Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.364)
If you're an entrepreneur struggling to manage overwhelming workloads and constant hustle that leaves you with no time for life,
then our guest Sabrina Starling is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Sabrina Starling, PhD, PCC, and BCC, the business psychologist, is the international bestselling author of the How to Hire the Best series and the four week vacation. She works with organizations and people who want to opt out of the hustle culture and opt into work supporting life for extraordinary peace, performance, and profit.
Sabrina, excited to have you here, really looking forward to this.
Dr. Sabrina Starling (00:41.742)
Thank you, Adam. This is gonna be fun. Let's dive in.
Adam O'Leary (00:44.468)
Absolutely. So I've heard you discuss how focusing on high value activities can transform a business owner's life. Why is identifying and prioritizing these activities so crucial for overcoming the feeling of being constantly overwhelmed?
Dr. Sabrina Starling (00:58.83)
Okay, so we business owners are, we always know what we want to do in our business and we're always very impatient to make those things happen. And so we just want to just jump and go. But then we have all kinds of decisions that get thrown at us. People need us, our input on this or that, and there's all these fires to put out. And we start the day with the best intentions, but then very quickly we are off track. And that is the repeated experience of being in business almost every single day.
when you have a growing business. And so what this really boils down to is we need a simple framework to quickly evaluate what is the highest and best use of our time? What is the one thing that I can do right now from my strengths such that everything else will be easier or unnecessary for myself or others? That is the definition.
of a $10,000 an hour activity. And when we consistently ask ourselves that question, it focuses us on the activities that really move the needle in our businesses. And we need to be able to do that for ourselves, but we also have to teach our team members to think in that way.
Adam O'Leary (02:21.951)
love that. And how did you come up with this concept of a $10,000 per hour? I mean, that is so much bigger than most people think. Where did you come up with that concept?
Dr. Sabrina Starling (02:30.798)
For me, it happened when I started my business Tap the Potential over 20 years ago and I was committed to working a 25-hour work week because I was a new mom and I did not want to put my daughter with a babysitter more than 25 hours a week. So I am all about growth and I want to make things happen. And so I thought, okay, but I've only got 25 hours a week. How do I do this?
And I quickly got overwhelmed with all the things that are needed in a startup business and having to wear all the hats. And what I saw is that when I was overwhelmed, when I was at a very low point in my business and I was having a meltdown and you know, the big ugly tears and crying and all of a sudden after I cried a little bit, I had a moment of clarity and I asked myself, okay, Sabrina, if you can only get one thing done today.
What is the one thing that you can do that's really going to move this business forward? And I knew my answer and I went and I did that one thing. I left my office that day and I still had a long list of things to do, but I felt this sense of accomplishment. Like, okay, I didn't get all the other things done, but I got that one thing done that I know that's going to move this business forward. So the next day when I came into work, I had that same overwhelm because that's we live with that as entrepreneurs, right? And I just said, okay.
you can only get one thing done today, what is the one thing that's going to move the business forward? And I did that. And what I started to see is, you the first week when I started calling this my $10,000 an hour activity, the reason I called it $10,000 an hour is I knew that I was adding value. I was treating my business like I was growing an asset versus treating my business like I needed to get the next dollar in the door.
Most of us treat our businesses like we need to get the next dollar in the door. We're not treating it like growing an asset. So we've got to start thinking about we're growing this asset and every small step that we take to grow that asset adds value. And I started thinking about it as $10,000 an hour time because if I have a client and they're paying me, I don't know, $20,000 for a coaching engagement and they call and they need something.
Dr. Sabrina Starling (04:47.723)
it's very easy for me to just drop whatever I'm doing because they're paying that amount of money and I'm gonna go do whatever they need. So I had to think about my time as being of higher value and that the asset that I'm growing this business is being higher value. And so what it did when I blocked the time on my calendar and I called it $10,000 an hour activity, it made it very hard for me to blow past my $10,000 an hour time on my calendar.
because a client needed something or because my inbox was dinging. And that valuation of my time and my mind made it much easier for me to protect the time. But then I also, I read Perry Marshall's book, The 80-20 Sales and Marketing, and he had a book in there, or a chart in there of $10,000 an hour activities for marketing. And I saw that and I thought, this is brilliant.
I need this for my business, but my business isn't just marketing. you know, thinking from a perspective of a small business owner, what are the $5 an hour, $10 an hour tasks versus $100, $1,000 and $10,000? So I adapted it and I made my own chart of $10,000 an hour activities. And what I did, Adam, is I printed it out and I laminated it and I put it behind my computer monitor. And so my eye was falling on it.
all the time and so I would be know hunkered down for two hours immersed in email and I would look up and I would look at that chart and I would immediately ask myself my gosh did I just spend two hours doing a ten thousand dollar an hour activity or was I doing a ten dollar an hour task and it was that instant accountability for myself that helped me become better and better at protecting the ten thousand dollar an hour time.
So started sharing this with our clients who were business owners and they, the feedback was immediate like, my gosh, this is so helpful. Thank you. And so I want to offer it to your listeners. You can download this chart of $10,000 in our activities at tapthepotential.com forward slash 10 K tapthepotential.com forward slash 10 K. The cool thing that
Dr. Sabrina Starling (07:09.485)
I started to notice is it's not about us turning all of our time into $10,000 an hour activity. I don't want to work 40 hours a week doing $10,000 an hour activity. That's not my goal. My goal is to get in about five hours a week of $10,000 an hour activity. And that's what we started seeing with our clients at Tap the Potential. When they give us five hours a week of their $10,000 an hour time over the course of a year,
able to get them to a four-week vacation and that is how powerful this $10,000 an hour mindset is.
