Why Your Business Needs a Profit Power Hour

Dustin: [00:00:00] Businesses rarely starve because the founder couldn't find 40 hours for marketing. They starve because the founder never protected the first five.
Intro - Outro: You're listening to the Seven Figure Leap podcast. We're here to leverage rich relationships and smart strategies to take your business to the next level. Here's your host, Dustin Riechmann.
Dustin: What did you do for the first hour of your workday today? Real talk. Did you hop right into email, check some social media?
Dustin: Maybe you had a team meeting, had a client fire to put out, that popped up overnight Now, what I'd like to you-- for you to do is think about that hour and then think through the lens of did you do anything in that hour that could directly contribute to new revenue within the next thirty to ninety days?
Dustin: I believe that most entrepreneurs don't actually have a time [00:01:00] problem, they have a sequence problem. And before you spend the day running through your business and putting out fires, what if you spent the first hour of each workday growing your business? This is what we call the profit power hour, and it has fundamentally changed my business.
Dustin: this has come up for me recently in our mastermind. I did a What's Working Now session in our Seven Figure Elite mastermind, and I was talking about, different iterations of this, what I now call the profit power hour. And became even more timely because I just hired a team member, and we're creating one for her too.
Dustin: And I'm gonna talk a little bit later about what might go into this hour. But the basic definition here is a protected block of time at the beginning of your workday. It's dedicated to proactive profit-generating activity. So ideally, this would be every workday, so four days a week, five days a week, depending on your schedule.
Dustin: But, more important than that is doing it consistently and having dedicated time on your calendar [00:02:00] that is non-negotiable. So if that's three days a week for you, that's fine. But we're gonna talk about it in terms of
five days a week, the first hour of each workday. So what might count for profit-generating activities?
Dustin: we're gonna go into some more specifics here in a minute. But just think in terms of marketing, sales, relationship building, partnerships, not admin, you know, fulfillment, planning, getting organized, doing research. really things that can drive profit. So why do we talk about doing this in the first hour of each day?
Dustin: So you may have heard or maybe, it'll ring a bell, from some past reading that you've done, this idea of the Eisenhower Matrix. It's really simple. It's basically on one axis you have, how urgent a task is, and on the other as- ax axis you have how important this task is, right? And so a lot of our time gets spent in urgent tasks, right?
Dustin: unfortunately, some urgent non-important tasks, right? The type of stuff you should probably [00:03:00] just delete from your life or delegate. but also important urgent things, right? actual client needs, team needs, and w- we tend to prioritize those because they're urgent, right? This type of activity, this profit power hour, is very powerful and easy not to do because it really falls in that quadrant of important but not urgent.
Dustin: It's one of these things that you could go for a very long time, maybe you've done it for your whole business, and you've never actually had this prioritized time. however, it's the most powerful hour you can have in most cases in your business when you do it well and you do it consistently. So because it's non-urgent, I really strongly advocate you do it first.
Dustin: I'm sure you've heard other adages like, "Eat the frog," right? do the hardest thing first thing in the morning. and this definitely falls in that category. So, the big idea here is you wanna take care of it and prioritize it first because that way it actually gets done before your day [00:04:00] gets more reactive, and you start to get into the zone of putting out fires, and you're sitting there for four hours at your desk, and you just kinda wake up and be like, "Where has the day gone?
Dustin: I haven't accomplished anything." This way you get a win right out of the gate each morning. the other thing is when you do this first, you sorta keep the, the gateway closed to a lot of the distractions that will naturally come, if you're not doing this first. Meaning, if you hop into your workday, and you open up Slack, or you open up your emails, what naturally happens is your priorities now are set by other people's needs, right?
Dustin: Because you're reacting to things that are coming in at you. If you simply left those for one hour, and you instead sat down and did something for you and for your business that could actually give you measurable growth and revenue and help you meet your goals and give you more freedom, that's better, right?
Dustin: so that's why we wanna do this first. Profit-producing work is usually not urgent, but is highly important. It's one of those things that's [00:05:00] easy to do, but it's also really easy not to do. And so doing it first thing will really help you prioritize it. You always wanna do the important work before that urgent work gets a vote in the process.
