Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink shares key takeaways from a recent calendar audit workshop. This led to some surprising insights regarding her role as CEO, and how she SHOULD be spending her time. She also reflects on the benefits of delegating more tasks to her executive assistant, as she strives for better time management and business growth, such as having her EA attend workshops like this one.

Key Highlights:

• Delegating learning opportunities to executive assistants.
• Executive assistants can help distill key takeaways from courses and other professional development opportunities, provide valuable outside perspectives, and put together action plans. 
• Team involvement in learning can reduce individual workload.

About Our Guest: 

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone. Welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink. And in today's episode, I'm going to share a surprising lesson that I received from a calendar audit workshop that I attended. So if you are new to the podcast or if you've been spending some time with me over the last several months, you

should know that I spend a lot of time learning about time management and productivity. So I am the owner of a virtual assistant services company. And so as not only the owner of a company, and I'm always learning to find better ways to manage my own time and maximize my own results, but I'm also looking for knowledge that can be shared with our clients because they're in the same boat as me.

Our clients are CEOs and founders and executive directors of their companies or nonprofit organizations. And they are also interested in how can I get more done? How can I get the results that I'm looking for without working more hours and so on. And so I'm naturally drawn to this type of information and I like to absorb it. listen to different podcasts and trainings. I read books and I certainly experiment with things myself.

just to see like, is there one more way that I can present this idea to my clients and my team to help them get just even a little bit better with the way that they spend their time. So when I attended this workshop, the number one lesson that I received surprised me because it did not have to do with time management or productivity directly. So here's what that lesson was, is that

I should have asked my executive assistant to attend the workshop instead of me. Yes, I should not have attended this workshop myself or I should not have attended it alone. I should have had my executive assistant participate on her own or along with me. And here's why. I'm going to share a couple of reasons as I've been reflecting on this because the most obvious one was that

the messaging of the workshop was geared towards executive assistants and chiefs of staff. So these are people who came from either small businesses like mine or yours, or even large government agencies where they had leaders that they were doing their best to support and keep them focused.

and working on the most important things that they needed to do for their businesses or organizations. They were here to learn how they could help their executives do their jobs more efficiently and how they could better support them. One of the things that they shared on the call were some ratios for how an executive's time should be spent and strategies for helping them achieve those targets. I think

On the call, these ratios were about 50 % growing the business or organization, 40 % on running the business or organization, and about 10 % on personal things because inevitably there's a dentist appointment that comes up or a hair appointment that couldn't be scheduled for off hours, things like that. We all have lives, these things come up, or we have things at kids' school and what have you. So they like to...

build in that little bit of time. And so they were talking about, here's ideally what the ideal calendar ratios break down for an executive. And so they were having some conversations around this. So the other thing that I found really interesting was that if I would have had my executive assistant attend this workshop was that she would have...

heard other executive assistants and chiefs of staff discussing ways that they are able to better support the executives that they are working with. And she probably would have been able to give me some outside perspective based on what she's seeing with my day-to-day habits and the way that I'm structuring my time. And she could have brought up some ideas for how I could manage my time and my energy.

more effectively based on the information in the workshop, but then also being, I don't want to say surrounded by her peers, but people in similar roles as what she is in. I think that sometimes we get so close to our day-to-day that we just can't even see other options for ways of doing things differently. And so this would have been a really good opportunity for her to provide that outside feedback if I would have asked her to do it.

Now, this is something that she probably would have been more than happy to attend. It never occurred to me to have her do this. And so when I found myself surrounded by people who are supporting executives and leaders of these organizations, it was really, really interesting to be sitting in on some of those conversations. So would love to have had her attend and be surrounded by that information and offer her feedback for how I could even be doing things differently.

Then that also got me to thinking here, how many workshops have I attended or courses have I purchased or even books that I've read, podcasts I've listened to, but I've actually not implemented the information or the concepts that are within them. I know there's so many guilty people of this because I was having lunch with a friend of mine, gosh, this was a long time ago at this point now.

but she was talking about how she was taking a break from attending conferences because she's like, you know, I feel like they get you really excited and, pumped up and then you get home and it's just kind of back to business as usual. And you find that maybe you implement one thing, maybe two things, but it certainly didn't inspire or certainly create the radical change that you were looking for in, you know, your life or your business. And so I was thinking about this.

And if I would have had my executive assistant attend this workshop for me, she could have received all that information, followed up with me later on this week or when we meet every Monday, and she could have shared with me, here's high level what they talked about. Here are some of the things that I think that we could implement together based on that information.

What do you think? And get my feedback, get my buy-in or my input on how we could make something like this work or things that we could maybe trial to see how they affect the way that I'm spending my time or the results that I'm getting with the effort that I'm putting in. And she could have also worked with any appropriate team members as needed to make these things happen. It would not have relied on me to receive all the information

process it and then bring it out to the team and say, hey guys, here's what we're going to be doing now. It doesn't necessarily have to work that way. And so it definitely has given me a different angle to consider this from. So now that I am processing this and just thinking aloud with you guys, really, this is just kind of something that occurred to me the other day as I was having this epiphany. I'm like, I need to share this on the podcast because

It's definitely behind the scenes. It's probably not so many like step number one or strategy number two that you're used to, but it's just kind of more of amusing of like, huh, I really could be doing things differently here with the way that I'm working with my own executive assistant or the way that you're working with your assistant or a virtual assistant, what have you. Because as I am considering this, I'm now considering

how our own team can be more effective in helping our clients maximize their time and results. I am preparing for our year end reset event, which I'll share more about as that becomes available here. And part of what we talk about is looking at like, what are the results that we've gotten? Where did maybe things get off track? We do a calendar audit. We're going to be doing a calendar audit this time around and take a look at

Really when we compare, were my goals, here's where I spent my time, if your goals are to double your sales, but you're running around putting out fires for several hours a day, or you're spending hours on emails and internal communications or fulfilling work that you have ultimately sold to your clients or your customers, those are all important things, don't get me wrong. But if you take a look at your role as the CEO of your company or organization,

and you look at your goals, those things might not be in alignment. And as I'm thinking about this, why wouldn't we have our client's assistants involved in that conversation so that they can see firsthand where those gaps are and make suggestions on how the client together with our team can fix it and improve upon it for the upcoming months and ultimately the upcoming year.

Now that is my version of the takeaway of this conversation, but maybe there are times where you have done the same thing as me or my friend where it's like we're going to conferences, we're doing all this learning, learning, learning, which is ultimately meant to help me be more effective in growing my business and leading my team and serving my customers. And yet, if it's all heavily relying on me in order to roll it out and make the changes, why not get the team involved?

at the very beginning rather than at the end when I am having to do a lot more work on the delegation side of things. So anyway, all of that being said, if you had an aha moment during today's conversation, would you forward this to an entrepreneur you know and just share with them like, hey, it just occurred to me that I have been doing X when really I could be having my assistant doing YZ. So.

Just wanted to share this with you because I found it really, really interesting that I don't have to do all of the things. I don't have to attend everything that comes my way. I don't have to be the one leading the charge on the knowledge side of my business. I can let others step in and make their recommendations and lead those implementations as well. So thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope that you found this information helpful and I hope.

that you have a great rest of your week and we will be back next week with more tips, tools and strategies for growing and scaling your business with ease. Take care everyone. Bye bye.