My Girlfriend Said: Are You Lazy?

Yaro is a serial entrepreneur, blogger, podcaster, angel investor and digital nomad.

When I was in high school I was forced to get up at 6:30am to do a 1.5 hour commute to school.

I hated it. I especially hated my alarm clock.

I promised myself that when I was older I’d never need an alarm again.

I kept that promise.

I’ve slept-in for the past 25 years.

Whenever I’ve seen ‘early to rise’ productivity trends I always laugh.

Not for me.

Are You Lazy?

I recently moved into a new place in Vancouver with my girlfriend.

She gets up at 6:30am for her job as a doctor.

Most of her life she’s been around people with jobs.

The only time you sleep-in is on weekends.

She’s had a bit of trouble coming to terms with my sleep schedule.

On several occasions, with a worried expression on her face, she’s asked me –

Are you lazy?

Naturally she wants an ambitious, hard working, money-earning partner.

While I consider myself all of those things, the time of day I wake up or even the amount of hours I work, have never been deciding factors.

Since the day I became an entrepreneur I’ve been on the hunt for leverage.

I built systems.

I hired help.

I focused on simple business models.

I aimed to avoid high-stress situations.

I didn’t rush towards growth, sacrificing everything for it, including sleep.

All that being said, I LOVE making money.

To this day, receiving a ‘you made a sale’ email is still my all time favorite thing.

And I want more of those emails!

I crave growth. I want to hit bigger money milestones.

But I won’t sacrifice physical health for financial wealth.

Hence sleep has always been at the top of my values.

I don’t enjoy life when tired.

I can’t grow my business when sleep deprived.

Getting More From Less

For over a decade with my teaching business, the core concept I promoted was this –

I wanted to show people that if you do a few key things each day as a content creator you can make a six figure income.

As I grew my business to over a million dollars the idea of getting more from less didn’t change.

My business had to expand – and there was far more than 2 hours a day of work to do – but with the help of technology and people, you can remain the visionary and the strategist.

Let the specialists handle execution.

For this to work you have make a commitment…

You must remove yourself from the day-to-day operations of your business.

The best starting point is hiring an executive assistant.

I hired one to handle email first.

By taking over email, they naturally expanded to all the tasks that come through the inbox, including:

• Calendar scheduling
• Updating software
• Following up with leads
• Supporting clients
• Research
• Event planning
• Proofreading
• Onboarding processes
• Working with contractors
  … and so on.

Every routine task I delegated to them.

These were important tasks, even tasks I initially thought impossible for someone else to take over.

Over time I hired more people to help with other specialized tasks.

• A person for website changes.
• Talent for video editing and graphic design.
• A copywriter, affiliate manager, pay per click ads consultant, etc.

Today my current business runs without me.

We have a team of 80 people who do everything for our clients.

I oversee the marketing department.

In that role I mostly strategize and check-in with other people.

This wasn’t always the case of course.

We had to build our way here.

You need cash to pay your team, so expanding has to be incremental.

As you get your own time back and expanded productivity from a team of people, more cash comes in.

It’s the only way to grow.

It’s also how you get to wake up at 10am every day, if that’s important to you.

Delegate and scale… and sleep in!

Yaro
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P.S. My company InboxDone.com offers executive assistants who specialize in email management.

If you’re a CEO or entrepreneur who needs an EA, we can give you back 50 hours per month.