Earn More $ with a Throughput Management System - 2 of 3

Step 2 – Sort our List

Now that we have our list of what we do lets rank this list by high value time spent. Meaning what items make you the most money on the list. And what amount of time does each thing take. Our goal here is to decide where we should be investing our time the most to get the greatest return.

I’d suggest putting this in a spreadsheet with column headers of

• Task
• Time (scale of 1-10)
• Revenue generated (scale of 1-10)

Make sure you include all your personal activities, that aren’t just things you love to do, in this as well. It all takes you time and your time is valuable.

Once you done this sort your spreadsheet by “revenue generated” column in ascending order. As well as Time in descending order. Whatever is on the bottom of the list is what you want to start figuring out how to make a time investment into getting someone else to do.

When I started this process my list had 120 items on it. Granted I didn’t do it this way to start. This was more of a process I learned to use over time and now apply to my high value employee positions within my company. Constantly trying to get more through put out of them by building support systems.

Step 3 – Building a Plan

Depending on where you’re at now in your business/career I always suggest you look 12-24 months out and decide where you want to go. As affiliate marketers we often get on the golden hamster wheel and live day to day (another post I want to write about). We really need to be planning more because if you don’t know where you’re going how are you ever going to get there?

With your list now sorted lets look at the high value items at the top and build a plan to only do those.

In order to do that you need to figure out how to hire or outsource people to do the other tasks. Most likely on the bottom of the list is things like shopping and cleaning the house. Now the average affiliates mindset says well I could hire a house cleaner and someone to do my grocery shopping but that’s going to cost me money. If I’m making 100k/year and I pay those people, could be the same person, 10k/year part time. I’m only going to make 90k/year. This is the wrong way to look at things. Depending on how much time those things are taking it’s actually costing you money because you could be doing your high value activities during that time. So stop and imagine you free up 20% of your time that should effectively allow you to make 120-130k/year. What’s nice about high value activities is they often compound the added revenue that can be generated. Meaning it’s not a linear growth curve typically.

Like I said I started with 120 items on my list when I was an affiliate marketer and then started A4D.

Here’s my list today.

1. Spend time with my kids and wife
2. Direction of each company over the next 12-24 months.
3. Building financial plans/models for these trajectories
4. Building the project management tasks to support these models
5. Spend time with our largest partners
6. Work on improving employee moral & support systems
7. Spend time learning and identifying market opportunities via running small campaigns. That then the ideas get passed to account managers to give to affiliates/merchants.
8. Identifying properties to purchase
9. Networking with venture capitalist
10. Networking with potential high value clients

Keep in mind most of these things weren’t on my list when I started with the first 120 items. We definitely don’t know what we don’t know and what we should be spending time on until we get a lot of the low value stuff off of our plate.