Adam O'Leary (07:47.947)
That's amazing, super, super cool. And I guess how would you say for anybody who's going ahead and they identify their 10,000 per hour activities that they have, what are some practical steps that they could take to really start moving in the direction where they're only focusing on that $10,000 per activities?
Dr. Sabrina Starling (08:08.077)
Yeah, yeah, so I've been in business now for about 20 years. I work about 10 hours a week now. So I went down from 25 hours a week down to 10 hours and about 90 % of that 10 hour time now is $10,000 an hour activity. So the practical steps for getting there, number one, think in your mind, small steps forward, taken in a consistent direction lead to big change over time.
So we're gonna do small steps. the first small step is to start blocking your $10,000 an hour time and think about how are you gonna find five hours for $10,000 an hour time this week. And you really wanna look for the time when you are most alert, most engaged, for most of us that's in the morning, like first thing in the morning before we get pulled into anything else. So you wanna block that time and psychologically,
we need to be aware of how we perform. So we can't do a five hour block of $10,000 an hour activity. That's just not possible. But we can do 45 minutes. We can do 90 minutes. Like if we take a 10 minute break in there, that's probably optimal for most of us. block that time, first part of the day, every day. And the goal isn't to be perfect because there's going to inevitably you will block this on your calendar and something's going to come up that's going to block.
blast through your $10,000 an hour time and then you're going to get to the end of the week and say, well, that doesn't work because you know, I got distracted. The goal isn't perfection. The goal is if you're doing this 80 % of the time, you're going to be way more further along, more effective than you are currently.
Adam O'Leary (09:52.235)
Absolutely, and when we look at this, how do we go ahead and maybe start? So you're saying just kind of start by throwing in like 45 minutes at a time or so. But obviously the goal is gonna be to build up to as many of these hours. Like imagine if we could get to like you, 10, 20 hours of just $10,000 per week activities. How do we start gradually building up to being able to add that to get up to 10 hours per week?
Dr. Sabrina Starling (10:00.28)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Sabrina Starling (10:14.977)
Yes. Okay. So the thing that we want to look at is when what are our strengths? Because that's the key to $10,000 an hour activity. When we're working from our strengths, making something easier, something easier or unnecessary for ourselves or others. So for me, I love teaching. I love going on podcasts. I love educating. So whenever I'm showing up here on a podcast interview,
This is $10,000 an hour time. And I had to free up other time on my calendar to be able to do these things. So we start looking at what are the things that are not our strengths? What are the things that drain our batteries when we're in our business? Bookkeeping, calendaring, all of that. I hate all that stuff. And so delegating that.
to somebody who loves organizing and dealing with a calendar and getting an inbox clean, that's their $10,000 an hour activity because it's freeing me up to focus over here and be on this podcast interview. So we use this chart of $10,000 an hour activity to look at, we can time track, we can take two weeks and track our time in 15 minute increments.
and then take that chart of $10,000 an hour activity and value where we spent our time over the last two weeks, very quickly we'll see most of it's been spent on $10, $100, and $1,000 an hour tasks. And so the lowest value activity is the $10 an hour tasks or what you wanna get off your plate and delegate that because it frees up your time to focus on higher value in the business.
And then what quickly will happen is you'll see that your team members become overloaded because you become a delegating ninja and it's all going to them, right? And they're like, my gosh, I'm drowning. It's all coming at me. So they have to learn how to delegate and how to use this chart and start looking at their time and seeing, they spending most of it on $10 an hour tasks? If you have leadership team members who are doing $10 an hour tasks, you are throwing money out the window in your business.
Dr. Sabrina Starling (12:25.666)
that needs to be delegated down to entry level positions in the business.
Adam O'Leary (12:31.112)
love that. And what would you say would be one simple win our listeners could listen to right now and start implementing today to start building their way up to this?
Dr. Sabrina Starling (12:40.14)
Okay, so I would say download this chart, tap thepotential.com forward slash 10K, identify one $10,000 an hour activity that you're going to focus on in the next week in your business, block the time on your calendar, and do that one activity. Don't try to do five different things because all that context switching really reduces our effectiveness as well. So pick one thing.
Get it done, see it through to completion over the next week. And then you're gonna have a feeling of, I got this, it's a small win and it gives us the momentum. And then the following week, repeat the process.
Adam O'Leary (13:22.792)
love that. And what results have you seen from people who have gone ahead and implemented this process?
Dr. Sabrina Starling (13:27.52)
All right, so at Tap the Potential, 95 % of our clients are achieving our promised result of more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than ever. So this is doable and the results that they're seeing, our clients are experiencing over a 700 % increase in time off. So what that means is they're going from working 60 plus hour weeks down to leaving work at five o'clock each day.
fully unplugging in the evenings and weekends, taking weekends off totally. So that's freeing up time, but then they're also starting to take more vacation where they're fully unplugging and building up to that four week vacation. So weeks of vacation happening over the course of a year and the business owner being able to be fully unplugged from the business while the business keeps growing. So those are some concrete results that are realistic to expect.
when you are focusing on your $10,000 an hour activity.
Adam O'Leary (14:31.146)
I love that. And where can people go to learn more about you?
Dr. Sabrina Starling (14:33.752)
Tappthepotential.com is our website and I also host the Profit by Design podcast with our lead strategist Melissa Kay at Tapp the Potential. So every week we are talking about these concepts. So if you need that ongoing reinforcement, check out the Profit by Design podcast.
Adam O'Leary (14:50.815)
That's amazing. Well Sabrina, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for your time. This was absolutely fantastic. Awesome, well thank you everyone for listening and I will see you on the next episode.
Dr. Sabrina Starling (14:55.906)
Thank you, Adam.
