80: How to Manage Your Time as a Podcast Entrepreneur

Two years ago, in the summer of 2020, we were three months into a, hopefully, once in a lifetime pandemic. And in the depths of quarantine, I did something that looked totally crazy to all of the people in my life. I started a business. I launched the Grow the Show podcast accelerator with just me and a virtual assistant. Shout out to Mitch, who is still with the team today. Fast forward two years, we have 300 plus clients in the accelerator, more than 150 videos in the accelerator library, 10 full-time employees, a handful of contractors, more than seven figures in revenue, an audience size of over 20,000, more than 100,000 podcasts to downloads, and a full-on media production agency. And if that sounds like a lot, it is. Running a podcast and a business is hard. It is not a joke. It is not easy. And I say that not to discourage you, but to acknowledge that a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, simply talk about the victories and the good stuff, instead of the difficult and less glamorous parts of being an entrepreneur and running a business. And this is probably why I've been seeing a lot of a particular question in the free Grow the Show community, which is, Kevin, how the heck do you do it? How do you manage your time? How do you schedule your days? How do you schedule your weeks so that you can fit in running a seven-figure business while also making and growing and monetizing a podcast? And so today, over two years after launching this business, I am going to answer those questions and give you a sneak peek behind the curtain into the inner workings of Grow the Show. But before I get started, a warning. While I have been incredibly lucky to find success with the business so far, I am still learning on the job. I do not have a perfectly efficient schedule, and there are habits that I should have that I don't have. And there's a lot of stuff that I plan to improve and upgrade about myself, the business, the team, everything that we do here at Grow the Show. And so by sharing this with you, I'm not trying to say that this is the only way to do things or that this is the best way to do things, or even that you should do things this way. I'm just saying, this is what I do now. This is what I have found works for me. And so hopefully you will get some value in that. I strongly believe in transparency. It is a core value of ours here at Grow the Show, Radical Transparency, and so I think it's important to be transparent about the less glamorous parts about what we do. And again, I don't suggest that you copy me directly. My hope is that you'll get some time management and business tips, tricks that hopefully you can apply to what you're doing so that you can accomplish more, enjoy your life, and you know, have fun. And so by the end of this episode of Grow the Show, you're going to have a better idea of how I run Grow the Show, which is a seven-figure company day to day, and I'll share with you the most helpful habits I have built as an entrepreneur and the habits that I wish I had earlier on that I feel like would have helped me level up way sooner. This episode of Grow the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, Spotify, and even the New York Times. Riverside is not only great because it has unbelievably high recording quality regardless of your or your guest's internet quality, but it also gives you separate audio and video tracks for each person speaking. It's high tech, but easy to use. Unlike Zoom, you don't have to have anything installed on your computer and your guests don't either. And did I mention that the audio quality is way better? If you're recording your interviews remotely, get off of Zoom now and hop into Riverside for your next interview. Your listeners will thank you. Head over to Riverside.fm and use code Grow. That's GROW to get 60 free minutes of recording and 15% off a membership plan. The link is in the show notes. And so a quick insight into today, today, this is how we are currently structured as a team, and so this will help provide some context into how I schedule my time. And so we have basically three pieces of this business. There is the Grow the Show Accelerator Program, which is our really, really intensive program for podcasting entrepreneurs who are looking to grow their show and grow their business. That team includes our enrollment team. So the sales team, it includes our podcast growth coaches. And so currently that team is at five people, including me. Then there is the production agency piece of the business. That is the piece that provides audio editing, video editing, show notes writing, et cetera, to some of our Accelerator clients. That team is at seven people. And then there is the Grow the Show podcast team, which includes me, Katherine Nils, a producer here at Grow the Show, and two virtual assistants as well. So that is the structure of the team. We've got quite the organization here at Grow the Show. And so for me, my job is to lead all of that stuff on the Accelerator side is to lead the sales team, lead the team of one-on-one coaches, and make sure that operations are running smoothly while also, of course, serving and coaching our clients. My job with the agency is to oversee our two agency leads, Jeremy and Max. And my job on the Grow the Show podcast is to be your podcast coach and host. And of course, to work closely with Katherine to put out incredible podcast episodes. And yes, monetize the Grow the Show podcast as well. Okay, so with that context, that is the shape of the Grow the Show team and the Grow the Show company. We kind of have those three divisions. And so here is what my time looks like. Now every day I have the same routine where I wake up at six o'clock in the morning, six to seven. I have coffee with my partner