Master the Proven Growth Formula: Do, Delegate, Delete

Running a business with your spouse can be incredibly rewarding, but also uniquely challenging. How do you optimize your time and energy to grow your enterprise while still being present for your marriage and family?

In this episode, powerhouse couple Kevin and Bekah Tinter let you in on their proven formula for doing just that. Known as the "Double Double D", this approach helps you be intentional about what you choose to do, delegate, delete, or "draft" by partnering up.

With 13 years of experience as couplepreneurs under their belts, the Tinters have navigated the ups and downs of integrating their work and home lives. They share practical tips for defining clear roles, defusing conflict, making time for the activities that give you energy, and leveraging each other's zone of genius.

Whether you're just starting out in business with your spouse or looking to take your venture to the next level, this episode will give you the tools to design a life and business you love, step by step. Join Kevin and Becca to learn how to master the art of the double double D and experience the power of true partnership!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome back Uncommon Freedom Fighters Kevin Tinter, here with my amazing wife and co-host.

Speaker 2: 0:12

Becca Tinter. Today we're diving into a powerful formula for couplepreneurs to optimize their businesses and personal lives.

Speaker 1: 0:20

That's right. It's all about mastering the double, double D, and we're not talking about bra sizes here, folks. It's do delegate, delete and draft. As spouses who run businesses together, it's crucial that we focus our time and energy strategically.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Absolutely so. Here's what we will unpack Understanding what tasks to do ourselves, what to delegate and what to delete. How to balance growing your business with nurturing your marriage and family, communication, tips for managing your roles as both life and business partners, and leveraging the unique strengths that couplepreneurs bring to the table.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Bam. We'll also point you to some handy tools and resources to help you put this into practice. So if you're ready to work smarter, not harder, as a couple in business, stick around.

Speaker 2: 1:09

Absolutely so. We're going to start by talking about some of the key principles in Kevin's book from chapter nine in the seven disciplines of uncommon freedom, and this chapter is called lifestyle design. So basically, one of the things that we have practiced and lived out is knowing that designing our life intentionally is very key to building uncommon freedom, which means being purposeful about our aligning our time and activities, our activities, with our core values. I think most people they don't think about their values, then they don't think about where their time is going and so all of a sudden there's like a cognitive dissonance happening when the things they spend their time and energy and money on don't align with the things that really matter to people.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Oh yeah, it's one of our favorite sayings from our friend John Maxwell right Leading the life you want instead of accepting the life you were given. So it's so important to be intentional, right? If you just drift, go downstream, you're not going to like where you end up. It takes effort to go upstream, it takes intentionality, but boy is it worth it.

Speaker 2: 2:10

Absolutely. And then there are people who are trying to do everything and spend all the plates and, especially as couplepreneurs, we don't have capacity or time for that. We need to be doing what we are the best at, so that's what we're going to talk about.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Yeah. So another principle from chapter nine is that it's so important to have an abundance mindset because when you have that abundance mindset you'll see opportunities as being limitless. You realize that there's an endless number of pies in the world and the communist type philosophy is there's only one pie and if you have more than me then I can't get them. And the reality is that's not true, right? Communism has failed miserably every time it's been tried. Every type of socialist type of government and economy has failed miserably and ultimately capitalism has shown itself to be the way for things to prosper and for people to truly thrive. The bottom line is there is no limit to the number of pies that can be made. When I'm successful, what we have learned actually is that I'm not actually taking away from anyone. I am actually helping other people build their pies. We pump so much more money into the economy the more we make than we did when we were scraping by $13,000 per year back in 1998, in the first year of our marriage.

Speaker 2: 3:39

Absolutely, and so the other thing that comes to mind from that philosophy and the way you were talking is for me to win, you don't have to lose. So it's really we each get to decide how much effort we're going to put in, and we see opportunities around the corner and as something we can approach and build a life around. So approach your business and life goals with faith, with generosity and with wise stewardship. These are principles that we live by and we feel have completely blessed our business and our family life. So regularly evaluate how you spend your time and manage your energy. So we want to delegate or eliminate anything that we consider energy takers to focus on things that are energy givers.

Speaker 1: 4:19

Well, so good, so good. We just recently brought on another part-time employee to make up for an awesome several-year nanny that we had, who is moving on to other endeavors, and the great thing that we're experiencing right now is the benefit of delegation. Lots of little tasks that just weren't getting done. That in the past we would do, and we can delegate them to our assistant. Done that in the past we would do and we can delegate them to our assistant. And it's wonderful because for the most part, these activities are not life-giving activities and they're not high leverage for us. So we can pay someone very well to do these low-level type tasks for us and then we can focus on things that truly are life-giving and just get us pumped up.

Speaker 2: 5:04

Absolutely so. One of the resources that we have available it's in the book as well is basically an energy audit and to figure out which things give you energy, which things take your energy. Sometimes it's people, and so we need to you need to look at associations but other times it's tasks and commitments that we make and so really taking an audit of that and figuring out which things do I want to keep, which things do I want to eventually give to someone else, and which things should I just stop doing altogether. So it's okay to design your life and your business as you go. Few things are permanent, so really embracing the freedom to make those changes. We are living drastically different decision making. We have made drastically different decisions now than we would have made 15 years ago, when we didn't have the resources or even the mindset to make some of these decisions.

