Episode 62

How to Buy Back Your Time as a Business Owner


“I just don’t have enough time.”

Tas has heard it repeatedly from painting business owners. There’s marketing to work on, sales to improve, numbers to understand, jobs to deliver, customers to deal with and a team to manage.

But what if the problem isn’t actually time?

In this episode of The Painters Circle, Tas breaks down why managing your priorities may be far more important than trying to manage every minute of your day.

More money and a bigger team don’t automatically give you more freedom. Tas shares the example of a painting business doing around $3 million in annual revenue with a large team, yet the owner still had virtually no spare time.

The real question is: Where is your attention going?

If you’re spending hours doing admin, driving materials around, checking invoices and completing tasks someone else, a process or technology could handle, you’re sacrificing time that could be spent on higher-value activities.

In this episode, Tas covers:

  • Why more revenue doesn’t automatically mean more time
  • Time management vs priority management
  • Where a business owner’s attention should go
  • Why not every task deserves equal priority
  • Delegating low-value activities
  • Using a default diary
  • How to track where your time actually goes
  • Using ChatGPT to audit your time
  • The “unpaid Uber driver” problem
  • Calculating the return on your time
  • How business owners can start buying back their time

Your job as a business owner isn’t simply to stay busy. It’s to work on the right things at the right time.


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