Dustin: So what are we actually gonna do in our profit power hour? there are many examples here, but some simple ones that totally count, right? podcast pitches, strategic partner outreach, following up with prospects, invitations to sales calls, invitations to events, like to workshops that you wanna hold or some live coaching sessions or Q&A.
Dustin: referral conversations definitely count. one that I think a lot of us overlook is reactivating past clients and maybe, cold leads from, you know, a, a distant conversation that you had in the past. A lot of times there's great profit potential in some of these older, relationships that we just need to go and proactively reach out to.
Dustin: So in general, those are some things that count, and we're gonna [00:06:00] talk about how to prioritize this and how to choose which activities you should focus on in this current season of your business. But think about the things that, do generate profit, that give you... bring you clo- in closer proximity to a person, a relationship that could pay you.
Dustin: So what doesn't count? frankly, the comfortable stuff, right? Like browsing social media, doing research, looking for ideas for your marketing, right? Checking analytics, updating CRMs or doing cleanup in your CRM. training doesn't count. website tweaks, planning marketing instead of doing marketing, right?
Dustin: Obviously, those are all things you can do in your business. They would all still kind of fall in that broader category of, quote-unquote, working on your business. but very different or very distinct from that are, profit producing activities. I think the key question, if you wanna kinda test, does this count, does this activity, does this action put me closer to a real person that could create [00:07:00] revenue?
Dustin: if you believe like I do that the best way to produce revenue in your business is through relationship building and, trust building and education, like this is really what, what we're gonna be focused on in our profit power hour. So does this put me closer to a real person that could create revenue for my business?
Dustin: And we're gonna talk here in a minute. This does not mean immediate revenue. This doesn't mean it produces profit today, although it could. but does it actually get me a deeper relationship, more proximity to a person who could result in increased revenue, either directly or through their influence?
Dustin: All right. So how do you choose? I only, I maybe gave like eight tasks there. there are many, many, many more that, we could think about. And so what I want you to do here... There's a reason I don't call it the, marketing power hour or the sales power hour. We call it the profit power hour. say that, you know, nine times fast.[00:08:00]
Dustin: We call it that though because there's some flexibility here on what you could be using this time for based on your needs, right? So don't think about it as like, "Oh, I'm gonna do marketing for an hour." Think about the actual current bottleneck in your business All right, I'm gonna say that again slowly.
Dustin: Identify the current bottleneck in your business, the current constraint. So if you look at kinda the reality of your business and how things have been going the last 30 days, what is the constraint in the system? What's the bottleneck? What's the thing that's actually keeping you from growing your profit and growing your revenue?
Dustin: So a few things might come up here for you. maybe you just need more leads, okay? So if you need more leads, use this time to focus on creating more attention, building relationships that can give you more leads, like podcast guesting, for example, or guest training in other people's communities. so the idea that you can create kind of higher level attention would [00:09:00] be, the, the types of activities you wanna focus on if lead generation is the big constraint in your current profit system.
Dustin: maybe you have leads, but they're not converting over into calls, right? So if you do sales calls or serve calls as a way to have people pay you, and you've got people, like, joining your email list and, and you're getting attention, but people aren't actually getting to calls, you could use this time to do proactive outreach to your leads inviting them to calls, right?
Dustin: And following up with leads, perhaps who have expressed interest, who have clicked, who have commented, who have replied to emails, and, or attended a, a past event. And how can you proactively reach out to them and follow up with them and invite them to the call? So if you need calls, do outreach and follow-up, to get leads to the calls.
Dustin: So maybe you're doing-- maybe you're in a season where you're getting a lot of calls, but you're not actually converting people to sales. you should spend this time on sales activity, right? namely following up with [00:10:00] past calls because, I know we get in these seasons, you know, we run cohorts of the Podcast Profits Accelerator, and we'll be getting a lot of calls and then kind of look up one day and be like, "Oh, we had, like, 12 calls.
Dustin: We did a horrible job following up." maybe that week, or at least a couple of those hours in the first couple days of that week, we should be focused entirely on our power hour of reaching back to those calls, to the people that we had those calls with. And that could be a simple email follow-up, but maybe it's a Loom video, right?
