An agency owner’s best day

Hey, Drew McLellan coming to you this week from Captiva Island, Florida. I'm getting ready to go in to two days of meetings with a bunch of agency owners as part of a peer group. But before I do that, I wanted to follow up on a video I did last week where I talked about how Agency owners should target 50% of their work week to focus on BizDev. And I know your reaction to that was, "Drew, you're crazy. How in the world am I gonna have that much free time to work on BizDev?" I'm not saying it's going to be easy and I'm not saying you're going to be able to do it immediately. But I do believe there is one hack that gets you to that half way point of your week much faster. And that is I want you to start spending one day a week out of the office. I want you to work one a day a week anywhere but in your office and with your team. Why? Because there is no more distraction and no less productivity that happens for you then when you're in the office. The minute you walk in the door there are people waiting for you, they have problems, challenges, ideas, issues. You spend the day putting out those fires. I'm not saying that that is not time well spent. But I'm saying it is not time that is conducive to getting your own work done, especially around BizDev. Whether it's list building or phone calls or emails, whatever it may be. So I want you to spend one day a week out of the office. You have two options there. You can carve out a day - by the way it needs to be a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, don't do this on a Monday or Friday. Or you can carve out two mornings. Tuesday morning and Thursday morning, whatever works for you. It can not be two afternoons. Why? You know why. If you get in the office, you never get out of the office. So this has to happen before you walk in the door. For some of you, you can work from home. Others, that's too distracting. Maybe you go to a coffee shop. For many of you, your public library has some amazing meeting space or quiet rooms that you can either rent or use for free. I don't care where you do this work, but it can't be at the office. You have to be isolated and alone. And part of being isolated and alone means you do not turn on your email or check it and you turn your ringer off on your phone and you turn it upside down. You can check it at lunch and you can check it at the end of the day. Before you freak out, if you were at an all day client meeting, this is exactly how available you would be. So your staff is used to this. You're gonna be amazed at how much work you get done if you carve out this time. So here's how I want you to do it. I want you to look at your calendar and odds are you don't have a whole day next week when you can do this but you might have a couple hours. Then I want you to look at the week after that where you might have three or four hours. And I want you to start going out far enough in your calendar where you can start blocking out either these two half days or the full day. And I want you to block it out on your calendar then. Make it a weekly meeting that is just recurring. Just try it for three months, alright? For a month. I think you're gonna be astonished at how much you get done. The key is your time has to be spent on BizDev. Don't allow yourself to do client work. Don't allow yourself to do anything else. This has to be focused on growing the business. If you do that, even if all you do is give it eight hours a week, for most of you, that is way more than you're doing now. So maybe you're not gonna get to my 50% but you're gonna get a lot closer to it then you are today. Give it a try and let me know how it goes. I'll see ya next week.