Show Notes
The paradox of business ownership: infinite choices, finite time. Every decision changes the trajectory of your business. Most business owners don't have a filter.
Scott's filter: Would me in five years from now appreciate that I spent time on this today?
The time allocation problem: You're the cheapest person you can hire, so you end up doing $10/hour work. But you can't make $1,000/hour if you're spending time on $10/hour tasks.
The Realtor study (National Association of Realtors):
- 31% running errands
- 29% social media
- 19% admin
- 18% email
- 3% client-facing activities
Time allocation doesn't match desired results.
Leverage or labor? That's the question.
Opportunity selection: Shiny object syndrome is real. Every week Scott gets 2-3 pitches. "Maybe I should start an AI company." It's easy to chase. You have to say no—even when you don't want to.
"Pick my brain?" I give it away for free every day. You have it.
Future me wants fewer and better bets. Not scattered everywhere. Consolidated efforts aligned with skill sets.
Daily decisions:
- Could that meeting have been an email?
- Is that urgent project actually a distraction in disguise?
- Focus on what your business needs next.
Strategy isn't a master document. It's the decisions you're making and the trade-offs you're prepared to make.
The inversion: The filter also reveals what you SHOULD be doing. What would future me run back into the past and give me a hug for?
Before starting any task: Pause. Would future me appreciate this? If the answer is no or "I don't know"—that's your signal.
Edward: Scott's daily Substack character—a composite of every business owner facing these same challenges. Free at scotttodd.net/blog.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
Scott Todd (00:00)
The paradox of business ownership is that you get an infinite amount of choices. You can choose what your team does, you can choose what they're working on, you can choose what you do with your time, but that's the flip side is that you have a finite amount of time. And every day, when you're making these decisions, they're decisions that are changing the trajectory of your business and what you're going to end up working on. And most people
don't have a filter. And I'm not saying that in a bad way. I'm just saying that when everything is rushing at you, how do you prioritize which goes where? And for me, my filter is simple. Would me in five years from now appreciate that I spent time on this today?
The paradox of business ownership is that we have an infinite amount of choices that we can make every single day. We get to choose what we do, we get to choose the priorities of our team, we get to choose the project that we work on. We get all of these choices. And at the same time, we have a finite amount of time. And every day that you're making decisions, you're changing the path that your business is taking.
And for most business owners, they don't have a filter. And I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm just saying it because what happens is when you're running this business, things are coming at you in every single direction. You're you're tap dancing, you're making decisions on the fly. And as much as you want to have a filter, it's hard in the moment to differentiate: do I do this or do I do that? And for me,
The filter that I've adopted is would me in five years from now appreciate that I spent my time on this. Welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my Fortune 300 VP career. And this channel is dedicated to helping you build and scale a business you love. Now
Time allocation is one of the biggest problems for business owners because, well, look, face it, you have a lot of choices to make and you also have the freedom. Most business owners, they they go out and they want to make a difference. They want to control their future. They want to have unlimited earning potential. And at the same time, they also don't want to be stuck in that cubicle. They don't want to work for the man, and that's okay too.
But what ends up happening is because we have this time allocation and because, well, we're the cheapest people we can hire, we end up spending our time on low dollar amount of work. So we end up doing things that just really doesn't make any sense or allow us to get to our overall goals. So as you look at this, I see a lot of business owners that, you know, when you ask them like, hey, what are you working on? They tell you tasks.
They tell you about the tasks that they're doing. And oftentimes those tasks can be replaced by, you know, $10 an hour employees, maybe $20 an hour VAs. And they say, Well, I can't afford that. Okay, I get it. And today, more than ever, what I see is I see people that are now trying to augment this team. Instead of having humans, they're trying to use AI. And what ends up happening is they spend more money trying to get the AI set up to go do all this stuff.
Then it would actually cost them to have a human do it. But they think, well, it's just my time. But you can't make $1,000 an hour if you're spending 10, if you're spending your time doing $10 an hour work, right? Like that's the way that I think about it. And it's a constant reminder, even for myself, after 10 years of being in business, hey, make sure that I'm getting the most value out of my time. Now, another thing that people end up doing when they have this, you know, newfound freedom in their business is
The time allocation doesn't always match up to the desired result. Let me give an example. And this is kind of an, I think it's an extreme one, but I think it's a very good one. The National Association of Realtors, every year they conduct a survey. And for years and years and years, they've conducted this survey on how real estate agents spend their time. And year after year, the patterns emerge to be the same. They spend their time 31% running errands, realtors.
thirty one percent running errands, twenty nine percent doing doing social media. I mean look at the same time, like come on, social media is a great platform, but they spend twenty nine percent of their time doing social media.
