Would you like to own a business 10x or 100x larger than the one you currently own? You know that there are businesses that are 100x larger than yours, right? And you know some started after yours? And you know they don’t work 100x more than you, because that’s impossible. So how come they’ve scaled up and you haven’t?
“I bet they had a rich father or a network of wealthy people.”
No, I’m talking about people who started out with less capital, less knowledge, fewer connections, and with no more formal education than you. Still, they managed to grow their businesses 10x or 100x bigger than yours.
The answer is: they worked on the RIGHT things!
Let me state it again more clearly: they’ve grown their businesses 10x or 100x larger than yours by working on certain tasks while disregarding others. The key is in those last three words.
It’s only by REFUSING to work on certain activities you face on a daily basis that you finally unshackle yourself and free up your time to work on the right things.
Sharpening your schedule is more a game of avoiding the WRONG activities than merely completing any given activity.
The topic of this book is what you must work on to grow your business—and consequently, what you must absolutely get rid of, whether by delegating it, ignoring it, or by writing it off. The multimillionaires I’ve worked with value each minute of their time, they know EXACTLY what has to be done and why. As for the how, they leave that to others. That’s the number one difference between high achievers and those below them.
I’ve been asked several times what the main characteristics of 8-figure earners are. And at some point, I thought it was their capacity to be laser focused, which means: to NOT devote any of their time to secondary tasks, or useless tasks such as checking Facebook or emails every ten minutes. But over the years, I’ve realized there was something much more important, something that precedes their ability to focus. It’s simply their ability to CHOOSE the right things to do.
Before focusing your attention and energy on something, you must choose WHAT to focus on. If you focus on the wrong things, your business may not grow as much as it should, or even at all, no matter how hard you focus. Before climbing the ladder, you have to choose WHERE to place it.
The thing that sets the high achievers apart from the rest is their ability to choose the right things to work on. The sun shines tomorrow on those who work on the right things today.
In a way, I’ve been writing this book in my mind for almost a decade, and as soon as I understood the above, my goal was to clearly identify every single activity that successful business owners invest their personal time in, the ones they delegate, and the ones they never do.
I’ve spent a lot of time—or should I say, INVESTED a lot of time—with these high achievers, some of whom were owners of companies earning 8- to 9-figures in revenue.
I did it all with my end goal in mind—I want to help my fellow business owners optimize their time by helping them concentrate their efforts on the right things: that is the vehicle through which they can reach financial freedom.
FINANCIAL FREEDOM
In the business world, financial freedom used to be owning a 7-figure company. But that’s not the case anymore. Inflation is changing everything.
Owning an 8-figure business is definitely more appropriate when we talk about real freedom. But when talking about freedom, revenue is not the be-all and end-all. I’m also talking about your working time. How many hours per week do you devote to your business? How many weeks off can you take with no impact on your business’s results? The bigger you grow your business, the freer you become, because you inevitably build an entity that operates independently of you.
Ask yourself this question: what would happen to your company, and ultimately your family, if something happened to you, say you were stricken with a disease or were involved in a terrible, debilitating accident? Is your business equipped to continue to deliver products or services the same way as if you were there, at least for a couple of years?
If your business slows down as soon as you’re unable to work in it, we need to fix that as soon as humanly possible. Your responsibility is to structure your company correctly so that it can thrive without you, if it ever needed to.
When your business is set up the right way, if anything unfortunate were to happen to you, there’s no impact, or at least you’re mitigating any drastic impact. You’ll never be able to build a business that functions without you until you build a system that requires ZERO effort on your part. This means delegating almost everything, a prerequisite of which is having the right systems and the right people.
You can’t focus on hiring and training a team to replace you if you’re constantly fighting to get clients. To be set up the right way, the company can’t depend on anybody, neither you nor any key employee. That’s when you own a real business—an entity with a bunch of proven systems, that has value with or without you, and that’s therefore transferable. But when someone becomes indispensable to a business, that business becomes a weak business, despite the fact that it may appear more robust in the short-term. That kind of business is like a house built on sand: having attractive architecture and yet lacking the robust foundations to endure the incessant ebb and flow of daily tides.
While it’s possible to reach this goal before, it’s really around the 8-figure threshold that such a structure can be optimized. That’s what I want for each of you, my fellow business owners, because it’s not THAT hard… as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ll delve deeper into that important topic later in the book.
MY STORY
When I said to a friend of mine that I was writing a book, the first thing he told me was to provide value “with no secret agenda.” So I intend on doing just that. Let’s uncover everything, from my personal story to WHY I wrote this book.
