FEATURING LARRY MORTON
Ever hear the phrase, “good debt?” or “time is money?” Here’s our paradox of the week: spending more money means making more money, and my husband Larry is here to talk us through what it means to buy more time so you can make even more money than you ever imagined.
In this riveting episode, get a detailed look at how Larry and I have been able to buy more time by setting aside our Scarcity Mindset – where we could never move forward because of doubts about financial ability – and how identifying smart investments ultimately helped our business goals soar to new heights by buying us more time.
Today’s Goals: Identify ways to buy more time by discovering how Scarcity Mindset affects you and your business. Then, identify key ways you can spend money that will free up more time for increased productivity and happiness.
IN THIS EPISODE, WE TALK ABOUT:
- Hiring freelancers as a way to buy more time and effectively be in 2+ places at once
- How Scarcity Mindset holds back so many people from acheiving financial freedom
- That there’s room for everyone to serve the market, no matter how saturated it might seem to you
- Identifying time-saving services that you can invest in to grow exponentially
- Changing your beliefs about money to see it as a tool for growth rather than survival
Episode 2: How to Buy More Time Transcript
A: Hi everyone, it’s Alyssa, and this is my husband Larry. I am so excited to introduce you to my moms — my mom friends! In this episode, we are going to be talking about buying time. And I think that everybody can relate that time is something that you can never get back and any way that you can buy more time is greatly appreciated. So today, we got Larry and we’re going to talk about this because I had a moment a couple of weeks ago that was like, we need to write that down so that when we start our podcast, we get to talk about it. So here we are. So let’s talk about that moment for a second, because I had just hired my first freelancer and it was the best feeling in the world being able to be in two places at the same time.
L: Yes, huge.
A: You work a full time job. So tell everybody about that.
L: I work 50 to 60 hours a week turning wrenches and I really don’t like it. Have been for about 10 years and lately, it’s just been a waste of time. I wake up 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning, and then I’m in a concrete box from 7 to 5:30, give or take, and time is wasted there. Like I get a paycheck at the end of the week and it’s decent, but seeing especially with our floral design, business, hiring freelancers, how much time can be freed, and how much time is really worth. Because when you work that nine to five, in my case that seven to five, you get into a routine and get comfortable. And then you realize, wow, this is really uncomfortable. So to see it from the entrepreneurial/business owner side, that you can hire help and it’d be the most freeing thing that you can do. That’s really the bulk of it. That having people to do the things that you don’t want to do, that you don’t have time to do, more things can get done at the same time. That’s huge, you know, the beauty of buying time, and in most cases, it’s cheaper than you think.
A: Yeah, let’s talk about that for a second because we are used to buying people here in America, where you know wages are pretty high. There are things that you can outsource overseas that are significantly cheaper and you’re paying people well – like in their countries – to be working for you that are significantly cheaper for us here in the States. So like for example, you could hire like let’s just say like a graphic designer for something that you needed to do. You can hire somebody in Taiwan,
L: Taiwan, anywhere in the world
A: They’ll do a great job. They’re super talented, and you pay a fraction of the price that you would be paying somebody here.
L: and that, that has a stigma to it. I feel like with the, you know, keep the working Americans working. But you know, we are all on the same planet and there are, you know, graphic arts designers like you said from you know, every continent that do good work, and now they’re willing to be paid for it, and you can pay a fraction of the price comparatively, you know, in America dollars to whatever their currency might be. And you get the same quality work and you’re still paying somebody, you’re still putting food on their table, you’re still helping them pay their bills. Like it’s, it’s a win for everybody. And you know, if you are that, you know, True Blue American, you know, you can hire, you know, somebody in your town because you can go on your local Facebook and say, Hey, I need somebody that’s going to be able to design a website for me and you’ll, I’m sure you’ll get people falling out of the sky that want to build your website. And they’re there and people are itching for it. And if you cannot spend… How long did it take you to build your websites?
A: I mean, I’ve gotten good at it. So like now, let’s do it. Oh, my first one. It wasn’t good. To see that. It wasn’t good. And it probably it was a work in progress for months.
L: Literally months of her staying up until, you know, anywhere from midnight to two in the morning after the kids are down and you know we’re kind of settled in of really grinding and, you know, doing all the backend stuff. It’s cooling. I never did it because I suck with computer stuff, but she’s a computer wizard. And it just sucks especially like because our workspace was still in our bedroom, I’m sometimes asleep and she’s doing it and after what you probably did those two websites, you hired someone to do another website and it came out gorgeous, gorgeous. It was worth every penny. It was a little pricey. But it was worth every penny to not have to sit there and do it for a month to go to the website it took probably a few weeks.
A: Because I’m gonna plug her name is Rebel Studio Design on Instagram. She does three-day website intensives. I actually did branding with her so she designed great branding for my Garden in the Pines floral design business. And then she did the website so the branding took a couple of weeks to fully ironed out our colors, color scheme, typography, fonts, all that stuff. But as far as actually designing the website, she does that in three days.