Another nineteen percent doing admin work, whatever that is. Eighteen percent in email.
And that leaves 3%. 3% that they use for client-facing activities. So then what happens is they're not necessarily allocating their time to the highest dollar usage. The best usage of their time is spent running errands or social media, which by the way is a just a rabbit hole. So, you know, that's where you have to watch out for. And so this is where the filter comes in.
Five years from now, does the me look back and say, Man, I'm glad he spent his time doing that. And do they want leverage or do they want labor? And that's the way that I think about it. Now, the next big problem comes into opportunity selection. And what happens is there's always new opportunities. There's new areas to go grow your business in, there's new markets to look at.
There's new innovations. Opportunities are everywhere. And look, I mean, every single week I get pitched by at least two to three people who want me to look at some opportunity. It doesn't matter if it's like a new business that they're starting out or, you know, some other type of investment. Every week I'm looking at these different pitches and I'm getting new opportunities all the time.
And this is where shiny object syndrome comes in. And look, I I I fight this about all the time. look, AI's on the market. Maybe I should do something with building some AI company. See, it's easy. It's easy, especially when you have time freedom. And, you know, you have to be able to say no. You have to say no to things even when you don't want to. I mean, one of the things that I love to do is I love to help other people in growing their businesses. That's why I do this podcast.
That's why I write on Substack every single day. I want to help you have what I have. And, you know, at the same time, I have to be very, very careful of my time because multiple times a week, somebody sends me a note that says, I'd like to pick your brain. Pick it. I give it away for free every single day on Substack and in these podcasts and everywhere else I am. There's no reason to pick it. You have it. So five years from now, me.
Wants fewer and better bets, not scattered across everywhere. Future me wants more consolidated efforts that are more aligned with where all of my skill sets are, not everywhere else. Okay. So that's a filter that you kind of have to develop over time. Daily decisions. Okay. Daily decisions come down to that meeting. Could could I have jumped on a meeting?
Or could it have been an email? I mean, teams have a way of just multiplying meetings. And sometimes owners who are well from corporate America, where it's meeting all day long, back-to-back, wall-to-wall meetings, what's easy to kind of get into that flow. And that's the thing that I want to avoid is I don't want to be in meetings all the all the day long. And I don't want my team in meetings either. I want them producing. Okay.
And so when we think about the meetings, can can we move things to email or communication some other way? What about that project that just feels urgent? You know, something that we just have to do today. Well, that's something that's in disguise, right? That's a dis distraction in disguise. And we want to avoid those things. So what I try to do is I try to focus on what my business needs next, which
Happens to be very close to the book. Tell that I have fix this next. Strategic direction, strategic direction. And here I'm looking at am I building something that's compounding or am I just busy? And when I talk about strategy to people, one of the things that they'll often say to me is, well, yeah, that's something that big companies do. They put it in a binder, it's some big report.
But that's not strategy at all. Strategy is more of these are the things that we're going to do, and these are the things that we're not going to do. So when you think about strategy for your business, it's not some master document. It's about the decisions that you're making, the trade offs that you're prepared to make to build the organization that you want. And ideally, what I want is not to be doing this busy work. And I look back five years later and say, Man,
Look at all the emails that I cleared out of my inbox. That's not going to do me any good. And five years from now, Scott is going to be like, why did you waste your time clearing your inbox? Somebody else can do that. $10 an hour work, by the way. See, that's the way that I'm using the filters to think about it. Now, there is this inversion. There's this way of looking back at it and say, okay, look, five years from now,
What's that guy five years from now going to regret that I did? Okay. And so sometimes the filters reveal like not what I shouldn't be doing, but what I should be doing. Okay. So like, what should I be doing that the guy in the future is going to thank me, that he's going to want to run back into the past and give me a hug for? And so what I do is before I start a task, I pause for a minute and I think.
Would future me appreciate this? And if the answer is no, or I don't know, I pause because that's my signal. That's my internal signal that says maybe you shouldn't be doing this. And look, these are all the challenges that all business owners face. We all face these same.