Emily and my dog, Dublin. Usually about 6.45 we take Dublin outside for a walk. And then my goal each day is to sit down at my desk and begin working at seven a.m. Full disclosure, that doesn't always happen. Some days it takes me longer to wake up. Some days I don't get started until about eight. But each and every day that is the goal for me to get started by seven. Now I never have meetings prior to 11 a.m. and here's why. What I found for me is that my most productive time to get anything done is in the morning. So the more long uninterrupted time I can have in the morning before I have any sort of obligations, the more I'll get done in the week. Now I know that everybody has an identity behind whether they're a morning person or a night person. Oh, I get more work done at night. I get more work done during the day. I'm just not a morning person, but here's the thing. If you're someone who says that you're not a morning person, I'm going to challenge you because I used to say the same thing until I became a morning person. And that's true for most morning people. My theory, you can come at me on this. My theory is that human beings are morning people and that most people who say they're not a morning person has never gotten up early consistently for more than three weeks straight that includes weekends. And so my theory is that the reason why everybody says they're not morning people is because they wake up at a certain time during the week and on the weekends they sleep until whenever they want. And so their body has never actually had a circadian rhythm that was locked in where they get up at the same time every day in the morning. And so if you're somebody who isn't a morning person, but wants to be, I challenge you to wake up at 6 a.m. every day for three weeks straight including the weekends with no exceptions. And on that fourth week, tell me whether or not you're still not a morning person. I promise you, the third day getting up early is the hardest. The first weekend is hard after that, but then the second weekend you become obsessed with it. So anyway, that's what happened for me. Please don't come at me. What I can say is I used to identify hardcore as not a morning person. And then in quarantine, there was nothing else to do but get up early and ever since then I've considered myself a morning person because it's just your brain is more creative in the morning and you have more discipline. So big problems that you want to avoid just seem less big first thing in the morning. When you've woken up, you're well rested, you've had some caffeine and everything's just less of a big deal. But as the day goes on, things become more of a big deal and harder to get yourself to do. It's a weird phenomenon. So, for that reason, my goal each morning is to sit down at my desk and get started at 7 a.m. and when that happens, that means I have four hours of uninterrupted time to get something done before my meetings begin. What's also key about this is that from 7 a.m. to usually about 9 or 10 a.m. Eastern, my team is asleep and so there aren't messages flying around our slack channel all the time and so it's really, really easy to focus completely uninterrupted. And finally, really the biggest reason why it's helpful for me to have those four hours in the morning is that I might have something that only takes two hours but if I wake up with two hours before my obligation start, there's just so much pressure on getting that thing done in two hours that I tend to be ineffective and I'm just anxious the whole time. So, for me, it's most helpful to get started at 7 a.m. I've got four hours to do what I got to do and so it's relaxed. I've got time. I can really dig in. I can go down some rabbit holes and really move the needle on my business. 11 a.m. at the earliest is when my meetings begin on days that I have meetings and then every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, I go to the gym for an hour. I'm usually back in my apartment by 5.30. Sometimes I do a little bit more work until dinner time around 7. Other times I just, you know, stop, I'm done for the night and then I usually go to bed between 9.30 and 10.30 p.m. and then do it all again the next day. That's what my daily routine looks like and I'll be honest, the more I stick to that, the less anxiety I have, the more I get done, the more I enjoy my life and the more I get to do cool stuff, nights and weekends. As far as what I do day to day during the week, Sunday, I do my absolute best to protect and not have anything that I have to do. And so I pretty fiercely protect Sunday as my not have to do anything day and that includes any obligations, like plans to hang out with friends, like nothing. My goal is to have every Sunday where I wake up and there is literally nothing on my agenda and I can do whatever the heck I want all day long. Side note, my goal in life is to make it so that I have as many of those days as I possibly can. So my goal is to become successful enough and achieve financial freedom such that every single day I can wake up and do whatever the heck I want. But I also understand that a life free of any obligations is pretty impossible so whatever. But for now, in the depths of building and growing a seven figure business for the first time, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of energy and I often find that if I don't work really hard to keep my Sundays free and clear, it'll encroach on Sundays and I'll find myself working seven days a week, which I don't want to do and which makes me actually really ineffective as a CEO. So Sundays I aim to protect, to have no have tos literally if I want to work on Sunday, I can because sometimes I wake up and I feel like working and then I do. And if at any moment I feel like stopping, I can, which is even better. If I feel like