This episode tackles the challenge of escaping the mid-seven-figure revenue plateau by implementing a rigorous time-tracking system. The goal is to classify every task as zone of genius (unique ability driving the business), zone of resentment (energy-draining necessities), or neutral (capable but delegatable), then systematically offload everything outside the zone of genius to free up capacity for high-leverage activities.
Key Takeaways:
- Minute-by-Minute Documentation Reveals Delegation Opportunities Tracking every task with ZOG/ZOR/neutral classifications exposes which activities should be hired out first—zone of resentment tasks get eliminated before neutral ones unless time commitment justifies different prioritization.
- Content Creation May Be Undelegatable Podcasts and newsletters generate consistent positive sentiment and represent a unique skill that likely cannot be handed off without quality collapse—these activities belong permanently in the zone of genius.
- Low Seven-Figure Swamp Requires Systematic Escape Healthy revenue with constant founder effort signals insufficient systematization—breaking free to $10M+ requires ruthless task classification and strategic delegation or automation.
The framework acknowledges that zone of genius will expand over time as skills develop, but without rigorous measurement of current time allocation, the business remains stuck at its current plateau.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to get serious. So today just a common theme I’m running through with myself is just how do I free up more time within the business for myself and my team to focus on the biggest blocks that are going to move us forward much more significantly, especially like the system building and
fit various AI workflows that are just, you know, choppy to, to knock out or, you know, still working on various marketing and sales strategies and tactics, actually implementation for land prices. My product team is like nearly done building it out. And I’m just, you know, still feeling so behind the ball on, um, you know, having to take care of random urgencies.
you know, with deals that come up or people are sending pretty complex deals over for funding. I need to take a look at those various calls that need to be made. And just trying to figure out how can I get to these next steps? I need to win? Like, what would it actually look like to make some other type of hires here?
Um, who should I even be hiring on top of what my core team is at the moment? And like, we’ve just kind of expanded a little bit too. Like I already have, you know, these two engineers, but, you know, including CTO for land price, or I have my core VA for, um, uh, serious land capital. also have, we’ve been working with this web developer slash SEO guy for well over a year at this point for all of our websites. Um, but now we’re just.
because we get so much organic traffic. It’s like, okay, we’re upping our monthly expense into SEO and GEO as well. So we have him, you know, more consistent as a contractor within our firm. And then, you know, all the various brokers and, you know, land investor clients who are working with us and we try to pass along.
Various tasks for them too, but you know, that requires a lot of back and forth. So even though like the overall head count, like it seems small, but there’s just, there’s so many moving pieces and we’re managing a lot more people than our technical org chart would look like. But I keep going back, you know, I think everybody’s kind of heard, you know, your zone of genius focus on your zone of genius, on a genius, Dan Sullivan, who not how type mentality. Sure. That is what we’re always.
trying to orient to, but in practice, like, and it’s a skill deficiency, I would just say, like, it’s hard for me to figure out how do I more consistently, like, only work in the zone of genius and try to offload the other things when you’re trying to balance cash flows and various profits that you want to take home or just, you bringing more cash into the business or offloading to your current staff and so forth.
or just new things that are coming up that just need attention, but are they really repeatable? I don’t know. So I need to break that down a bit more going forward. And I don’t think I ever fully listened to it, but I think I saw a headline somewhere and this is a Leila Hormozi thing, which is like, just have to note down every minute of your day, really, really, really break it down. And not every day is gonna be the same, but to me,
I thought about this a lot more today and starting to account, okay, every single task that is coming my way, I need to note it. And I’m going to break it down whether it is in my zone of genius or a Sharon Street, Vasa type thing is, it in the zone of resentment? Things that like, I feel I need to do, but they just, they bring my energy down more. and,
even though I’m probably like capable at them or just, you know, just need to grind through it. But, you know, they would classify as a Zona resentment and then, you know, tests that are just kind of in between things that I don’t mind doing. I don’t resent them, but they’re also not like Zona genius. They’re not really driving them for driving us forward. They can probably be delegated out. And so I just want to start breaking down everything.
