Hire Your Weeks

The best entrepreneurs we’ve worked with think about time a bit differently than the not quite as good entrepreneurs.

I was speaking with an alum last week who now runs a business that’s raised 10s of millions of dollars and has over 100 employees. We were talking about his earliest days and when things “clicked.”

He said it was a mindset shift. He changed from “working on his startup on the side” to “hiring” two-week blocks of time to accomplish a specific task. He said that since he had such a relatively small amount of time to work on his idea while he still had a job, forcing himself to sit down on a Sunday and say “the next two weeks I’ll accomplish X” was important. If he didn’t, he’d just do a bunch of random stuff that didn’t get him anywhere.

His four-step process

First, decide on “X” - what he’d “hire” the two-week block to do. He wasn’t an industry expert to start, so maybe an early two-week block would be hired to become an expert on some part of a potential customer’s process.

Second, he’d create success criteria: What’s “becoming an expert” mean? In the example case, maybe it meant that he could map out the motivations for each person in the buying process at a certain type of company.

Third, he’d create a plan. To become an expert he’d have to speak with, say, 5 people in the space in different roles. To do that, he’d have to reach out to 25 people. He’d have to identify the people most likely to speak with him and most helpful to his goal, craft those emails or ask for intros, send them, schedule the talks, then figure out the questions.

Finally, he’d schedule out the blocks of time on the calendar when he’d do each task. To hold himself accountable, he’d tell me the goal at the start of the two week, then present his findings at the end. You can do this, too. Respond to this email with your plan, if you’d like.

This approach does a lot of things. It forces you to choose something important and build a plan to achieve it. It forces you to stay focused for two deep weeks of work. It optimizes the time you spend.

Most importantly, it’ll start to feel like you’re building on what you’ve learned. The two-week sprints will stack and you’ll get momentum. Hire your weeks.