Dustin: I mean, it's like, "Hey, I wanna talk to you. I've been thinking about you. We had this call. I want to invite you to the next step. I wanna, you know, invite you to a follow-up conversation." So that relational, intentional nurturing after a call is really powerful, and we don't often prioritize that, right? We don't make time for it.
Dustin: and so maybe you say, "Hey, you know, like, I've got some good leads. I'm getting the, a good number of those people to calls, and the calls generally convert. the thing I, I'm kinda missing is just overall [00:11:00] leverage." Right? I'm kinda at a point in my business where I wanna scale, I wanna grow. And so maybe you wanna focus your power hour more on higher level leverage.
Dustin: That's where things like partnerships become really powerful, right? embedded partnerships, referrals. I did a, a whole episode on this podcast about power partners, and right? So, like, power partners is where I would be thinking about leverage, is how can I use my power hour, to go identify and reach out to and follow up with these power partners, right?
Dustin: So- Th- th- there's always gonna be stages in your business, and these will be seasons. So it could be like, hey, for this month I'm really focused on lead generation. Maybe next month it's more on calls, the month after that it's more on conversions from calls and follow-up, for that. And maybe you get to
the point where things are working pretty well and you're really trying to take that 2X, 5X, 10X leap, and it's really about building leverage.
Dustin: that's gonna be more of that higher level relationship building. But hopefully you can hear in that the main thing here is focus on your constraint [00:12:00] right now and run with that in your power hour, because the worst case scenario is things stay the same. But pretty much guaranteed is if you put some focused effort into that, relieving that constraint or addressing that constraint, it will get better, and then the system opens up and creates more revenue, right?
Dustin: And creates more profit. So use the hour to solve your biggest profit problem, in other words one of the keys to doing this well and staying consistent with it is not starting, say it's Tuesday morning, you don't wanna wake up Tuesday morning, show up at your desk, and then decide, "What do I wanna do for my power hour today?"
Dustin: Right? What you wanna do is decide in advance what your power hour is going to be, and the best time to do that is the end of the, previous day's power hour. So you do a power hour on Monday. Let's say you're doing, podcast outreach, and you get to the, the last 10 minutes of that time. What I want you to do then is [00:13:00] reflect on the progress that you made that day and then plan for tomorrow.
Dustin: "Hey, tomorrow I'm gonna reach out to six more podcasts," you know? Maybe you wanna continue on the same train. Or maybe you're like, "Hey, I feel like I've p- I got a lot of podcasts out there. tomorrow I'm gonna follow up with the eight podcasts that I pitched last week that I didn't hear from." But the idea is when you sit down at your desk, you've already established, you already have a plan for how you're gonna use your power hour, so you're not wasting the effort, for one, of, of a cold start and trying to figure that out.
Dustin: The other thing this will protect you from is abandoning the power hour, right? Because it's real easy, "Hey, yeah, I did this yesterday. I think today I'm just gonna like chill out and get on Instagram," or, "I think today, you know, I'm gonna use this time to update my website or whatever." If you predetermine the day before what you're gonna use that hour for, it makes you much more, prepared and consistent.
Dustin: So end each power hour by defining the next day's power hour or the next, the next workday's power hour. [00:14:00] And, let's talk a little bit about-- We talked about like generally we'd say like, podcast guesting. So those
are the categories that we talked about that, that qualify for a power hour. But when you're writing down your objective for the day or, you end one workday by writing the objective for the next day, it's a really important distinction.
Dustin: You don't wanna write something generic. You don't wanna say, quote, "Work on podcast guesting." W- why? Because you're still kinda starting from a cold start, and it doesn't actually give you an objective truth whether you've got it done. So instead of saying, "Work on podcast guesting," if you're focused on
marketing, write, "Research five shows and send three pitches."
Dustin: That is specific, and you can know when it's done, right? So don't say, "Do follow-up." Say, "I'm gonna follow up personally using Loom videos with seven qualified prospects that I know are still on the fence or cur- currently haven't told me yes or no from a previous conversation." [00:15:00] That I can do, right? I can, I can send seven emails or seven Loom videos, and I know who I'm sending them to in advance because I can go, with that criteria, I can go identify those individuals.