Time crunches, allocation of time, allocation of resources, decisions. We face all of them. And it's our job to properly navigate that world to make the best decisions for future you. Now, every day I mention this, every day I write a sub stack. I call it my blog. You can go to my website, Scott Todd.
dot net. You can click on blog at the top. It'll take you there. There's no pay. Some people charge for Substack. I don't. But what I am writing about is I'm writing about a composite character named Edward. Edward's a business owner like you and me. And he's facing the different challenges that you and I are facing. And the one thing that Edward is trying to do is he's trying to get better. He's trying to make better decisions.
And I hope that it's something that you can look at and learn from as well. And I hope that you'll also join me over there. And I will also see you in our next episode.
The paradox of business ownership is that you get an infinite amount of choices. You can choose what your team does, you can choose what they're working on, you can choose what you do with your time, but that's the flip side is that you have a finite amount of time. And every day, when you're making these decisions, they're decisions that are changing the trajectory of your business and what you're going to end up working on. And most people
don't have a filter. And I'm not saying that in a bad way. I'm just saying that when everything is rushing at you, how do you prioritize which goes where? And for me, my filter is simple. Would me in five years from now appreciate that I spent time on this today?
The paradox of business ownership is that we have an infinite amount of choices that we can make every single day. We get to choose what we do, we get to choose the priorities of our team, we get to choose the project that we work on. We get all of these choices. And at the same time, we have a finite amount of time. And every day that you're making decisions, you're changing the path that your business is taking.
And for most business owners, they don't have a filter. And I'm not saying that in a negative way. I'm just saying it because what happens is when you're running this business, things are coming at you in every single direction. You're you're tap dancing, you're making decisions on the fly. And as much as you want to have a filter, it's hard in the moment to differentiate: do I do this or do I do that? And for me,
The filter that I've adopted is would me in five years from now appreciate that I spent my time on this. Welcome to Fix My Business. I'm your host, Scott Todd. I have built multiple seven-figure businesses after leaving my Fortune 300 VP career. And this channel is dedicated to helping you build and scale a business you love. Now
Time allocation is one of the biggest problems for business owners because, well, look, face it, you have a lot of choices to make and you also have the freedom. Most business owners, they they go out and they want to make a difference. They want to control their future. They want to have unlimited earning potential. And at the same time, they also don't want to be stuck in that cubicle. They don't want to work for the man, and that's okay too.
But what ends up happening is because we have this time allocation and because, well, we're the cheapest people we can hire, we end up spending our time on low dollar amount of work. So we end up doing things that just really doesn't make any sense or allow us to get to our overall goals. So as you look at this, I see a lot of business owners that, you know, when you ask them like, hey, what are you working on? They tell you tasks.
They tell you about the tasks that they're doing. And oftentimes those tasks can be replaced by, you know, $10 an hour employees, maybe $20 an hour VAs. And they say, Well, I can't afford that. Okay, I get it. And today, more than ever, what I see is I see people that are now trying to augment this team. Instead of having humans, they're trying to use AI. And what ends up happening is they spend more money trying to get the AI set up to go do all this stuff.
Then it would actually cost them to have a human do it. But they think, well, it's just my time. But you can't make $1,000 an hour if you're spending 10, if you're spending your time doing $10 an hour work, right? Like that's the way that I think about it. And it's a constant reminder, even for myself, after 10 years of being in business, hey, make sure that I'm getting the most value out of my time. Now, another thing that people end up doing when they have this, you know, newfound freedom in their business is
The time allocation doesn't always match up to the desired result. Let me give an example. And this is kind of an, I think it's an extreme one, but I think it's a very good one. The National Association of Realtors, every year they conduct a survey. And for years and years and years, they've conducted this survey on how real estate agents spend their time. And year after year, the patterns emerge to be the same. They spend their time 31% running errands, realtors.
thirty one percent running errands, twenty nine percent doing doing social media. I mean look at the same time, like come on, social media is a great platform, but they spend twenty nine percent of their time doing social media.
Another nineteen percent doing admin work, whatever that is. Eighteen percent in email.
And that leaves 3%. 3% that they use for client-facing activities. So then what happens is they're not necessarily allocating their time to the highest dollar usage. The best usage of their time is spent running errands or social media, which by the way is a just a rabbit hole. So, you know, that's where you have to watch out for. And so this is where the filter comes in.