Speaker 1: 5:49

Yeah, I think it's important to have that one, three and five-year vision and I would say we've, for the most part, always been moving towards whatever our five-year vision was. But a lot of times inside that one-year vision, we have to make some adjustments because, you know, evidence and flows in business, parenting creates a lot of unpredictability. Some people are dealing with, you know, maybe aging parents and things like that. They can be a disruptor, or maybe it's your own personal health. So, just understanding that, it's important to give yourself the flexibility and freedom to redesign as you go through and this is once again we talk about kind of breaking things into quarters, and that's a really helpful benefit of breaking things into quarters and if you can get ahead of your decision-making, that is ideal.

Speaker 2: 6:40

So what's really painful is when you and sometimes we just don't see things coming, but when we know like school is going to be out for the season or we've got a different change in our family dynamics coming and we don't get ahead of it with childcare, assistance, you know, commitment to work and other things that we're committing our time and energy to, then we can often feel like we're drowning. So if you can look ahead and around the curve a little bit by looking to the quarter ahead of you and having those regular meetings and conversations, you will feel much more at peace about really the pivots that need to happen in both work and home life.

Speaker 1: 7:14

All right. So I'm going to ask you some questions that I know our listeners will have. Go ahead and answer, and then I'll jump in as well. So the first question is how can we effectively separate our business roles to prevent overlap and conflict?

Speaker 2: 7:28

Wow. So I think we've talked in previous episodes about really figuring out what we're good at, what we enjoy doing, and then which things do we both need to have our hands and fingerprints on and which things can we separate out? So, for each of us, we coach our own clients. When it comes to coaches, we meet together and we figure out which coaches we're going to work with directly. You handle finances, I handle some of the training and once we have made those decisions, unless we come together to make a different pivot, we now run in our own lanes, which prevents us from having to have like regular ongoing conversation or conflict about those things.

Speaker 1: 8:02

Yeah, and just a couple of things to add is just understanding personality types, strengths and weaknesses. So strengths, finders, discs are things that we've talked about a lot, but to really identify what is the things that give you life versus the things that like, for example, there's things in the business that, like I love being the CFO role that would suck the life out of you. And there's other things that you're phenomenal at that I don't really enjoy, and so just identifying those and making sure that we both focus on those is really helpful.

Speaker 2: 8:33

The other thing that came to mind was just like when we delegate to an assistant or our children or somebody else, it's also having the ability to have permission for imperfection for especially a season. Like maybe we're transitioning roles and I'm giving you this thing that I was doing and I'm going to let you figure out how to do it your way or the best way, or you're learning from me how to do it, and many times we see people not able to give up that control and so they're having this constant conflict because they need it done a certain way, they need it done perfectly, and we've just found that there has to be permission for imperfection and then a regular feedback loop will really prevent conflict over time, because then you're making those 1% changes and not waiting until it becomes something that is really irritating or, you know, becomes a very challenging situation to deal with.

Speaker 1: 9:21

All right. Next question what are some practical steps to delegate tasks without losing control over our business quality?

Speaker 2: 9:30

So, again, I think that would be covered by a lot of the regular feedback loops. So, again, I think that would be covered by a lot of the regular feedback loops. So, again, we use shared calendars, we use shared delegation lists, we use voice texting. We have a weekly meeting with our assistant to go over things and usually once you get into a good rhythm and there's high trust, that need for consistent conversation and clarification goes down. But at the beginning it's to over-communicate expectations and even just to check, like, okay, will you please do this project and then send it to us so we can take a look. And then down the road it's no longer needing to be sent back. We can just say you do it, you take it, we trust you. And that's where we are with a lot of the things in our business nowadays, which creates just such a streamlined approach and a lot easier and more fun to work in those situations. But at the beginning, high quality conversations, regular feedback loops.

Speaker 1: 10:20

Yeah and this is something that we said in the military all the time, but I know it's not unique to the military and that is to inspect what you expect.

Speaker 1: 10:27

So if you're delegating something to an assistant or anyone else, it's important that you do the follow-up and check how did they do?

Speaker 1: 10:36

Because we have learned that communication is the results you get, and you see this in parenting, you see it in marriage, right, hey, I want you to do X, y or Z, and someone does X, y or Z, but that is not the way that you intended for it to be done, and so it's so important to number communicate clearly, as clearly as you can on the front end, and then do the inspection on the back end to make sure that it was done properly, and then to have that follow up conversation to say, hey, thank you so much for doing X, y or Z. There's some things I would love to have you adjust, and here's the bottom line If you're writing the paycheck, for the most part you get to determine how things were done. There's going to be some things that you're going to want to be very specific about. Other things you're going to be more flexible on, but don't feel bad about expecting things to be done a certain way if you're writing the check.