that I’m doing on a daily basis and anything that’s new that comes in, you know, do this over the course of a week or multiple weeks and start noting down, is this a ZOG, Zona Genius, is it a ZOR, Zona Resentment or, you know, is it just a, you know, just a mutual, just a blog, just a task? And then I can start to orient, you know, first off the Zona Resentment, is this something that
I can hire out for first and can I batch some of these together into a specific role or it can it go to a current team member and just re strategize our overall system and who is handling what particular task. so that would be the first thing and then knock out the other pieces that are not within my zone of genius, you know, just kind of the blah, the neutral tasks.
that need to get done as well. And those would be further up the chain because they’re less stress on me specifically. But I don’t know, you also have to kind of weigh it because maybe some zone of resentment tasks only take me, I don’t know, five or 10 minutes a day or something. Whereas some of these just blah neutral tasks might be like an hour, hour and a half. And so all of a sudden, what’s the bigger…
leverage point for the business. You know, can I just eat some pain for five or 10 minutes versus freeing up more of just an hour, hour and a half to get more into zone genius that that that’s the trade off there. So you have to start weighing both the actual time as well as where you would consider that task to be. And then I have to start mapping that out. All right. What, what, who can I start offloading this to? That’s always the question, right? Or,
Can this be more of an AI workflow and what do I need to strategize to get that thing built out? And I just realized like, if I don’t do this and force myself to do this, like I’m going to be, you know, stuck in the same place, kind of, you know, the low to mid seven figure swamp revenue, you know, healthy business, but it just requires me to be constantly putting in the effort because I haven’t
done enough of the work to systematize further and reorient my team. Like that’s what, this is probably the number one issue that I’m thinking about at the moment besides, you know, book and sales, right? are, you gotta get cashflow. But once those things are kind of off my mind or I’ve done as much as I could on those areas, then it’s like, okay.
talent acquisition or adjusting systems has to be the next open question to consider. And then you like, you just keep noting things down and okay, when do I, when can I find people to or systems to knock off these tasks? And then the goal is to be, you know, I don’t know, does anybody in any business like, regardless of size, like ever get to where they’re.
only working on their zone of genius. I feel like that’s a bit of a pipe dream that there’s always going to be something that doesn’t like quite fit or something in your life. That’s just a bit outside of it. That’s going to require your responsibility, but I think that that should be the goal, right? Like you’re orienting towards this potential pipe dream of like only working on zone of genius type stuff. And the better you get, the more…
your zone of genius can can change as well. You know, it’s a 10 X mindset, of course. And, you know, offload more and more of what you shouldn’t be doing. And that’s really the only way to fully grow. So that’s just the system I kind of arrived at today, but I actually need to go through the work and note things down accordingly to figure out how to do this.
Cause I know that’s what the best businesses do. and I’m actually, you know, pretty excited to actually think about it because if you don’t measure what you’re doing, like it’s just, it’s never going to get done. and you know, already trying to think, you know, the zone of genius type stuff, like am I ever fully going to give up underwriting in some capacities? Yes. But final state, like within the industry, I just, I think there’s like a special skill that I have.
that bring, it truly is, you know, with a certain humility to say it, but like, I think that is, I sound a genius and that a number of the content production and the way I’m able to convey ideas over these podcasts, newsletters, et cetera, like the positive sentiment is, you know, notable. And that’s, that’s not something I think I could offload without, without it completely going into the tank.
so, I think those are the kind of orientations I need to focus on. And then just the general kind of visionary aspects, where can I really take the business to the next level, larger deals, certain relationships and so forth. But what calls are worth my time versus not, that needs to be more rigorously examined. So I will let you know my process on starting to handle this.
And actually I can probably just have started starting to have a running task within AI. And now that notion can connect directly to Claude. I’m actually just live thinking about this that I can just have a living document and it can start orienting me towards, have you taken care of these tasks and.
you know, what are you tracking here and have like actual check-ins for me to stay on point here. This is a very intriguing idea. So I’m going to get on it. I will let you know my progress. Now that I’ve had to set my public accountability in this direction here, we’ll check in with that SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, 50K minimum buy price, 150K plus preferred, 2X gross conservative margin and land daily diligence.
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