L: So I didn’t know that. So I was wondering if you make some a few days Yeah. Doesn’t matter how much cost it’s so worth it to not have that pulling your hair out and figuring out all the back end all the formulas the claims like clicks all that stuff. It’s just better to have somebody else do it. That’s just one small subset of your business is having a website, so and there’s so many other little odds and ends that you could hire somebody as a freelancer. No wait for time and it just be done for you. You don’t have to worry about it, not to stress about it. You don’t have to do it yourself and find time when you’re trying to create all those things. It’s worth it. Even if – you said in another podcast – that if you need to pick up a side hustle that you’re good at in order to pay somebody to do something that you’re not good at. It’s worth it. If you like knitting, you can make a nice scarf and sell on Etsy for 30 bucks or whatever. You make a handful of them in your free time. We all have a lot of that. And you sell a handful of them. You get a couple hundred bucks. You can hire a freelancer to you know, clean up your books for that month or whatever. Because money is out there. And people are willing to buy things. You know, even if it’s something small that you think is stupid. somebody’s willing to spend money on it.
A: Yeah. And I want to like unpack what you just said for a second. Because you just breeze by that money’s out there. A lot of us have these scarcity mindsets about money that once it’s gone, it’s gone. But we all need to remember that money is a tool and it is abundant. When you have that mindset that is abundant. It’s going to keep coming back to you and it will keep coming back to you like big time. So when you think that way about money, you’re able to reach for the stars and hire as much as you want, buy anything that you want. And really just be able to save your time for whatever brings you joy. Like so tell me a little bit more about ways that we can buy time what are some things that we can do for side hustles for I don’t know, like anything that we can outsource that would make our life better.
L: As far as side hustles — and that’s a very common phrase these days because everybody’s got a side hustle for something. But it’s something that I think that a lot of people don’t realize is that there’s so much in your niche and whatever you’re going to sell us when there’s so much availability that not one person can do it all. So say the other day, this nice camera we just picked up, this nice one that we’re recording on. If we wanted to do a side hustle when we did some photography on the side, or if we did, we took stock photos and sold them to like Shutterstock like whatever. It’s out there. And you know if you have something especially like buying a nice camera that you’re using for your content or anything like that, it’s it’s a tool you can use that for other things. So that’s just one little nugget that you can do.
I want to like, unpack that a little bit more. Because you mentioned something about something that you’re already good at, like something that you already have that you can use to monetize. Every single one of us has a cell phone that we can pick up and do Instagram for somebody can hire us to manage their accounts for you. And you can make good money doing that because nobody wants to spend their time doing that. You can do that by creating a little extra money for you so that you can outsource other things that save you time.
A: Gamechanger.
L: Yes, to be on the delivery, delivering side of that service. Like if you have a handful of free hours or weeks and whatever. Like when she came up with a phenomenal idea, because we’re in the wedding space, to do events trying to clean up and you know, I’ll go out to wherever the venue is in Jersey, clean up for other vendors, I’ll clean up for other florists or pick up their rentals, it’s something that they pay a premium for. Because no florist that has been designing for days for a wedding they spent the whole day installing these giant installations, setting or being all over the place and they don’t want to stay up until midnight just to go back to the venue and clean up, and not get home until you know 2:30, 4 o’clock in the morning. Sometimes later.
A: We had one strike that we didn’t get home until nine o’clock in the morning. We left at 9:30 at night. That was the longest night ever.
L: Oh, it was a long night. But that’s you know, is that that’s a service that the people who are providing the flowers who are florists, you know, whatever it might be. They don’t want to do that. They’re looking for somebody to do that and a lot of people just don’t hire a college kid or a freelancer or something. And you know, they’re kind of SOL if they break their stuff, or they forget things stuff like that. They can show off the cancel last minute. You know for us, since we already have several businesses, we know the back end stuff so we have insurance, everything is all scheduled, this contract did they have a deposit like everything is already in place, it’s professional. So to have that and it’s, I don’t do it every weekend. You know, I get requests now then and it’s you know, an extra grand in my pocket for working a night. And that goes a long way in hiring other people.
A: Yeah, like I know I had touched on this in another episode but you could use that grand that you’re making and have meal prep for five weeks.