My life, as is common in most people’s, can be summed up as a series of defeats. But you don’t need many victories to turn it around and shift the balance in your favor.
I grew up in Montreuil with my two sisters in a lower middle-class suburb of Paris, France, home to many blue-collar workers. My father was a house painter in France, when he came in 1968. He left communist Yugoslavia, where he was a teacher of philosophy and history, to build a brighter future for his children. My mom was a licensed childminder, so the atmosphere was always warm and festive at home; and there was anywhere between five and eight children at home all year long.
I’ve been an avid reader all my life, as have all my family members. From an early age, I figured that my reading taught me a good deal more than my schoolbooks ever did. School never interested me, so naturally, I started my first business at eighteen, after dropping out of high school.
That was the first of many businesses in various industries (cleaning, real estate, software, e-commerce, medical device manufacturing, and fintech among others). I failed a lot and succeeded a few times … until I started to win BIG. The turning point came when, as an investment banker, I started to meet owners of 7-, 8-, and 9-figure businesses on a regular basis.
I realized the way business was done up there had nothing to do with how I was managing my companies. So I decided to spend as much time as I possibly could with them, not only to do business but also to learn directly from them. From the outset, I felt that something was different in their world, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Was it their budget? The way they talked? Their marketing? Their education? Their connections?
Turns out it was none of that. I needed to take a step back and adopt a more holistic perspective. And when I did, I realized that the main difference was in what high performance people chose to do and, perhaps more importantly, what not to do. Over the years, it became so obvious that high performers were spending their time very differently. It was all down to their time management.
Every day, I took notes, compiling and modeling what I’d learned. I’ve always excelled at applying what I learn, without procrastinating, second guessing, or spreadsheeting it to death. That was key to my impending success. From then, I was able to grow four 7-figure businesses and one 8-figure business.
You can find greater details of my life on Wall Street right here, among other bonuses—it’s free:
8FigureWorld.com/WallStreet
I’d planned to write this book for such a long time, but the trigger came in March, 2020, when small business owners were forced to close their doors. I felt like the FINAL BATTLE had started, between US—the real business world, the producers, the wealth generators—and THEM, the financial world, the virtual economy, and the parasitic super-class.
I wondered what I could do to help my fellow business owners, and that was the catalyst for starting this book. In it, I hold nothing back and explain everything I know that has allowed me to start and grow 7- and 8-figure businesses. If you apply what you learn within these pages, you’ll see results first in yourself after a couple of days, and thereafter in your business after a few weeks.
For the proactive among you, this book will become a jumping-off point for a new direction in your life. That’s why I didn’t create an online course, as so many around me suggested. A book is a much more convenient guide to keep within reach, to flick through and refer back to, and to digest and re-read the salient parts again and again.
WHO THIS BOOK IS NOT FOR
Now, there’s a reason why some of you probably shouldn’t follow the framework of this book. I’m here to show you all the pros and cons, and I do this because, again, I have no secret agenda and want to demystify the truth about time management. It’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy.
There are business owners who like to be HANDS ON with their businesses. There are two reasons for that:
OR
This is something I’ve seen time and time again. Unless they’re ready for a big paradigm shift, these are the kind of business owners I can’t do anything for. When a business owner doesn’t want to relinquish some control and insists on carrying out certain activities, they’re not ready to grow their company. Why’s that? It’s because:
What I’m offering you is to acquire a new vision and another set of skills that very few business owners have, to propel you further and faster. Personally, I like marketing, but I prefer profit and growth.
Instead of doing what you love, I suggest loving what you do.
And you’ll love it 100% when you see tremendous results, in terms of earnings and free time.
I may sound like I am obsessed with efficiency … Well, that’s because I am.
I want to do the minimal amount of work while achieving optimal results. I think about the 80/20 rule all the time; and by thinking this way, that’s exactly how I’ve managed to grow my companies to seven and eight figures. In the world I’m going to show you, there’s no room for excessive control or doing what you like.
The other kind of people this book is not for is business owners who are looking for tactics. There are plenty of other books on that topic, whether it is about ads, offers, funnels, copywriting, and so on … Whatever tactics you plan to use, you won’t have any problem finding a book on that matter. But there are very few books about time management, and even fewer proven frameworks with which to implement your strategies. This book is the one.
