It is. About revenue generating activities. So clearly in your head you must know what are the revenue generating activities for my business. So let's get started. I don't wanna waste any more of your time. Here we go.
Understanding the Eisenhower Matrix
---
Speaker: First thing I wanna talk about is Stephen Covey, who I have so much respect for. Several books.
He's written one famous book called the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And he goes over, he talks about the Eisenhower Matrix. It's called that. But and people call it other things. Basically there's four quadrants and. We'll just put things into quadrant. Quadrant one first and quadrant one are things that are urgent and important.
So as you're starting your second act, urgent and important things might be to get your product line clear. Let's see. Urgent and important. Do the research that you need to do to get your [00:03:00] business started. File your paperwork, form your LLC, those kinds of things. Urgent and important, do first.
Right. And then there are things that are important but not urgent. Those are things like. Getting your website is important. It's not urgent though. You can start selling your business most likely, unless you're a, a, a dependent website. But that could be something that you would consider really important but not urgent.
In other words, you're gonna schedule it and you're gonna plan for it. So. Q1 has things that are urgent and important that we've gotta get done, or we can't do things in quadrant two, which are important, but not urgent. Those are things we schedule and, and even delegate. So ideally you would delegate the website process after you've had a strategic meeting, which is actually in quadrant four.
We'll talk about that in just a minute. So quadrant three then is urgent, but not important. So, like. The neighbor is calling you to say your dog is out. Yeah. That's urgent and it's [00:04:00] kind of important, but it isn't something you're gonna focus on. You're gonna delegate that. And, and other urgent and important things are like people interrupting you or, or having a conversation about the football game over the weekend.
To them it's urgent and important but it's not important to you. It's urgent because they're coming at you, they're in your face or they're bothering you, taking your time. Q4 then are things that are not urgent but important. A good example of things that are not urgent and important are listening to podcasts about how to start your second act business.
Honestly, those are things that you don't have to do. It's not urgent. You can put it off forever and ever and ever. Is it important? Yes. Because you wanna have a successful business. So this kind of learning, the sort of strategic planning and when I talked earlier about the website.
That's a strategic planning thing that you wanna put in your not urgent but important quadrant, quadrant four. So if you wanna get the book, Stephen Covey's seven Ha Habits to Highly Successful People, I highly recommend listening to it on [00:05:00] Audible. It's a great book. You can listen to it multiple times and continue to learn.
Tips and strategies and because, you know, think about it, we, we do bring some big bad habits with us in our second act because we've had a lot of practice doing them. So there are some things we have to learn. Luckily, we are smarter than we've ever been today, so we have the resources to do that.
Okay, so, I wanna give you a tip.
The Three Ds: Do, Delegate, Dump
---
Speaker: And this is the three Ds. We call it do delegate dump. And especially now in your second act, you don't have time for crap, right? So when something comes on your plate, when someone throws something upon your plate, you do something about it. Or you delegate it or you dump it. And when you have those three strategies, it's life changing.
It's so freeing to say, you know what? I'm not going to do it. I'm dumping it. And so the three Ds and the Eisenhower quadrant, next thing I wanna take you through is something we do and, and with my, with my coaching clients, and I have for myself.
Creating a Default Calendar
---
Speaker: And that's to have a default calendar. [00:06:00] And first of all, you're gonna say, my life is too crazy and chaotic.
I can't possibly have a default calendar. But you can have a default calendar. It's just Describe the word, describe, understand the word default. It's just a default. Even a busy surgeon has a default calendar. I start surgery at eight, I get done at noon. Well, the surgery goes over until one. You continue to do the surgery.
You just move the schedule the rest of the day. So the default calendar works for the surgeons and it works for people in their second act business. First thing you do to create a default calendar is identify the areas where you have to work. So here's generally speaking. In business, you have operations, you have sales, you have team, you have product, you have admin, generally speaking.
I also would add networking to that. And there may be a little bit of a different category depending on how far you are in your second act. So think about those categories. And I love writing the categories on a whiteboard. [00:07:00] And then I ask my clients, okay, now how many hours are you spending in this category?
How many hours are you spending in this category? How, here's what usually happens. At the end of the week, they tell me I don't know where the week went. I got nothing done. And then we go and we categorize their time in these categories and they put three hours, five hours, two hours, and sometimes it's more than 40.
Well, how can that be if you didn't get anything done? It's because there was not a time set to do the work, to do the activity even to do the things that are. Relaxing kinds of things. I love, it when people include those in their default calendar. And by the way, default calendar has a lunch in it every day.
And I don't care if you don't eat or not, you still take a lunch. That's what I'm telling you to do. Take a lunch. So you've decided your categories, and then you get really, you know that when you're starting your second act early on, you're gonna be doing networking and marketing and cold calling and talking to people.
Probably eight hours of your day [00:08:00] is going to be. Or eight hours of your week is gonna be in that category and just, just decide how many hours you need to do in each of the categories to be successful in your second act. Then you actually literally put it on a calendar and you shade the calendar in color based on the category that it is, and you can do this in your Google calendar, you can do this in your Outlook calendar. I have a default calendar that is a perfect week that I have set up an Outlook. I I happen to use Outlook and so I have a separate calendar called Lee's Default Calendar has a perfect week in it.
So I wanna. focus on the default calendar , for just a moment.
First things first, don't worry. It's not a perfection tool. It's a tool to help you get better. It's not a perfect thing. It doesn't have to be. In fact, it never will be perfect. If you think about a default calendar, it's your ideal week. You're gonna do your best to work. To that default, and then you're gonna make adjustments.