DJing, I do that. If I feel like watching football, I do that Sunday is feel like day. I do whatever the hell I feel like doing Monday then I wake up and I plan. So the first thing I do every Monday is plan out the week. What is it that I need to do? What are my goals for the team? Who do I need to talk to? What decisions do I have to make and what do I have to anticipate for this week? That's what I do first thing Monday morning is plan the week and then Mondays and Thursdays is when I have appointments. And so I borrow this from one of my mentors, Ravi Abuvala, who only takes meetings on Mondays and Thursday. He's an eight figure entrepreneur who I've had the pleasure of learning from really closely over the past two and a half years. And through that whole time, as he's been growing into say eight figure business, he only takes meetings on Mondays and Thursdays and he has Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays totally free. I am not there yet. I hope to get there at some point soon, but for now, I batch all of my appointments on Mondays and Thursdays and I try to be as strict as I possibly can with that and here's why. First of all, if you open up your calendar to have meetings any day of the week at any time, then what you have is a week and a calendar that is incredibly fragmented. And what I mean by that is every single day, you have a bunch of random meetings and random things at totally random times. And what I've found for me personally anyway is that the thing about meetings that takes up the most of my time and attention is not the actual meeting itself, but anticipating the meeting coming up. So if I have a meeting at 2pm, I spend the whole day thinking about how I have a meeting at 2pm and I just feel this resistance to really diving deep into anything because I know at 2 or at 1.30, I'm going to have to stop and I'm worried about missing the meeting and I'm thinking about what we're going to talk about. And so in actuality, a 30 minute meeting costs me like four hours of attention. What's more is that before a meeting, you don't start anything, you have to get ready for the meeting, the meeting ends, you write your notes, what do I do next. And so the context switching of meetings is also incredibly, incredibly costly. And so if you're somebody who currently has a calendar link where people can book time with you any time, any day of the week, I implore you to lock that down and make it so that you only take appointments at maximum four days a week, ideally two days a week. If you're able to make this happen and batch your meetings to two days a week so that you have three days a week open to actually get stuff done, I'm telling you, you will grow your podcast and grow your business so much faster. And if you're somebody who has a full time job, I would just do that as much as you can, try to block off your calendar as much as you can so that you're only available at certain times. I remember when I worked in corporate, it was center practice for my calendar to be available for other people to book time literally the whole week, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and people could just put anything on my calendar any day of the week the whole time. And I didn't realize it back then because that's what everybody else in corporate does and they just say my calendar is up to date. And for any time that's free, it's open for someone else to book. But then what happens is you don't have any time for yourself to get your own work done. So whether or not you're an entrepreneur, I highly recommend you lock down your schedule and try your best to batch meetings. For me, what that looks like is every single Monday and every single Thursday, I have meetings straight through usually from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. Eastern. I try to allocate time in between to ease or take a break, but usually something comes up that that gets filled. And I know that sounds really, really, really intimidating. It was kind of hard at first, but now I'm just used to it. And honestly, I kind of look forward to those days because I know that on Monday and Thursday between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. I got nothing to do, but talk to people. It takes pressure off of the day because I'm not like, you know, in meetings, worried about getting stuff done, I'm just like, I do meetings today and that is my job. And so that's what Monday looks like 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. I take meetings and then nothing after that. And then what that does is it frees up tons of time on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday so that I can actually get some work done. Now the only exception to this rule is that I still meet with the Grow the Show team daily. And I also still meet with the Grow the Show accelerator enrollment team daily as well. With the exception being Friday, we recently implemented no meeting Fridays here at Grow the Show and early returns are great. So all in all, what my schedule looks like in terms of meetings is Mondays and Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. that includes everything coaching accelerator clients, doctors appointments, you name it Mondays and Thursdays Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I still meet with the Grow the Show team quickly just for updates and with the accelerator enrollment team for sales coaching. But other than that, those days are free and clear for me to actually get work done. And then Fridays are totally clear with no meetings and that's when I do the majority of my work on the Grow the Show podcast. My podcast interviews happen on Fridays, batch creating content happens on Fridays, any needle moving work within the business like creating marketing materials or updating the course, you name