Drainers vs. Drivers

What's good everybody.In this episode, I want to break down a strategy and a philosophy that you can apply to your business that I learned from one of my mentors called drainers versus drivers. ... Let's get it going.

For three years, my agency built funnels and automation systems for the biggest names in marketing today since then have transformed that agency into a hyper profitable training and consulting business. While everyone is out there talking about scale like it's some sort of destination, we'll be asking the real question, how do you transform your business into a more scalable model using the knowledge, skills, and expertise that you already have? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me in to follow along as I learn, apply and share the strategies I'm using to build my multimillion-dollar business. My name is Greg Hickman and welcome to scale up.

All right, so let me set the stage. One of my mentors, Tony Greg Meyer runs a company called ShipOffers and they're based, uh, just south of Denver, about probably 30, 35-minute drive from me here in Denver. And we always go back and forth in text messages. And this was early on in our relationship multiple years ago. Uh, and he said, hey, why don't you come down to the ShipOffers headquarters and we'll, I'll get lunch and we'll jam on a handful of things about, about you, your business, and I'll even interview you for my podcast. Um, he has a podcast called be fulfilled. And so I drive down there and I spend the day most of the day with him and you know, he provides lunch and, and we start talking about the things that I'm doing in my business that I don't like doing, that are preventing me from growing. And he basically made me pull out a piece of paper, which I'm going to have you do here in just a second.

Uh, and he called it the drainers versus drivers. And so he basically pulled out a piece of paper he actually did on the whiteboard. So let's jump to the whiteboard here real fast. And I want you to make, you know, take a piece of paper, draw a line right down the middle. And on one side I want you to write drainers. Now on the other side, I want you to write drivers. Okay? So very simply, drainers are the things that drain you, drain your energy and drivers are the things that you know, gets you motivated and get you excited to do the things, to do, more stuff to create, right? The things that you enjoy doing. So drainers and drivers, we have our coffee, we have our piece of paper. Now if you're driving, um, while listening to this, if you're listening to the audio on iTunes, pull over.

Don't do this while you're driving, but we basically have a piece of paper with drainers on one side and drivers on the other. And what I want you to do is to spend a few minutes and you can pause this or you can come back or at the end of this, um, at the end of this episode, spend 10, 15 minutes, five, 10, 15 minutes. I revisit this all the time and I want you to make a list of all the things that drain you and all the things that drive you. And I want to give you an example so that you understand how to break this down. Because Tony asked me this question and I'm going to ask you this question or kind of reframe it because I want you to think of how does this apply to the actual things you're doing. So he looked me and I and said, tell me this was driving down here to hang out with me, a drainer or a driver.

And at first I thought this was really a trick question, but I thought with, I thought on it for a minute and I said, you know what, the being here with you is a driver. Like the things we're talking about. Um, you know, the, the energy and the motivation that I get that from being around you is a driver. The drive down here and the drive back home is a drainer. And so he said, um, well that's good that you understand that distinction because when you go to meet with other people and, or people want to meet with you, you should do what I did with you is, well, they can come to you. So if I'm going to have coffee with someone or someone wants to meet me, I will always take the initiative and have them come to me. And if it requires me to go there, I'm now, if I'm trying to engage this meeting, I'm going to be more willing to, to go there.

But if someone's wanting to spend time with me, uh, I'm always going to be like, Hey, come to my office, uh, come near me so that I don't need to have that drainer, which is the commute to get there. Cause the meeting itself, I get pumped about that. I get energy meeting with other entrepreneurs, especially ones that are ahead of me. I am always trying to be around people that are ahead of me like Tony. And so, you know, for Tony it's like, okay, I will go down there and spend time with him, even know that I know that there's a little bit of a drainer to get there. But now when people want to meet with me, I know and have the wherewithal to say, hey, if you want to spend time with me, I'd love to do it cause I love doing this but you got to come meet me at our office, right?

