Nobody plans for the problem that shows up. That’s what makes it a problem. The key person quits. The system breaks. The client you counted on goes quiet. And most owners respond the only way they know how: react, absorb it personally, work another weekend, and hope it doesn’t happen again.
In this episode, Karl walks through the Six ATEs: six moves that give you a way to process a problem instead of just surviving it. They’re simple enough to remember under pressure, which matters, because pressure is exactly when you’ll need them.
Here’s the connection most owners miss: how you handle problems determines how free you are. If every problem has to route through you, you don’t own a business, you own a job with more risk. The Six ATEs are how you start changing that.
Because most owners say they want freedom. Fewer are willing to build the thing that produces it.
Listen in, and pick the one you’ve been avoiding.
Hi everybody! Karl Diffenderfer here from Higher Impact. I wanted to just spend a few minutes talking with you about a concept that comes up a lot in coaching, and I think it might help you in your business, your life, whatever it is that you’re trying to do. And so the idea is this: Lots of business owners run into these… problems with — I want to say that cautiously because none of us have problems, right? But we run into these problems in our business, and it’s unexpected. We weren’t expecting to have this happen, and we’re not sure how to deal with it, how to process it. And these SIX ATES, A-T-E-S are great ways to begin to deal with these problems. And so ultimately, if you’re a business owner and you want to have freedom in your business — which most business owners do, some don’t, but most do— then you’re going to want to focus on these SIX ATES.
Now that sounds kind of funny to say SIX ATES, but you’ll get it here in a second. The first three are the ones that you most commonly hear, and I’m going to share them with you right now. So here they are: Automate, Delegate, Eliminate. There’s the three. I’ll give you the other three here in a moment. So these are the most common ones. You also might hear a delegate, automate, eliminate. But whichever way you hear it, it’s the idea of, okay, well number one:
Delegate
Let’s look at that. If we’re going to delegate something it means that we’ve identified that it’s not something we need to do. A lot of business owners do things that they’re below their pay grade. So they might be doing administrative tasks, they might be running for the mail, or they might be doing things that aren’t the best use of their time. There are things that they can do for the company that will auto-generate more money for the company, and so when we look at what we can delegate, we want to go through a delegation process of identifying what we do in our day-to-day. And then after that we want to take those things and say ‘okay, well hey, do I like doing this, do I not like doing it, but should I be doing this?’. As they do that they can begin to create a delegation plan. Now if you want more information about this reach out to me I’d be happy to give you a free complimentary coaching session, just to, like dig into this a little bit. It’s pretty complicated but once you get it, it’s really easy and I can teach you how to delegate.
Now also with delegation, maybe you want to employ a new person to help you with that delegation. What I’ve done is I have a team of people in the Philippines, and they do a whole bunch of work for me. They’re a huge help. I value them very greatly, but they allow me to delegate things that otherwise I might not be able to do. For example, some business owners might not be able to afford somebody locally, but abroad they can. In my case, I can afford people locally, but I want to be able to support people abroad. I want to help people in other countries that might not have an opportunity for a job like we do here. And so my way of delegating is to give to my overseas team, and they do amazing. If you ever want to meet any of them or learn more about that, I’m happy to share that with you too. So now, we have Delegate. Automate is next.
Automate
is where we’re taking something that we’re going to create and have it happen over and over and over without us ever having to touch it. Some great tools to help you with this are online automation systems. Inbound marketing, the email marketing that you can do through inbound marketing is a great way to do that through maybe HubSpot or Infusionsoft or something like that. But then also, there are other ways to do it too like for example Zapier. I use Zapier to automate moving, like when I add a contact to my contacts it automatically puts them in QuickBooks. That saves me the time of double-entry. Automation gets rid of double-entry, any kind of remedial tasks that you have to do over and over and over. Figure out how to automate that or delegate it. Okay, so Automate, Delegate, Eliminate is the final one.
Eliminate
is, what are we doing that we shouldn’t be doing? And a good way to tell if you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing is to say, ‘do I feel like I should be doing this?’ Do you ‘should’ all over yourself? I think Tony Robbins says that. So when we look at the things that we’re doing in our day-to-day, we want to identify — ‘okay, is this something that I really should be doing?’. Going back to the delegate, when we make that list of things that we do on a monthly, daily, weekly, or hourly basis, those things we can look at real quick and say, ‘do these help the business?’. Statistically, it is proven that 20% of what you do generates 80% of the results in your business. So okay, now how could we shrink that, all that stuff down to that we can do more of the 20 to have better results in our business than doing all this 80 percent of the stuff that doesn’t do anything for us. Okay, so automate, delegate, eliminate.
Deliberate
Now, you’re ready for the other three? These are the ones that I’m adding to our ATES, and the reason I’m adding them is that I think that those first three are great, but I think there are a couple of other ATES that we should look at. All right, so number one is the word Deliberate. And so what I mean by that is, sometimes we need to take a moment to pause, to slow down, to deliberate over what it is that we’re doing? Okay, should I be doing that? How could I do that better? Is that a current goal? Or is that a future goal? Is that something that I need to manage better? Do I need more clarity around the organization of that thing? Do I need to plan better? Whatever it is, deliberate over it. If we study many of the greats of the past, they all had massive amounts of journals. Back here behind me are quite a few. I think the stack’s about this big now. Journaling is so imperative to your success, and when you deliberate that allows you to write things down and come up with better ideas. Okay, the next one is Concentrate.
Concentrate
So when we concentrate on something, we want to put our focus on that. I don’t know about you, but I can be “squirrel”, you know, I’m gone, I’m on to the next thing. I thrive on interruptions. I love that about myself, but what it means is sometimes I just need to hunker down and concentrate on that one thing. Even like this video today. I’ve been percolating on it all day saying, ‘okay what should I talk about this, what should I do, blah blah blah, and at the end of the day, I was just not going to do it because I was like, ‘yeah, I don’t know. I don’t feel quite ready. Do you ever do that to yourself? You have this, I should do that, but then you just don’t do it because you, okay, I gotta do this and it’s not gonna be quite perfect, and I really should pull this together. Whatever it is. And so we need to concentrate. And then finally… this one is probably the most important of all of them, and you’re going to find this one rather interesting. The final — give a drum roll here — the final ATE of the SIX ATES, and that is Perspirate.
Perspirate
I know that sounds kind of funny, right? Perspirate. But what I mean by that is sometimes we have to put in the hard work to make something work. Sometimes we have to go the extra mile, we have to perspirate to reach that success that we’re after. And so, let me ask you, how are you doing it perspiring? Are you going that extra mile to make sure that you’re successful? And that you’re right on track with where you need to be? I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get lazy. Sometimes I just want to rest on my laurels, I want to just take it easy. But if we look at ourselves and where we want to go and what we want to accomplish, sometimes we have to perspirate.
All right so we have Automate, Delegate, Eliminate. We also have Deliberate, we have Concentrate, and we also have Perspirate. Now my challenge to you, my final challenge to you out of this is, don’t Hibernate. Go out and work hard, strive for your goals, go after your calling, do the things that God’s called you to do, and do it well. Don’t give up, keep pressing forward because it does have an impact. It has an Eternal Impact. It has an impact here on your family, your business, and your staff. Everybody around you is impacted by your drive to go out and be great at what it is that you do. So, thanks for listening, I hope you found this valuable. I’m going to be doing more of these as time goes by.
If I can ever help you in any way, please just reach out, I’d be happy to provide support or encouragement, or maybe as you have this tough issue that you’re trying to wrestle through, or maybe a difficult employee. Whatever it is that you’re trying to figure out, reach out. I probably have some of the solutions that could help you.