It seems these days when you ask somebody how they are the immediate response is a puffing of the cheeks, a very loud exhale of breath and a worried look on their faces before declaring “I’m so busy”.
“I am so busy doing nothing that the idea of doing anything which as you know, always leads to something cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.” – Jerry Seinfeld
Well I’m here to declare – with a degree of pre-meditation – we keep our calendars purposefully clear most of the day. In other words, we’re not busy.
In business most people would find that to be an awful predicament. But it’s just not.
Let me explain.
Generally, for personal and professional reasons, Nick and I will not book an appointment in the Sydney CBD (our offices) before 10:30am. The main reason for this is Sydney traffic. We work from home from when we both arise (for me 6am, for Nick earlier because he has very young children) to around 10am. That’s when we decide to drive in. We generally save ourselves 30-45 minutes a day and a lot of frustration.
We drive a lot. Either to and from the office or visiting clients in the suburbs.
These drives incorporate our daily sales meetings or whether or not we want to enter into a referral agreement and quite often whether or not we’re doing the right thing. This saves another 20 minutes (per day) on average. As my car is our secondary office, Nick always has his laptop open and connected on these drives so that we can provide instant answers to any potential client questions.
We try not to book appointments between 4-7pm (although we’re happy to meet people at their homes or offices after 7pm). That’s another 30-45 minutes each day. Again, we use the drive home the same as in the mornings (usually to chase up lenders). This also means that we can tend to personal responsibilities if/when required.
By adopting the above schedule we estimate that we save between 100-130 minutes per day that we dedicate to work rather than frustrating traffic. Over a 12 month period that saves us between 54 – 65 working days (assuming an 8 hour day). I’m not sure about you but that’s significant. It’s an extended holiday if we were that way inclined. When we have taken an extended holiday (and we did last year) it was not obvious to our clients as we had our phones and laptops with us. In fact, we settled half a dozen home loans and a commercial transaction whilst on that holiday.
On the odd occasion when we have no meetings scheduled – we don’t come into the CBD at all. We work from my house. These home working days usually only last 4 hours (with no breaks).
So, by working less we’re actually working more. Think about that for a moment.
Add to that the fact that -when required and as stated above – we work on holidays. Unlike a bank, we can’t just shut the doors and disappear and hope someone else picks up the slack. We don’t work, we don’t eat. Now you’re starting to get the picture of how efficient calendar management means we can achieve what we do with around 4-6 hours in the office daily.
Here’s the big one…We try and avoid meetings on Fridays. Whilst this is almost never possible, there is tremendous intent from both of us to try and achieve this. The idea behind this was for us to have a day off because on occasion – when there’s no other choice – we have been known to meet clients on a weekend (though, if I’m honest, this has happened a dozen times since May 2015).
This flexibility gives us options from a personal perspective but it also means that if one of us has to attend an urgent meeting, we can. Obviously, if we have a client who cannot make it any other time we’re flexible enough to fit them in.
Some of you may be thinking that we have no down time. You’d be so wrong. In fact, we purposely regard most of the day as down time. Which means we’re available for clients.
So, how is being not busy a good thing?
What we’ve discovered is that clients are rarely available to meet 9-5. They have working lives. However, they’re happy to fit in with all the other times which we allocate for meeting with them. The reality is that we’re very rarely required to book meetings in the blocked-out times stated above. This ensures that we have dedicated work times so that we can do all the analysis, administrative and compliance related tasks each transaction requires. As well as follow up calls to lenders and clients.
Initially this all started because we were concerned that we would not have a work life balance. But it turns out that when we’re at work – we actually work. Compare that with an average employee who is always busy. I’m sure they are but my experience as an employee suggests that there’s always down time while you’re waiting for someone to complete a task or approve something.
I would suggest that Nick and I have the perfect work/life balance but we don’t always take advantage of it. Being not busy doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. It means that you do the things you have to do far more thoroughly than a busy person. More importantly, you have time to think, to assess whether or not you’re doing the right thing or heading in the right direction as a business.
From a practical perspective, it means that we’re able to answer a phone call from a client almost immediately and allocate time to ensure we understand their requirements. It’s difficult to do that when you’re “busy”.
As an example, last year we had every intention of embarking on a joint venture with another firm. Two weeks into the JV, I called it off because it was significantly impacting our work load and our ability to communicate with clients in a relaxed manner. In one particular client meeting – which lasted an hour – I received three calls and 14 texts from our potential JV partners.
Obviously, they felt that whatever they had to say to me was far more important than whatever I was doing at the time. From a client perspective that’s not a good look. It says to the client they have no hope of being my priority.
We’re not the type of business that stretches themselves so thin that things begin to fall between the cracks. We’re just incapable of effectively working that way. Also, we refuse to outsource client service tasks.
If you want that Wolf of Wall Street, stock broker environment, we’re not your guys. If finance was movies or music, you won’t find sex and violence here. We’re not Death Metal of even Rap. We’re probably more like easy listening (and that’s not an easy comparison for me to make).
So, when someone asks me how I am these days, my response is invariably “tremendous!” But it’s never “busy”.