Dustin: Don't say, I'm gonna work on partnerships tomorrow," right? Say, "I'm gonna send invitations to Chandler, John, and I'm gonna identify two other partners, from this community I'm a part of, and I'm gonna send them specific invitations asking if I can do a workshop for them." Much, much better, right? Much more specific.
Dustin: And p- part of the reason this is so important, one, specificity will actually, help you psychologically commit and complete these tasks. But two, the good news is you may have an hour blocked out. the 60 minutes is actually not the important part here. it's not about the time. It's about the outcomes, right?
Dustin: It's about the completed activities, in other words. if you said, "Hey, I'm gonna write seven podcast pitches and send them," and it only took you 42 minutes, congratulations, you're done, right? Other than you wanna plan what you're gonna do the next day. But [00:16:00] the, the hour is a good block of time to have to focus, and sometimes you'll use the whole hour and not be done, and then you know exactly where you're gonna start the next day.
Dustin: sometimes maybe it only takes you 35 minutes. You spend five minutes determining the next day, and you got 20 minutes, back in your schedule. so don't fixate on 60 minutes and sort of spread out the work to fit 60 minutes. Focus on identifying what you wanna get done, getting it done, and then being done , right?
Dustin: so there's some tips for you. Like, do it first, plan it the day in advance, be specific on the activities, so you can answer, "Did I do this? Yes or no?" and then don't worry about the time as much as, completion of the activities that you planned. So that brings me to tracking, because very important to make this
successful and to keep you motivated is you're gonna wanna track this activity.
Dustin: this can be super simple. I'd actually recommend you keep it really simple. there's really three questions you wanna be able to answer, at the end of each se- session. And I would just keep this in a s- [00:17:00] little spreadsheet, Post-It note, journal, whatever works for you, bullet journal, something like that.
Dustin: input, output, and outcome. So input, did I do the hour today, right? Or did I complete my task today? Yes or no? Output, what did it produce? Or what did I produce, I should say, right? And this is gonna be, I sent seven podcast pitches, right? So this is... Input is, did I sit down and, and contribute the energy and time and focus to this?
Dustin: Output is basically, did I complete the objectives? Did I... What specific things did I ship? what things happened at, during this hour? And then outcome is what resulted. This is important to make a distinction because most of the time, the things you do in the hour don't generate results in the hour.
Dustin: There's a-- Th- that's a leading indicator, the input that you're doing in the hour, but you get lagging results, right? And so you can't expect instant revenue from the hour, but what you can do is track those lagging [00:18:00] results. And so to keep this simple, it's Tuesday, I say I'm gonna write seven podcast pitches.
Dustin: At the end of the hour, I say, "Did I show up at my desk and commit to this and, and do it?" Yes. What was the, output? I sent six podcast pitches, right? And then for outcome, what I want you to think about is what, recently has-- what fruits recently have come from past efforts, right? Because what you wanna do is kinda close that loop.
Dustin: this is a loose attribution. This is not like, well, from the activity 33 days ago, this happened. It's not like that. But if you got a new client yesterday and they told you they heard you on a podcast, write that down, right? Because what you wanna do is close your own loop that, hey, all this input that I'm putting in will eventually bear fruit, right?
Dustin: And so you wanna just be constantly kinda documenting outcomes from previous effort, is how I would think about that. So make sure you track it. Keep it simple. And it's really fun to look back and see, how much you [00:19:00] actually create and how much energy and momentum and results you create over time by just doing this consistently and making it a priority first thing in the day.
Dustin: So You're gonna do this. I hope you're inspired to do this, and, it's easy to fall into a trap that you've probably fallen into with other habits, right? Like working out or eating better, where it's like, "Hey, I'll do this for like three days," right? and then the fourth day something comes up, and it gets hard.
Dustin: what I want you to think about here is breaking out of a cycle you've probably found yourself in. I know I've found myself in it before, right? Where, we treat our profit activities in sort of emergency spurts. It's like I'm working on, fulfilling for my clients. I'm, I'm doing some cool stuff with my team, and then I realize that revenue has dropped.