So there can be things in your life or your business that really need to be dissected into the separate parts like me going to hang out with Tony. There is a drive there, me hanging out with Tony and a drive back and those are all separate instances, some of which dreamy and some of which driving me drive me. And so you need to start dissecting this for you in your own life to start eliminating those drivers. If you have a similar example where driving to people or driving to meetings and things like that is a drainer for you and you're energized by, those meetings will start having those meetings at your office or your house or you know, if you lived down the street from a coffee shop and have them come to you or maybe have them come to your house and you guys go for a walk, right?

Eliminate those things. For example, at home, I don't mind cooking or preparing food. I hate the planning of the recipe. And so my wife plans recipes. Uh, we also, um, on and off we'll use a service like a Sundance Schutte or blue apron where they just send the recipe to us and all of the ingredients are there. So those are ways that we've eliminated certain things that drain us. Like me having to go search for a recipe is the most draining thing in the world. But if we know what the recipe is and I just need to chop up a bunch of stuff and throw it on a grill or throw it in a, you know, an a pan or whatever, I'm way more inclined to do that because I actually enjoy the process of cooking. I despise the process of prepare or of planning to cook.

Okay. So you have to look at kind of the experience as a whole because there might be pieces of the experience that you don't like and that are draining you. And those are the things that you need to start eliminating from your, your life and in your business. So basically what I want you to do coming out of this episode is make a list. Um, spend some time with it, revisit it, revisit it often. I kind of look at this list every, every 90 days, especially as I'm doing planning. When you look at it in kind of the silo of specific activities in your business, you'll start to find where you might need to be delegating, right? Or what types of people you need to be hiring. If I hate if one of my drainers was setting up Facebook ads, right, but I liked the strategy and I have the strategy of the marketing.

Well I just need someone to do the ads for me so I can meet with someone who knows how to do the tactical part. Um, you know, the hands to keyboard of setting up the ad sets, doing the audiences. I thus don't need to go get a strategist or a strategy minded ads person. If I'm strong in that area and I enjoy doing it, I can keep doing that piece. I just needed someone to execute the strategy. Thus the hire that I need to make is going to be a lot different. If I didn't like doing this strategy and I had no idea what I was doing and hadn't done it myself, I might want to go get a full service advertising agency that will do all of it because I don't, maybe that was in my draining my drainer list in the beginning, like planning of ads and coming up with the ad strategy that was in my drain, my drainer lists or drain.

Yeah. Drainers list, then I might change who I go to higher. Is this making sense? So really start to dissect the different areas of life, the things that you're doing. Um, when people ask for your time and you are maybe saying willingly saying yes right now, but then you're kind of regret it ask, do you regret meeting with that person or do you regret certain aspects of how you conducted that experience? It might just be how you conducted that experience. Don't make the mistake of, and what I did for a little while, I was like, well I just won't meet with anybody. Which then I lost the drive, the driver part, you know, the part around being around other entrepreneurs. Just because I wasn't willing to do the commute. When I reframed it I was like, Oh, I love the meeting. I hate the commute.

You guys come to me. Perfect. And so you start to whittle out the elements that actually drive you and the elements that actually drain you. And the goal is to just constantly be deleting things from the drainer list, right? Or delegating them. So delete it, delegate it or create a system for it that has you not having to do it and maybe someone else on your team can manage it. Hey still, if you enjoyed this episode, we would greatly appreciate a rating and review in iTunes. If you've been watching on Youtube, we would love you to hop on over to iTunes, make sure you're subscribed there, leave us a rating and review, be honest. Um, W we use it to grow, but it also helps you know the iTunes algorithm get us in front of more people. So share this with a friend. If you have a fellow agency owner or service provider that's looking to be more scalable and kind of build a business that's on their terms, we would appreciate you sharing it with someone, whether that's a text message, a DM, smoke signals, we don't care. We really appreciate you leaving the reviews, the reviews that have come in already. They just energize us and want us to keep creating more content for you. So hop on over to iTunes or you can visit scalable podcasts.com and we'll bring you right over there and submit your rating and review and we will be forever grateful and we'll chat soon.

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