The Side-Hustle Dad

Ep24
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Welcome Entrepreneurs
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Bryan Steele: Hi, and welcome back to another episode of The Side Hustle Dad. I'm glad you're here with me today. One of the things that you probably don't consider for yourself is that you are truly an entrepreneur. If you have started a business, if you're creating something for yourself, even though it's just a side hustle, you're an entrepreneur.

E-Myth Seizure
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Bryan Steele: And there's a book that I read that I come back to periodically that I love, and I would highly recommend it. It's called The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, and in it, he talks about how entrepreneurs are seized. They have an entrepreneurial seizure, which makes them start a business. Some [00:01:00] sort of thing happened that says, "I've got to do this.

Something's gotta change." I imagine for you, that was something along the lines of, "I have to get some financial freedom. I have to send my kids to college. I have to, you know, pay off the house sooner. I have to get us out of debt." There, there's probably something that's caused you to say, "I need to create a business."

And you're doing something different than just getting another job. You're not getting a second job. You're not doing a gig economy type things like DoorDash, Uber, stuff like that.

Three Business Roles
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Bryan Steele: Those are all good, and they're great ways of earning some side income, but you wanted to build something yourself that was more valuable, that had the potential to bring in more revenue and work faster for you But something that doesn't get talked about a lot is that when you start a business, there's actually three roles that you play.

Normally, in a larger business, individuals will play [00:02:00] different roles. You'll have different employees that fulfill each of these roles. But Michael Gerber talks about how with these small entrepreneurs, oftentimes the owner has all three. They have all of the roles wrapped up into a single person, and it creates a lot of chaos and confusion.

That's what we're gonna start talking about today. So before we get any further, here's those three roles. The first is the entrepreneur or the owner. This is the person who is building the business, has this vision, has this big idea for what is possible. They've got grand ideas. It's what got you started in business in the first place.

The second role that needs to be fulfilled is the manager. The manager is the systems person, the one who's organizing the work, the one who's planning the next steps, the tactician, right? The [00:03:00] one who's directing things. And then finally, there's the technician. The technician is the one who's performing client work, the one who's making things happen for the customers.

That's the technician role.

Role Switching Stress
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Bryan Steele: Now, what happens a lot of times is you are doing one of these roles and your brain flips suddenly to needing to be the owner, or you're working on a task for a client, flips to being a manager. You're like, "Oh, this isn't working. We gotta make some system," and you're constantly back and forth, and it creates chaos, creates confusion around what is happening.

Why am I always so stressed? Why am I always overwhelmed? How do I keep this organized? How do I keep this straight? So that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about, first, understanding these roles and how they have to have a tension between them, where you're working in each one. And then in future [00:04:00] weeks, we're going to get into the details on what happens in each of those roles and what to focus your time on in them, depending on what's going on in your business at that time.

Okay, so let's jump into it

Time Constraints Plan
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Bryan Steele: So the first thing we have to discuss is your constraints. We've talked about it on episode three, identifying where you've got time to work in your business, what your, when your working hours are gonna be for this side hustle. ~But you also need to think strategically about when things are happening. Man~ We need to think strategically about what role you're playing at different times in the business. So if you've got a set number of hours, you know, you've got ten to twenty hours, something like that, that you're gonna be working on this business each week, we need to be strategic about you using that time most effectively.

Owner Manager Technician Hours
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Bryan Steele: So for a simple breakdown in the math, at an early-stage business, a side hustle as it were, you're only gonna spend one to three hours per week on the owner [00:05:00] tasks. The vision setting, the opportunities, the big crafting of what's possible is going to occupy a small amount of your time. But it is important, and you need to protect that time so that it doesn't try to leak into other parts of the business.

It's an opportunity to take a step back, get to fifty thousand feet, and look down on what you're doing and evaluate it. So that's the owner task. The manager tasks really gonna be in that two to five hours a week. So a little bit more time. This is your planning, this is your project management, this is your, your activity around the things you're doing, creating systems and structures.

We'll dive into that in more detail, but roughly two to five hours. And then your remaining seven to fifteen hours is going to be spent as the technician. Now, the technician is the [00:06:00] part that you already know. That's the skill, that's the knowledge that you used to create the business. That's what you were seized by, is, "I don't wanna work for somebody anymore.

I can do this myself and keep the money all internally, use it to benefit my family, benefit our lives," as opposed to working, you know, doing that for somebody else, right? Instead of doing a second job where you're trading time for money, you're saying, "I'm wanting to build something better." But it's all based around a skill.

Avoid Technician Trap
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Bryan Steele: So oftentimes, what we do in the business is we default to the technician role. We don't spend time in these other spaces. So while they're not large, especially early on, 'cause it's just you, you are the one who has to do the work, you have to do the revenue-generating activities, and it [00:07:00] makes sense, so you're gonna spend the largest chunk of your time in the business doing the technician work.

But you have to understand that when you are filling those other roles, you do not go do technician work. You stay on that important task. You stay on that piece that you're needing to do to make sure you're crafting something that's of value long-term. ~So~

So we normally, as business owners, will default to the technician role because it feels safe, it feels familiar. This is the piece that we're offering that's valuable to somebody else. So we have to separate all those tasks out and not just spend all of our time in technician mode. Technician mode is critical.

~We tend to default to technician mode because it's most familiar, it's easiest for us to get into.~ But the tendency is to push all those other things out because we don't understand them, because we're not as familiar with what the manager role is, what the entrepreneur role [00:08:00] is. ~It's not a place we've lived in.~

~It's not where we've built the skill.~ So you have to move away from just being in execution mode all the time into some of these other spaces, or else you're gonna be just on a roller coaster of business, feast and famine. Sometimes you'll have tons of customers, sometimes none, because you're not crafting something organized with the system.