Dustin: Well, now I gotta market like crazy. I gotta be really aggressive with that, right? And then the sales go up because I did that. Cool. So I get really busy fulfilling, and onboarding those new clients, so I [00:20:00] stop marketing completely. And then, you know, I wake up, a month later and my pipeline's dry, and I realize that, there's no more recurring payments coming in from clients, and I panic again, and I start doing a bunch of activity.
Dustin: That is the cycle that actually most entrepreneurs found themselves in, especially solopreneurs, right? Been there many times myself. So how do we avoid getting into those cycles? Rather than thinking, at a zoomed out level, right? Like what do I need to get done this year? Am I on track for this quarter?
Dustin: Like, those are good questions, but, the anecdote to the year problem is the today action, right? And so committing to five hours a week, a power hour every morning, adds up so quick, right? and in the big picture, it may seem like, oh, what... It's an hour, right? I... Like, I'll just do it or not do it.
Dustin: It's important but not urgent. But when you stack those hours, five hours becomes 20 hours a month, right? That's like, I don't know, 200 and something, 200 and, [00:21:00] 20, 240, something like that, hours a year.
That's super substantial, right? And it's deliberate growth activity, right? Everything we're doing in this hour is eventually tied to profit and revenue.
Dustin: And so Here's sort of a key takeaway with this when you think about the life cycle of how most people, do revenue and how I want you to think about it differently. Businesses rarely starve because the founder couldn't find 40 hours for marketing. They starve because the founder never protected the first five.
Dustin: And so this idea of I do this first, this is my primary, controllable, this is my primary responsibility as the business owner and the founder, is I'm a rainmaker. I create revenue. I create profit. I do that through relationships. That doesn't happen accidentally. and I have control, to an extent, right?
Dustin: I control the inputs. I don't control the outcomes, but I do control the inputs. And so I am committed to making this a [00:22:00] priority because I want to be successful and grow and have freedom and do all the things that a successful business does for me and my family. The price to pay for that is
focus for one hour a day at the beginning of your day.
Dustin: and so that, that's just sort of the, the big idea I want to leave you with there on the life cycle is if you are really sick of going through feast and famine cycles and, like, feel like you have to market as a sprint because you didn't do any marketing or sales and, and it seems like everything is constantly afire and everything feels urgent, the anecdote to that is doing this for one hour each morning of, your workday and doing it in the way that we described so that it actually is productive.
Dustin: and I, and I want to give a shout-out to Kelly Roach, a previous, interviewee on this podcast, who wrote a great book called Miracle Morning. I'm sorry, The Miracle Hour. Miracle Morning is also a good book. but hers is The Miracle Hour, and it's kind of the same idea. hers is a, a little bit different application, a little more broad, but I sort of married up a lot of things, from my [00:23:00] own experience, things I learned from Kelly in her book and our interview.
Dustin: there's another great book called Outgrow that's more on the sales side, but s- same idea of being proactive and having dedicated focus time. kind of married those up into what we're calling the Profit Power Hour here. But there's a reason, these are all popular ideas. It's 'cause they actually work, and, they're also not easy, right?
Dustin: It's like one of these things, it's not easy, but it's totally worth it, and it's easy to do, but it's also really easy not to do. So what am I doing with this? I, I
feel like I've been preaching to you here and, and telling you, like, "You should do this, and you should do this." I'm doing this too.
Dustin: I've been doing this for quite a long time. I haven't been perfect with it, and I would say I probably, if I'm being realistic, I still go through some seasons. I'm generally really good about three days a week at this. Fridays I purposely don't do it. I'm in a small faith group, and, Fridays are a little more of a strategic day.
Dustin: But four days a week, this is the focus, and then s- you know, sometimes I, I slip, and other things jump up and take my focus. But three to four days a week, I'm doing my power hour. for right n- right [00:24:00] now, like as we record this, my current focus is I've got a book coming up, $100,000 podcast guesting, preparing to launch that.
Dustin: And so I'm back in the, the podcast, pitching grind. I'm, I'm outreaching to a lot of very specific podcasts to line up, potential interviews, to, promote my book, as we do. but I'm also using some of this time for strategic partnerships. following up with, previous clients has been a big focus.
Dustin: It's something I didn't really do very well for a long time. And so, checking in with our 7 Figure Elite community members and seeing how we can serve them better, 'cause it does generate more revenue, right? Ultimately through referrals or additional services, et cetera. the other thing I'm doing, which is really fun and, and one of the reasons I wanted to record this today is I recently hired, a relational sales lead.