The last kind of people this book is not for is the 8-figure business owner. If you’re already part of this world, you’re already applying things written in this book, whether consciously or not. I have some ideas on how to grow a 9-figure company, but until I do that myself, I’ll refrain from dispensing my advice. I don’t value theory, I value experience: I only talk about what I know for sure. If I grow a 9-figure business, I’ll let you know EXACTLY how I did it.
WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
When you become aware that 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your activities, you’ll start to focus your time on this 20% and maybe even become obsessed with doing so.
What this means, mathematically, is that if you can accurately identify the 20% of your activities that bring 80% of your results, you can then focus 100% of your time on these activities and automatically get 5x the result you’re currently getting.
Now let’s take it a step further: when you look at the layers, it means that 4% (20% of 20%) of your activities bring 64% (80% of 80%) of your results. If you can focus on these very activities and spend 100% of your time on them, you’ll mathematically get 25x the result you currently get (100/4 = 25). It’s a rudimentary sum, but when you think about it, it makes total sense. Perry Marshall devoted an entire book to this topic.
Following that logic, you come to realize that less than 1% of your activities bring your business more than 50% of its results. Let’s concentrate your time and efforts on these, to get 100x the results you’re currently getting.
That’s the theory.
Creating the plan doesn’t miraculously bring your expected results to fruition. Between theory and real life, there’s the human factor, the known problems, the unknown factors, accidents, unexpected events, the unforeseen issues … But when you establish the vision, it puts you on the right track of understanding: you always keep in mind that there are activities that are infinitely more important than others. It enables you to have the optics required to see where the points of leverage are, at each stage of your business—and to act upon them.
There are things a business owner HAS to do, whether or not they dislike them or are bad at them. Conversely, there are activities a business owner should NOT do, not ever. No matter how much they enjoy or excel at them. If you’re ready to keep that in mind and to apply it to every minute of your business day, then this book is for you.
It’s a question of leverage and timing: what moves the needle the most at the growth stage you’re at? That’s the ONLY thing that matters.
If you’re not running an 8-figure business yet and you’re ready to follow the guide and not be distracted by things such as the activities you like, immediate rewards, easy tasks, or short-term gains, this book is for you. Your industry doesn’t matter either. It didn’t matter if I was selling gift baskets, nutritional supplements, growth advice, body products, or medical devices, all I had in mind was how to spend my time the best way, following the blueprints of multimillionaires.
Whether you need to do something by yourself or not doesn’t matter, as long as you’re moving closer towards your 8-figure goal. Just follow the framework. What needs to be done is the only thing that matters. This book is the answer to this question.
You’ll never make $2–10m/year in revenue if you keep doing $25/hour tasks.
It’s literally, undeniably, physically impossible. Many readers of this book will go on to scale their businesses to $1m/year or more. Some of them will grow them to $10m/year and beyond. Most will find more time and energy, regain control and consistency, and even be inspired to help other business owners around them with their new knowledge.
The better we small business owners do, the better everybody does. Share what you know. Our world—the world of small- and medium-sized companies—is NOT a zero-sum game, contrary to the corporate bureaucratic world. Always maintain a mentality of abundance.
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
Before we get down to business, here’s how NOT to read this book.
A word of caution: don’t be pumped up about anything you read here. You might just walk away feeling deflated. Leave emotion out of it. Just apply it. Being pumped up is useless, because it’s only a temporary boost. It’s like drinking too much coffee: you’ll be pumped in the short-term, but drink too much and you’ll end up with the jitters before finally crashing. This book isn’t about being motivated, or finding the motivation, or anything related to what you’ve heard elsewhere from choristers of toxic positivity. These notions have very little substance to them and always disappear and leave you drained. This book exists on the other side of the spectrum: its practical advice will help teach you about self-control.
Given that the topic of this book is centered on WHAT you should work on, the most important aspect is in its TABLE OF CONTENTS, that is, the list of activities which should and shouldn’t be carried out by YOU, regarding your business’ growth stage. By following these, you should see dramatic improvements in your time management, even if you refrain from delving deep into the theory behind it.
Since I’ve seen 8-figure business owners at work up close, and given I’ve taken endless notes over the years after almost every interaction I’ve had with them, it would be a shame not to share with you the HOW with regards to working on each of these activities.
I wanted to write a book that’s never been written before, a kind of blueprint where every possible task a business owner faces is listed and ranked in order of importance. My first title idea was The Activity Ladder, and I itemized over a hundred activities. Then I gathered some of them together to make it digestible and clear. After that, I put them into four different categories, ranging from useless tasks to super-high-value tasks. And finally, I described these activities in greater detail, based on how each of them is handled by the high achievers I know, those being the owners of businesses making at least $10 million in revenue.
