The Margin Nobody Measures

A few weeks ago, I ran my business from a chair next to a hospital bed for days, in fact. And and the problem that those four days exposed had really nothing to do with the hospital. It was it was actually a business problem that got exposed to this whole thing now. It's something that has been building for months, and it took this pretty significant event.

It took. You know, sitting in that chair for for four days to finally see it. So, um, quick context here. Um, before anything else, because it does matter. So my wife is fine. She's home. She's doing much better. But what started as this nosebleed just would not stop, right? Like, in fact, the E.R. couldn't couldn't stop it initially.

Um, we ended up going back, and it turned into four day, you know, hospital stay, a couple blood transfusions later. Um, again, she's she's doing much better. I ran my business sitting next to the chair. Right. So, you know, I'm. I'm canceling calls. I'm moving deliverables. I'm, you know, watching like this, this fully mapped out week collapse into next week's calendar, which was already full.

And to understand why this week hit the way that it did. You've you've got to understand how structured I am and how systematic I am. Like, I've taken my newsletter, for example, I've published a newsletter for 222 straight weeks. Like through vacations, new product launches, business pivots, holidays every single week.

And that streak has never really been in any real danger because I built an entire system around it. I spend a chunk of every Sunday mapping out, like the week ahead, client deliverables, content, you know, all that kind of stuff. Get my calls all locked in and I've got AI. It's like wired into my calendar.

It's wired into email, it's wired into Basecamp, into fathom where we record calls. I've got automations that are pulling all the commitments from the from the calls that I make and I, you know, pulls it into one list and then I block time to, to execute all of it. Right. So I get it all on a list and I map it all out.

That Structure has is what's let me squeeze in like maximum productivity out of myself while still showing up as a dad and as a husband. And here's the trap. Like the the business has grown really aggressively in the past 12 months. We've the team is growing. We're hiring very quickly. And all the other demands that come with this are growing right along with it.

My response has been to systematize harder and and so far like for the for the most part it's worked. Every every block of time is basically accounted for. Every every deliverable is on track. Not an unclaimed hour anywhere on my calendar. It is just like it is completely mapped out. Now read that again.

That's that's that's it's not an unclaimed hour anywhere. I think that's discipline. I think it's good structure, good systems. But it was also the problem because most of us business owners we think about margin, right. Like constantly we're thinking about margin. We usually think of it in financial terms.

We think of it in terms of profit margin. Margin of safety, cash reserves, runway. And we track the numbers and we protect that margin. And we and we feel it immediately when it gets thin. There's a second kind of margin that follows the like the exact same rules as financial margin. But nobody really measures it.

And it's the margin on your time. The financial margin that you build in your business is what buys you security. It's what buys you flexibility. It's what buys you optionality. It's what buys you peace of mind. Margin on time basically buys you all of the same stuff, plus the head space where your creativity, your best ideas, and really like your sanity come from.

If you then on margins on either side, you're going to feel stressed, you're going to feel anxiety, you're going to feel like no options. Like we have zero optionality here, and I've got no capacity to absorb a hit Like I'm walking a tightrope and it's like a debt that you don't really notice it's accumulating and you don't feel time margin eroding day to day.

You you feel it all at once. You feel like the day something big lands and there's nothing left to absorb it. The part that really stings is my margin didn't erode because the business was struggling, right. It eroded because the business was winning. Things are going really well. Like we're we're growing.

We're getting everything that we want. And like every efficiency that that I created in my calendar just got reinvested like into into more commitments instead of into more space. And the quest to build financial margin, like all of the all of this time is coming at trying to build financial margin. I sacrificed the margin on my time.

I and I traded one for the other, like I like. I didn't need both. The payoff that we're all chasing on the financial side of things. The peace of mind, the optionality, the security, the independence also never really shows up because we spent all of our time margin to get it. So how do you rebuild it? Well, listen, I'm I'm not coming at this as a guy who's like, I didn't crack under pressure and I'm not coming at this as somebody who's got it all figured out.

Um, like I've, I've had seasons where I've got plenty of margin on time and money and I've got seasons where I've got none of it. And so this isn't a lesson that I'm necessarily learning for the first time. It's just one that I got build for again. And but when when I've had margin it's come from, from three things.

One is running a surplus like schedule below my capacity on purpose. Just like spending. If I leave blocks of time on my calendar unclaimed and then defend them like protect them because unallocated time, it looks like a waste when things are running really smoothly. And it's not like that is that's a shock absorber.

It's the it's like having the cash reserve of your calendar. Uh, two has been redundancy. Like developing the team up and the systems that can take a hand off when I've got to go sit in a, you know, next to a hospital bed for four days without warning, because that's the real test of delegation. It's like a normal week.

Doesn't really prove much. If everything routes through me, every surprise is going to land on me. Three is just mapping out like, your perfect week. Like, this is an exercise that I teach a lot of salespeople too, like blank calendar. Just design your your ideal week from scratch with margin blocked in first before all the commitments take all those spots and my actual calendar has drifted really far from my perfect week for a long time.

And when the drift gets that big, you don't really just like patch the schedule, you just got to rebuild it. Right. And that's and that's where I've that's where I've started here, these, these past couple of weeks. So one thing I'll say is because a lot of people are going to ask is why not just build a buffer of newsletters, you know, like why not just build up six newsletters in advance?

I've done that. I hammered out like a, you know, a bunch of issues in a couple marathon sessions, and they were technically fine, like, but I just felt like they were lifeless, like written about like nothing that was actually happening at the moment. And the engagement I got from it seemed to support that.

And worst like it turned something that I actually liked doing, which is the writing into a chore. You know, batching is kind of like the same reflex that ate my margin in the first place. It's taking any free time that I have reinvesting it into more production. What actually protects the streak for me is, is the margin.

So, um, I'll leave you with this. If if you're building financial margin so that you can breathe some day, margin on your time is what lets you breathe right now. And you can build both. Like they're they're not mutually exclusive. I hope it helps. Audios.