Dustin: And so she just started. Sh- we're onboarding now, and we're-- Our first focus is, like, equipping her to take serve calls, right? Like, take sales calls. But the other part of her role that I'm really excited [00:25:00] about, we're calling it relational sales. And we are defining, with her input and my input, a sales
focused power hour for her.
Dustin: So that will remove some things from my power hour, and mine will focus more on marketing and leverage, right? Where she can focus a lot more exclusively on sales activity, and I think that could be really, really,mult multiplicative. it'll really multiply the impact for our business. And so I'm currently thinking about this again through a fresh lens because I'm helping someone else on my team develop theirs, and part of her role and part of her compensation is to have a power hour every weekday, right?
Dustin: And there's a lot that will come from that, and it can be very complementary to what I'm doing in my own power hour. So I think that's a really cool way to think about this too, as you bring someone on and you're defining revenue-generating roles, is what's their power hour? at least, in the first 30 days or first quarter.
Dustin: Obviously it'll evolve over time depending on how the business evolves. But, I think that's a really good [00:26:00] lens to think about this is, how are you first and foremost as a founder using your own time, but then on your team as a leader, how can you empower them to also have power hours that help them meet their goals and of course, drive revenue and profit for your own business?
Dustin: So here's my closing challenge for you. I would love for you to commit to a power hour for the next 30 days. So how do we do that? Pick a frequency. I wouldn't overextend yourself. You certainly don't need to start with five times a week. if you're feeling it, do that. but you know, two times a week is a lot better than zero.
Dustin: Three times a week is great. but pick specific days of the week that you can commit to this as your, your dedicated profit time. Unless there's some crazy reason to avoid it, I would highly recommend making it the first hour of your work time. and then identify your profit constraint. You know, as we talked about earlier, is it lead generation?
Dustin: Is it conversion from lead to call? Is it from call to sale? is it more of a leverage thing or a, a, a [00:27:00] larger picture, growth opportunity in your business? But think about what the current constraint is in your business and focus on that for your first, 30 days here of your power hour. So once you've identified sort of the category, then I want you to go through and identify very specific profit or revenue-producing actions and write down the one you're gonna do tomorrow, and then, do it.
Dustin: And then at the end of tomorrow's time, write down the one for the next time, for the next session that you have scheduled. define every tomorrow's outcome today, in other words, and keep a simple scorecard. And I would love to hear how this treats you, what results you see from this. I'd love to see your scorecard.
Dustin: of course, if, podcast guesting is part of it and you need some pointers, we have a lot of resources there to help you with that. But, yeah, I'm, I'm really
excited to share this with you. This has been a total game changer for our business. I'm really excited to be able to expand this into our team now as well.
Dustin: And so here's a closing question. What happens to your pipeline if for the next 30 days, the growth of your business gets the [00:28:00] best hour of your time instead of just your leftover time? So before you spend your day running your business, spend your first hour growing your business with your profit power hour.
Dustin: I can't wait to hear how this goes for you. one of the big benefits people have in coming into our Podcast Profits Accelerator is they're left with no questions about what they're gonna be doing with this time, because we are defining a very specific plan over 90 days to guarantee they get profit, right?
Dustin: And so the big levers that we're typically pulling for people with our work is lead generation, and then to a second- secondary but important extent, leads to calls, and then we also, help people with conversion from calls to sales. But the main thing, if you're like, "Yeah, my constraint is lead generation.
Dustin: Not enough people know about what I do. I'm not visible enough to my ideal clients," we would love to help you with that. And you can always book a call with us at 7figureleap.com/call, and we can have a strategy session with you and, talk through what levers you might be able to pull, what strategies [00:29:00] make sense for you, and then, if it makes sense to work together, you'll have your power hours figured out for a while because we'll be, showing you exactly what to do and giving you the assignments, to make sure that you get the results you're looking for.
Dustin: So, love talking about this topic. Again, would love to hear from you if you have any feedback. Otherwise, if you wanna have a call with our team, we welcome that, 7figureleap.com/call, and I will see you next time.