Sometimes I asked them directly about their opinions on a specific topic, but most of the time I just had to open my eyes to see them in action, since I worked with them for years on a daily basis as an investment banker.
Here are the four categories of activities, which form the main sections of this book:
You can read this book just to pick up some tricks and tips here and there such as my popular hiring questions, if you’re looking for a shortcut. If you apply them, you’ll still improve your business. But if you’re looking for a transformational process that will radically change not only your vision as a business owner but also your business, and ultimately your life, then STUDY this book, exactly as I’ve studied those high achievers.
First Step
When you launch your business, you have to do ALL the activities that are in the first three sections, that is, the GOLDEN, SILVER, and BRONZE activities. That’s seventeen major tasks to personally handle. As long as you permanently avoid the activities listed in the fourth section (RUSTY activities) from the beginning of your business growth adventure, you’ll find yourself on a trajectory to managing a 6-figure business in no time.
Second Step
Get rid of the low-value activities (those listed in the Section 3) by delegating them. If you keep doing all of them PERSONALLY, you won’t be able to reach the 7-figure stage. You go from seventeen to fourteen tasks (those listed in the first two sections). The more you work on the high-value and super-high-value tasks, the more chance you’ll have of reaching the million-dollar mark. Let me reiterate: only when you write off all the BRONZE activities (Section 3) from your own agenda will you find yourself in the driver’s seat of a 7-figure business. Not before.
Third Step
You must now get rid of half of the fourteen remaining activities to reach the next step, that is, the 8-figure goal. You’ll delegate the ones that are on the high-value list, those in Section 2: the SILVER activities. When you write them off your personal to-do list and put them on other people’s to-do lists, you’ll have MORE TIME to devote to the super-high-value tasks: the GOLDEN activities (Section 1). While ever you cling on to those SILVER activities, you’ll never be in a position to lead an 8-figure business.
The secret is that, at any given moment, you KNOW how to get to the next stage. So while your competitors work on activities at each level, you DELEGATE these very activities in order to devote your energy to the tasks that are above your current operating level.
For example, let’s say you have a 6-figure business. Instead of getting stuck there and personally handling all the GOLDEN, SILVER, and BRONZE activities, you choose to delegate the low-value tasks (BRONZE), so you can invest your time into GOLDEN and SILVER activities. As a result, your business grows and you soon find yourself driving a 7-figure business … precisely BECAUSE you’ve worked like a 7-figure business owner! Therefore, you’ve BECOME a 7-Figure business owner, and therefore your business BECOMES a 7-figure business. The same process applies to reach the 8-figure stage: you get rid of the SILVER activities to spend more of your time on the GOLDEN activities.
To summarize:
As is so often the case: less is more.
THE 400-HOUR WORK WEEK
The title of my book, The 400-Hour Work Week was chosen for a specific reason. Let me explain to you why. There’s a growth process which all companies go through, and it’s directly related to what the business owner spends their time on.
Mathematically, 400 is the number of hours that ordinary business owners would have to work each week to keep up pace with you after you implement the teachings of this book. Let’s take an average week during which your 6-figure competitors work forty hours mainly on tasks of their level (BRONZE activities): they generate $4k (40h x $100) in revenue. Multiply that by the number of weeks they work in a year, and you can see that it is indeed a 6-figure business.
Meanwhile, you work forty hours per week too, but you’ve spent most of your time on GOLDEN and SILVER activities. Your efficiency calculation goes something like this: 40h x $1k (at least) = $40k. That’s 10x more than your competitors! If you multiply it by the number of weeks you work within a year, you realize that, in carrying out the GOLDEN AND SILVER activities, you’re establishing the foundations of your 7-figure business.
You and the average business owner work the same number of hours. Nevertheless, by the time they’ve worked forty hours, you’ve just OUTPACED them ten times, by plowing through what would be, for them, the equivalent of a 400-hour work week.
If you want a deeper dive, you can find a bonus tutorial of this disrupting concept here—it’s absolutely free:
You might have heard that you have to x10 your goals, sales, profits, and so on. But have you ever been taught the method of how to do so? I will show you how in this book.
You see, your goal is to CLEVERLY delegate, in the right sequence, as much as possible in order to arrive at the point where you only have to work on the super-high-value activities. That’s how you find yourself on the road to managing an 8-figure business.