L: Yes and not have to cook for five weeks because you just did not have to cook at least with watching dinner for over a month. But working one night that’s that’s huge. Yeah. Because you can spend you know your day off. See it says what? Tuesday you can spend two hours go to the grocery store and then another you know, two hours cooking is four hours. And then that’s for your week has been four hours a week, grocery shopping and preparing your food and then hopefully eat or you go online to order your meals and they drop it off in your doorstep and you spend five minutes putting everything in the fridge
four hours a day, four hours and you’ve talked about in the past week for many weeks. When you’re an entrepreneur, you said you know you want to be a multimillionaire you got to make $100 a minute, you know for a year and four hours is a lot of time. You know, we spend you know four hours doing this and ya know, it adds up quick, especially over the course of a month use that 16 hours. That’s almost a day out of your month that you spent just on food prep for you and your family. That is that can be cut down to a half an hour a month in putting this stuff in the fridge. Placing the order you place the order and unpacking it putting in your fridge. That’s huge. And that’s just again another small thing that you don’t think about until you think about it. You’re like holy crap I spend an entire day a month on food.
A: Which is ridiculous. Ridiculous.
L: Yeah, exactly.
A: That’s easy to cut out. For sure. So can you tell our listeners and our viewers, let’s unpack that scarcity mindset a bit that we talked about for a minute? What are some of the really big scarcity mindset blocks that you have that you’re working to overcome? So I know that that’s something that’s really big in our life right now. We’re trying to really acknowledge our bad mindsets and shift them immediately so that we have abundance mindsets that bring us more money and more time and everything that we want more of in our life. So let’s talk about that.
L: Yes, I actually want to talk about this earlier. Scarcity Mindset is just such a lie. You think that you know, there are a dozen other people that do something that you want to do. And like I said before, not every not one single person can do everything. Like you can’t service every person in your area in that one thing. So you’re saying earlier with, like photographers, you know, there might be a dozen photographers in your town that are doing family portraits, but it’s just kind of happenstance that a family picks a certain photographer. They might have a good portfolio but if you have a decent portfolio, you have a good chance as anybody else to get picked to do that. So you know, for you to think that whatever your niche is, whatever your business or whatever, you know, side hustle, you want to pick that it’s too crowded you know, there’s too many influencers on Instagram, there’s too many podcasters there’s too many vloggers and too many bloggers whatever. There’s not you know, it’s if you pick the proper niche, whatever yours you know, well versed in you know, people will come if it’s there, you know, people don’t know about you until you make them. Put yourself out there and they find you. So on the other side scarcity and money, that’s another lie that we tell ourselves because even today we go into the store and pick up a couple of things for the business and I’m thinking, “Do we have enough in our checking account for me to buy this?” And I’m like, “Of course you do.” Like for me to spend 100 bucks on a handful supplies just like you know… in the past, that would have been a big deal to just, you know, because that 100 bucks in the back of my head is like, “Oh, we could buy groceries and diapers and formula for our babies and like, but that scarcity thought is just so limiting to say, you know, we’re not going to have any more if I spend this $100. It’s like, no, we’re only spending $100 on our business and on us, for us to grow more. So this $100 is going to come back to us tenfold in other aspects.
A: 100% Yeah, anything that you’re going to be investing in yourself or your business is going to pay dividends. So it’s definitely worth investing. Wow. Larry, thank you so much for coming on. I think that we just have some final thoughts that I want to share with our listeners and our viewers. Time is, at the end of the day, so valuable. Is there anything that you want to share that you really think that our listeners can take away from today in regard to saving their time or scarcity or anything like that?
L: I think the biggest thing that anybody should take away is that money is unending. You might say all right, I could save myself a lot of bucks if I do it myself. But like we said before, you can that you can always earn more money but you can’t earn more time in a day. Like there’s 24 hours end to end each day. And if you spend like I said, you know, two hours in your day, food shopping and food prep and all that and like our kids are in daycare for a good chunk of the day, but there’s so many small things that need to get done. If you could take one of those things off of your plate and pay someone else to do it. You will free yourself up to have more opportunity to make more money than what you’re spending in help. So you know if you spend, you know $150 a week, let’s say in meal prep, you can easily use you know that amount of time can be instead of spent meal planning to be spent doing whatever you do and I’m sure if you’ll make more than $150 in two hours worth of your time spent.
A: Definitely. That’s so great. Thank you. Thank you for coming on again today. We’ll have you again next week. We love having Larry on the show because this is like a real look into our life. Everything that we’re having conversations about in real life or making a note so that we can talk about it here or pick up the podcast microphone so that we can talk about it. Share with us anything that you really took away from this episode. Tag us, tag Larry. We’d love to see it. We love to repost it. We love to share it. And like always. We’ll see you soon.
L: Yep, thanks for having me. See you guys next week. Bye!
RESOURCES
- The LYSST – Never miss an episode, blog, or exclusive deal for my favorite mom friends.
- Rebel Studio Design for websites & branding- use Alyssa Morton as your referral.
- Dubsado – a CRM I use daily in my floral preservation business to help you organize all of your clients, accept payments, etc.
CONNECT WITH LYSS:
Follow me: @lyss.morton
Follow Garden in the Pines: @NJGardenInThePines
Follow Larry: @mortmotoshow
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