Speaker 2: 11:27

Right Now, if we're talking to couplepreneurs and you write checks to each other in other words, you work together this is where you're going to have to get your marriage to a place of high trust, so that there's not a constant conflict every time there's a request to do something differently or a critique, and so it's having that open-mindedness, definitely with employees. What we've found is, even on the front end, when we prepare to hire them, or we start working with them, or we're doing the regular feedback loops, the evaluations, it's hey, we're pretty particular about certain things, and so we're going to ask you to do things a certain way or course correct. And please understand that we're not meant to be critical. It's not meant to be critical, we just want to communicate as effectively as possible and so, going into it that way, they also expect feedback, and that's a lot healthier, I think, than surprising someone with feedback.

Speaker 1: 12:14

Absolutely. How do? Last question how do we identify which tasks to delete from our daily business operations to improve efficiency?

Speaker 2: 12:24

Wow. So delete, meaning like we'll never do them again, or delete them like we're going to delegate them to someone else. I think this goes into two categories.

Speaker 1: 12:30

Well, I guess the one delegate. There's going to be some things. We delegate Right and well, so delegate. How do we decide what to delegate?

Speaker 2: 12:37

Right To delegate. I would say again which things do not give us a high ROI. They don't need our personal touch, our talent, our personality. We don't enjoy them. That can be a long list, from everything from household tasks to running errands to creating graphics, things like that. The other thing is, even if you're a creative and you enjoy making graphics, but your time can be used elsewhere, it's being willing to say is this worth my time right now? If I could do this, or I could go play a game with one of my kids, which one would be a better legacy, long-term choice. So that's what I would say for that. And then, as far as deleting, I mean I think it's doing an audit of your time, your commitments and your ROI on a regular basis to figure out which things are we spending time on that, honestly, are not giving us a good return on our investment.

Speaker 1: 13:22

That's so good. All right, let's recap. So, master, and then, oh, real quick, we mentioned the double-double draft. I know we didn't get to yes. Do you want to touch on draft real quick?

Speaker 2: 13:34

Sure. So I mean part of this comes from Rory Vaden's, the focus funnel and really learning to multiply time. So it's knowing that when things come across our to-do lists which we all have we either need to do them because they're ours to do, we need to delegate them to someone else, or we need to just delete them. Because many of us rewrite things on our list like three, four, five, eight times, and we once heard a personal organizer say if you have to rewrite something or reschedule something more than three times, at that point the decision is now do it, delegate it or delete it. Just be done. But drafting is when you can come behind someone else who's sharing an experience with you whether it's a training or carpooling or something and basically utilize the same amount of energy by partnering with someone instead of always doing everything on your own. Do you have some examples of that?

Speaker 1: 14:22

Well, just as an example, like a home-based business model, what we see is frequently people team leaders want to do their own type of training, and it can feed their ego.

Speaker 1: 14:38

Sometimes they might be really good at something, so it makes sense for them to do it, but it's what we have seen over 13 years is it's not a business building activity. It doesn't have to be you, and for sometimes it should be you. Many times, though, there's someone in your mentorship team that is also doing something that checks the box, and it's just our ego that is causing us to work harder than really makes sense and focus on things that aren't growing our business, and what we're also teaching our team members is oh, I got to be a hero as well, so that's a simple example. When it comes to household type things, carpooling is actually a great example, instead of and there's the double-edged sword here, because there's times where I've had some great conversations and we've shared some of them with our kids, especially when they were younger in the car. So I don't want to give up all of those travel opportunities, but especially as they become teenagers, the conversation quality goes down and you don't necessarily have to take your kids to everything and home from everything.

Speaker 1: 15:47

So a great way to draft is to carpool with another family Could save you easily 20, 40, 60 minutes per day, or at least per week. So that's a very rudimentary example of drafting.

Speaker 2: 15:58

Yep, and if you have any other examples, send them to us, throw them in our social media posts underneath this episode and let us know what you think of, because we don't know all the different kinds of businesses represented here, but we're just saying if you can find a way to batch or draft parts of your life, that you're going to create efficiency and it's going to make things a whole lot easier. So other part of our recap is to balance your business growth with investing in your marriage and family. Again, we don't want all of our energy going one direction or the other. We want to learn how to counterbalance and then to communicate clearly, to manage all of our dual roles that we play within a work-life balance which is never really balanced we hate to use that word but basically an integrated life where you have family and you work from home or you work together.

Speaker 1: 16:43

Yeah, and don't forget to capitalize on the unique strengths of being couplepreneurs. Yeah, and don't forget to capitalize on the unique strengths of being couplepreneurs, as well, as don't forget to access tools and resources to work more efficiently as a couple.

Speaker 2: 16:55

So, as couplepreneurs, we have incredible potential to build thriving businesses and families. That's really what we're passionate about. The key is being intentional about how we invest our time and our energy.

Speaker 1: 17:07

So start putting the do, delegate, delete and draft approach into action and, if this episode resonated with you, share it with a couple you know who could use these principles in their life, business and family.

Speaker 2: 17:21

Until next time, keep designing that life of uncommon freedom together.