Five years from now, does the me look back and say, Man, I'm glad he spent his time doing that. And do they want leverage or do they want labor? And that's the way that I think about it. Now, the next big problem comes into opportunity selection. And what happens is there's always new opportunities. There's new areas to go grow your business in, there's new markets to look at.
There's new innovations. Opportunities are everywhere. And look, I mean, every single week I get pitched by at least two to three people who want me to look at some opportunity. It doesn't matter if it's like a new business that they're starting out or, you know, some other type of investment. Every week I'm looking at these different pitches and I'm getting new opportunities all the time.
And this is where shiny object syndrome comes in. And look, I I I fight this about all the time. look, AI's on the market. Maybe I should do something with building some AI company. See, it's easy. It's easy, especially when you have time freedom. And, you know, you have to be able to say no. You have to say no to things even when you don't want to. I mean, one of the things that I love to do is I love to help other people in growing their businesses. That's why I do this podcast.
That's why I write on Substack every single day. I want to help you have what I have. And, you know, at the same time, I have to be very, very careful of my time because multiple times a week, somebody sends me a note that says, I'd like to pick your brain. Pick it. I give it away for free every single day on Substack and in these podcasts and everywhere else I am. There's no reason to pick it. You have it. So five years from now, me.
Wants fewer and better bets, not scattered across everywhere. Future me wants more consolidated efforts that are more aligned with where all of my skill sets are, not everywhere else. Okay. So that's a filter that you kind of have to develop over time. Daily decisions. Okay. Daily decisions come down to that meeting. Could could I have jumped on a meeting?
Or could it have been an email? I mean, teams have a way of just multiplying meetings. And sometimes owners who are well from corporate America, where it's meeting all day long, back-to-back, wall-to-wall meetings, what's easy to kind of get into that flow. And that's the thing that I want to avoid is I don't want to be in meetings all the all the day long. And I don't want my team in meetings either. I want them producing. Okay.
And so when we think about the meetings, can can we move things to email or communication some other way? What about that project that just feels urgent? You know, something that we just have to do today. Well, that's something that's in disguise, right? That's a dis distraction in disguise. And we want to avoid those things. So what I try to do is I try to focus on what my business needs next, which
Happens to be very close to the book. Tell that I have fix this next. Strategic direction, strategic direction. And here I'm looking at am I building something that's compounding or am I just busy? And when I talk about strategy to people, one of the things that they'll often say to me is, well, yeah, that's something that big companies do. They put it in a binder, it's some big report.
But that's not strategy at all. Strategy is more of these are the things that we're going to do, and these are the things that we're not going to do. So when you think about strategy for your business, it's not some master document. It's about the decisions that you're making, the trade offs that you're prepared to make to build the organization that you want. And ideally, what I want is not to be doing this busy work. And I look back five years later and say, Man,
Look at all the emails that I cleared out of my inbox. That's not going to do me any good. And five years from now, Scott is going to be like, why did you waste your time clearing your inbox? Somebody else can do that. $10 an hour work, by the way. See, that's the way that I'm using the filters to think about it. Now, there is this inversion. There's this way of looking back at it and say, okay, look, five years from now,
What's that guy five years from now going to regret that I did? Okay. And so sometimes the filters reveal like not what I shouldn't be doing, but what I should be doing. Okay. So like, what should I be doing that the guy in the future is going to thank me, that he's going to want to run back into the past and give me a hug for? And so what I do is before I start a task, I pause for a minute and I think.
Would future me appreciate this? And if the answer is no, or I don't know, I pause because that's my signal. That's my internal signal that says maybe you shouldn't be doing this. And look, these are all the challenges that all business owners face. We all face these same.
Time crunches, allocation of time, allocation of resources, decisions. We face all of them. And it's our job to properly navigate that world to make the best decisions for future you. Now, every day I mention this, every day I write a sub stack. I call it my blog. You can go to my website, Scott Todd.
dot net. You can click on blog at the top. It'll take you there. There's no pay. Some people charge for Substack. I don't. But what I am writing about is I'm writing about a composite character named Edward. Edward's a business owner like you and me. And he's facing the different challenges that you and I are facing. And the one thing that Edward is trying to do is he's trying to get better. He's trying to make better decisions.
And I hope that it's something that you can look at and learn from as well. And I hope that you'll also join me over there. And I will also see you in our next episode.