So those are the three roles. You know what the technician is. You know what you should be doing there. But before we get into the others, we'll talk about the manager and the owner in future weeks on the podcast.

Block Your Roles
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Bryan Steele: But today I wanna talk about the challenging part, which is how to switch, right? If you only have a limited amount of time, your ability to effectively move from one domain to the next is absolutely critical, ~and you...~

~There's, there's a cost-switching...~ There's a task-switching cost that often comes up. So I wanna give you some tools today to make sure you understand how it is that you're [00:09:00] gonna make sure you stay in the zone, ~w- in~ that specific role when it's that dedicated time for you to be in that role

So the first thing to know is that we're going to block out our roles. We're not going to mix and match them. We're not gonna do a few minutes here and then some of their time over here. We're not gonna split them up. We're gonna make them as efficient as possible by allowing ourselves to get into some deep work with our tasks.

So you need to do at least sixty-minute blocks in each of these. Now, if you're, you know, say, responding to emails over a lunch break or sending out some notifications, that's not what I'm, I'm thinking about. I'm really thinking about when you're spending one to three to five hours on your business. This is where you're gonna block it out, and you're gonna avoid switching back and forth.

So you set out with the hours you've defined from episode number three when you looked at your availability and when it [00:10:00] is you're gonna be working on your side hustle. We start to define those blocks. We say, "This is when I'm gonna be the owner. This is when I'm gonna be the manager, and this is when I'm gonna be the technician."

Define those spaces so that you know what each domain is.

Guardrails Against Distraction
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Bryan Steele: Then you specifically craft out guardrails around those blocks. So for example, if you're the technician, you're gonna turn off your email notifications. You're gonna stay in the work. You're not gonna be responding to things. When you are the manager, you're not gonna be opening the software to work on projects.

You're gonna keep that out of sight, out of mind. You're gonna only be doing certain software tasks. You're only gonna be in certain domains. If you're the owner, maybe you don't have the computer in front of you at all. But think about what those things are that can pull you out of those spaces and create some [00:11:00] guardrails around them so that you focus on the most important tasks.

Make sure you're doing those right things. Then now that you've got the roles defined, when you're gonna work on them, you've got some tactical guardrails, ~we wanna start each of those blocks with... Sorry.~

Smooth Role Transitions
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Bryan Steele: Now that you've got those guardrails, we need to create a transition from one to the next, right? Because you are only gonna spend an hour in owner mode. You're going to need to switch to manager. When you're in manager mode, you're gonna switch at some point to the technician. So we need to make that transition smooth and efficient.

So whenever you are wrapping up a session, whenever you're getting to the end of a block, you need to make a note of what is next. You need to make a note of what the next task is going to be. Maybe that's for the manager to work on a system. So if you're in owner mode, you think about something, you go, "Oh, that's really cool.

That system needs to be built," you're gonna make a note of it so that next time you get [00:12:00] the manager block, you know what tasks are important there. You know what needs to be focused on. You've got it organized, so you're not back and forth. Plus, where in your owner mode, you're not starting to do manager tasks, right?

So you use those last five minutes to document what it is that needs to happen in the other blocks for the other roles

Once you've done that, you've given yourself the exact things that need to happen in that work block for the next person to focus on. At the end of any of these sessions, you need to basically-- ~I,~ I don't wanna say purge, 'cause you're not really getting rid of it, but you need to remove potential distractions to come back to something later.

So if you've got notebooks where you write down your ideas, or if you've got tabs open on your computer where you've been doing research or, you know, talking to clients, we wanna close out those tabs, close out those things that could be potential distractions as you make the shift, and only focus on those [00:13:00] things that are most important.

So make sure to close out, shut down, wrap up all of those pieces so that they are gone, and they're not something that's in your peripheral vision, you know, metaphorically, to where you could easily pop back into it and leak tasks in another area. So that helps make that transition more seamless, so you maintain focus and efficiency.

Because ultimately, what we're trying to do is get to flow state as quickly as possible, where we can do our best work

Wrap Up and Next Steps
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Bryan Steele: And so that's what I want to leave you with today is you now know there's these three roles. So what I want you to look at, look at when you work on your business and when are you going to focus on each one of those roles. ~It's up to you to define when you think you're going to be at your best thinking to be the entrepreneur, when you're going to be most efficient to do client tasks.~

~Think through those pieces when you're going to focus on each one, and~ then decide what it is you're going to use to remove distractions as you're in each of those modes. Is it turning off certain notifications? Is it closing your tabs? What is it going to be that's going to create those guardrails ~when you're each...~

when you're [00:14:00] fulfilling each of those roles? And then how are you going to make that transition? That close down each item, keep a running list of like, "Hey, this is the next thing for this person to focus on in that block. You know, I'm wrapping up my time as the owner. The manager is next. The manager needs to do these three things with their time."

And think about passing that on, because in reality, what you're doing is what a company does for multiple people. The owner is passing on information to the managers on what to focus on because these are the most important things for the business. The manager is creating the systems and structures for the technicians to work on to make the business money.

That's how you need to approach these things so that you're as organized as possible. It's just you're now delegating to yourself in many ways. You're fulfilling each role and telling the other role what it is they've got to accomplish. [00:15:00] I hope this really helps clarify what it is that's creating all that confusion, why you feel like sometimes you're just paddling and not going anywhere.

So think about these roles, how they show up in your business, and start to implement those guardrails. Create some space where you can focus on each one.

Closing and Teaser
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Bryan Steele: And in next week's episode, we'll start getting into the specifics of the manager role and then the owner role. Thanks, and I will see you next time

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