it Fridays are my days to really dig in as far as fitness goes. I go to the gym every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 4 p.m. for one hour. I like going four days in row and then having Saturday, Sunday and Monday off to recover. It works really well. And then after the gym, I come home, I shower sometimes I'll do some more work if there's more to be done, but most of the time I have dinner with my partner Emily and we hang out with our dog for the rest of the night. What I'll say is that that again is my ideal week. There are plenty of weeks where that gets totally blown out of the water and it doesn't wind up that way. In fact, I would say most weeks, it doesn't go that perfectly. Although I do my best to make it so that it goes as close to that as possible because the weeks that I am able to stay disciplined and stick with that routine are actually the weeks where I feel the most free. I feel the most sense of play and I have the most fun running and growing this business. What do I want to change about my routine? Well, I'd like to be more consistent with it above all else. And so where I want to go with this routine in the future is that where I really want to go is that I personally don't have any meetings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Fridays. Just recently, I was able to implement that I have no meetings at all on Fridays, including with my own team. My goal is to make that happen in the near future for Tuesdays and Wednesdays as well. I can have three days per week to really dig in and to grow both the business and the Grow the Show podcast. But for now, I'm still pretty heavily involved in the operations of the company. I still meet with the team and the sales team on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in addition to Mondays and Thursdays as well. My goal, though, is to make it so that Mondays and Thursdays are when I meet with people and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I'm free with no appointments to just do work. Hopefully, I can get there in 2023. As far as weekends go, I very often work on Saturdays. I enjoy working on Saturdays because they're free. There's nobody in Slack. Nobody's talking to me. I'm able to just get some cool stuff done, but I also often don't work on Saturdays. What's nice about having no meetings on Fridays is that it kind of serves as a Saturday when I can really dig into stuff. If I don't work on Saturday, it doesn't mean that I don't have a whole day to dig into something that week. As I mentioned before, I aim to keep Sundays completely free and clear of any obligations at all. That is what my ideal week looks like. As far as the rest of my lifestyle, what I'll say is that I do keep things pretty simple and clean because right now I am in a season of growth, meaning I am going all in on growing this business. I actually moved away from my hometown of Philadelphia to Miami, Florida simply to focus. I love Philly. I have tons and tons of friends and family there, but it's really, really hard to go all in on a seven-figure business, turn it into an eight-figure business when you spend all of your time going to breweries and hanging out with all your friends and doing all these extracurricular activities. I made the choice in early 2022 to move away from my hometown so that I can focus for a season. So right now, me and Emily live in Miami. While we're here, our life is pretty quiet. We do not go out all the time. Many of you know that I am an avid raver. I love electronic dance music, and so I do love going to electronic music shows. I often don't do that in Miami, though. I'm a big believer in batching. I batch creating the Grow the Show podcast. I batch my meetings. I batch a lot of the work that I do, and I also batch partying. What I mean by that is my partner, Emily and I, will go to a music festival four to five times per year and that weekend, we don't worry about our sleep schedule. I drink. I drink tons of caffeine. I have a blast at these concerts. I stay up late. I have so much fun. And then when we're not at festivals, we lock in. We get up at the same time every day, including the weekends. We don't really go out on the weekends. I usually don't drink at this point in my life. I don't drink other than at music festivals. And that serves me really well because what that's doing is allowing me to really invest in this business, grow both myself, grow my team, grow my business, grow my financial withstanding, grow my financial position. And then in the future, when things are a little bit more stable and I'm not in a period of really going all in on growing my business, then I'll be able to drink whenever I want. But for now, it serves me very well to not drink. I don't drink nights and weekends, usually I save my drinking, I batch it, I batch my partying at music festivals, like I said, four to five times per year. And so that's how I currently shape my life. I'll be honest, this episode was a little weird for me because I'm used to just sharing podcast growth and monetization tips. So this was a bit of a test. And so I'd love to hear from you. If you found this valuable, if this served you in any sort of way, let me know. I'd love to know where you are in your podcast, growth journey, where you are in your entrepreneurship journey. And I'd love to know if this was helpful for you. If it wasn't, you're probably not still listening to this, so that's okay. But if it wasn't useful, let me know that as well. As I try to find out how much you, the Grow the Show listener, want to hear about what I'm doing outside of growing and monetizing my podcast. That's it for this one. Let me know if you have any questions in the Grow the Show Facebook group. And hopefully you've picked up on some time management or life management techniques that can help you.