So for me, I'm a morning person when it comes to [00:09:00] doing things that require a lot of thinking. So I'm going to put the admin sort of stuff and non-sales, non-revenue generating activities early in the morning, because for me, that's when I'm best at that. And it took me time to look at that. I set up my default calendar initially thinking I was gonna do stuff all day long.
It didn't work for me. And neither for my clients, they. They realize that they can't do the same thing all day long. So fixing that in the default calendar, maybe putting some admin Friday morning, some admin Thursday morning, and that's it. The other thing about the default calendar that's really important to remember is look, if you go on vacation now, worry about it.
Your default calendar. It stays where it is. You can go on and you have your vacation. If you have a giant project for a customer and you can't do any revenue generating activities outside of that work, that's okay. That week is different. That's an anomaly. Actually, no week is the same. I think that's the most important thing to [00:10:00] remember about the default calendar is it's a.
Tool. It's a you, you try it, you test it and see, but what I, here's the cool thing about the default calendar and then if, let's say you're appointment driven, like, like I am, I work on appointments all day, all day, all day, and things happen. People have to skip a meeting. I suddenly have. An hour in my calendar I wasn't planning to have, and what a gift.
So I'm learning in my default calendar one of the ways I use my default calendar is to have a list of tasks that need to be done, that are not urgent, but important. And I use those tasks to fill that free gift of time that I was given when I have an hour. So sometimes the default calendar, the hardest part is figuring out what to do when you get a free hour and it happens in.
All of our businesses, if electricians, it happens. Oh, oh my gosh. The customer's at home, it has happens to real estate agents. Of course we talked about it happens to surgeons as well, surgery goes over, surgery gets done quicker, but the default calendar still remains. And [00:11:00] then just re readjust it. You know, like last week we had all of our clients together to do end of year planning, and it was a full day.
They couldn't do their regular default calendar for that day. And that's okay. They were working in quadrant four, so you still have to do that. So default calendar is your tool. Default calendar is your weapon. Think about the default calendar as your friend.
Maximizing Revenue Generating Activities
---
Speaker: The other thing I want you to think about is revenue generating activity. Because if you're spending all your time doing admin and following up and doing stuff that doesn't generate activity well. You might not be in business very long, so think about prioritizing your revenue, revenue generating activities.
So you're going to number one, track what you do for a week. What? I don't have time to track what I do. Yes, you do. That's the only way to really know what it is that you do. And you're gonna love me for this. You're gonna get a 25% productivity [00:12:00] boost just by tracking your time. It's just like going on a diet.
If you weigh every day, if you weigh every day and you know you're gonna get on the scale you're going to, you're going to make changes. So track what you do in 15 minute increments. Oh, I know you're too busy to do 15 minute increments, but it's your second act. You're gonna invest in your second act, aren't you? Of course you are, because it's worth it. You're gonna be a rockstar. You are a rockstar. I have these tools available to you, and they're going to be in the show notes of this episode. So I'm going to be giving you a default calendar template and a time study tool that you can use to capture all the, all the time that you spend and, and your default calendar.
But I think that why it's important really is think about it, you're in your second act. You may be 30, 40, 50, you may be 60. I, I have worked with people who started their second act in their seventies, and I mean. Ain't wasting any time in their seventies. They are pounding through and can say no to anything you talk about.
Do dump delegate. [00:13:00] That is their persona. Not doing it. If it's not making me money, delegate it. If it's not making me money, if it's making me money, I'm going to do it. When you have your default calendar and you live by your default calendar and you establish. Do delegate dump and you pri prioritize the quadrants that I spoke about.
Acknowledging things that are not important but urgent. You know, things that are not urgent and not important. And quadrant three things like texts and phone calls, you know, that you don't need to take when, when you move away from those and you gain 20% of your weak back. That's a day, that's a day a week.
And if you think about that's 52 days a year that you gain back with the discipline of creating a default calendar. Can you talk about your business? Can you sell some product in your business? If you have 52 days to do it, absolutely you can. [00:14:00] And that's what this tool is all about, deciding where I'm gonna spend my time being.
Absolutely vicious about protecting it and making sure that my top priorities are around generating revenue, because that stuff, cleaning your desktop or whatever feels like it's work, but that's the stuff that at the end of the week, you're gonna say, man, I was really busy and I got nothing done. So focusing on the priorities that for your business is revenue, revenue generating activities, and honestly.
30, 40% of your time spent on revenue generating activities, you're gonna be talking about selling your second business act in a 10 years or less. So if that's what you wanna do, if you wanna have a successful business, you really have to start with some of the foundations of structure and the default calendar is one.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
---
Speaker: Okay. As a reminder, these tools are in the show notes.
So download them, use [00:15:00] them, enjoy them, share them, and make 'em work for your business. Make 'em work to grow your second act. You deserve it. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a review. Please like this. It really helps us, if you do, leave us a review and share this podcast with another person who's thinking or in the middle of, or halfway through, or almost ending their second act, because we're going to be focusing on your second act wherever you are.
I tell you what I feel like expressing today is. Just talking about time and how important it is and that we all only have a small amount of it left, right? I mean, we don't know how much time we have left. I feel like talking about time in business is probably one of the most un. Hmm. I feel like talk, I feel like talking about time and how we spend our time in business is one of the most underserved [00:16:00] conversations.
We need to talk about the importance of where we spend our time, and that's what I feel like expressing. What do you feel like expressing?