Will Power Podcast by Will Humphreys
Freedom isn’t just possible… it’s kind of the point.
If you’re a healthcare leader or entrepreneur drowning in to-do lists, juggling team drama, and wondering if success has to come with burnout...this podcast is your lifeline.
Hosted by Will Humphreys, a former physical therapy practice owner turned serial entrepreneur, The WillPower Podcast is your go-to resource for building a business that actually serves your life.
Each week, we tackle the big stuff: leading with vision, scaling with systems, and figuring out whether AI, virtual assistants, or a clone of yourself is the best path to freedom.
You’ll get unfiltered solo episodes, candid interviews with leaders in healthcare and beyond, and just enough humor to cancel one meeting and feel good about it.
So if you want more income, more impact, and way fewer 10 p.m. emails… this is your new weekly habit.
Will Power Podcast by Will Humphreys
Reclaim Your Time: How to Buy Back Your Freedom with Will Humphreys
Are you an entrepreneur feeling trapped by your business? In this episode of the Will Power Podcast, Will Humphreys dives deep into Dan Martell's game-changing book, "Buy Back Your Time." Discover why hiring isn't just about growth, but about reclaiming your most precious asset: time.
Will shares personal struggles, including a powerful story of burnout, to illustrate the critical shift in perspective needed. Learn about:
- The Buyback Rate Formula: Calculate your hourly value and understand which tasks are costing you profit.
- The Time and Energy Audit: Identify what drains you and what energizes you to truly align your work with your genius.
- The Four Task Levels: Distinguish between $10, $100, $1,000, and $10,000 an hour tasks and learn to live in your highest value zone.
- The Replacement Ladder: Understand the strategic order of hiring to systematically free up your time and energy.
Stop building a prison and start building a life you love! Will even offers to buy a copy of "Buy Back Your Time" for listeners who reach out. Tune in and start your journey to a more present, energized, and free life.
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Learn how a Virtual Rockstar can help scale your physical therapy practice.
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Next on the Real PTs of Coccyx County. Paperwork. Crazy insurance and patient care can make you lose your mind. Dude, I would have been this stressed out if I found out Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays. Dude, what you need to do is get on the 202, take it to Moholland and subscribe to the Stress-Free PT Newsletter. Dude, I know how to get on the Moholland. What I need to know is how this Stress-Free PT Newsletter, which comes out weekly, outlay, dude, don't you know? Stress is the new smoking. You need to take the antidote. The newsletter comes out every week and totally provides you with fun information ways to take the antidote. The newsletter comes out every week and totally provides you with fun information ways to de-stress. It totally blows your mind. So subscribe to the stress-free PT newsletter today. Stress PT newsletter made by PTs for PTs, launching on July 21st.
Speaker 2:How many is going to get better than?
Speaker 1:that we nailed it.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to another episode of the Willpower Podcast. Welcome back to another episode of the Willpower Podcast In this great season of AI versus VAs. Today we're doing an in-depth book review. We're going to give you the 20% that you have to know. That is the most important information of the book. Buy Back your Time by Dan Martell.
Speaker 2:This book changed the way I thought about freedom. It completely revolutionized how I actually created freedom, and I am excited because by the end of this episode, I promise you you're going to make one or two decisions that will immediately increase your time and flexibility. How cool is that? So I'm not going to pull any punches. I'm going to share real life experiences, but I'm also going to illustrate these concepts clearly and for anyone who wants a free copy of this book, I will buy it for you, I know. So listen it, just let me know, respond to me and we'll make sure we get you a copy of it. But buy back your time by Dan Martell opens the book with this core idea that you don't hire to grow your business, you hire to buy back your time. Let that sink in. Too many entrepreneurs build businesses in a way that box them in. We almost create our own prisons right. Then we hang the open for business sign on the cell that we've just created for ourselves.
Speaker 2:This part hit me really hard because I remember thinking about every hire that I had and how that scaled me up. There was this one time when I was driving home from an accountability meeting from Florence, arizona that's where my practice was. I had a 45 minute drive and my heart started palpitating. I will never forget driving there and having it skip almost every third beat. I'm sure many of you may have had heart palpitations before. This one was absolutely connected to the stress of that stressful meeting. But it wasn't just that meeting, right, it was an accumulation of all the stats, all the countless hours, the treating and this person that I'd hired. I remember thinking why did I hire this person? I'm hiring to make my life easier, but all it's doing is making it worse. And it's because I was hiring to grow. So, as I would hire, I would take on more responsibility because I was overseeing the people and all of my own tasks. And then I realize now, when we hire, the importance is for us to be able to be freed up immediately.
Speaker 2:Martel says the goal isn't just more money, it's a way to create a life where you can wake up excited. So right now, do you rock star? Do you wake up excited? If you do, turn off the episode? If you don't, and you'd like to, let's get right into these concepts, because this starts by understanding a concept he goes over called the buyback rate. Okay, so what is the buyback rate? The buyback rate is a way of helping us understand the value, literally to the dollar, of where we spend our time. So there's a formula that he shares. It's called the buyback rate formula.
Speaker 2:Your buyback rate is equal to your annual income divided by 2000 times four. And I don't want to get into the how he created that. I just want to share it with you for an example, so you can learn the concept. So you can do it right now as you're driving or working out in your head. So you take your annual salary or how much you make at the end of the year. That maybe that's variable. Take an average For an example.
Speaker 2:Let's say that you make $200,000 a year. I can hear some of you laughing because you don't make anywhere near that. But for the sake of this episode, if you make $200,000 a year, you divide it by 2,000 hours, which is a typical work year, and that equals $100 an hour. But then you multiply it by four to get your buyback rate. That means you should never, in this case, times four is $400, right? $200,000 a year divided by 2000 hours, times four is $400. That means you should never do a task that costs less than $400 an hour to outsource. But you might be thinking, well, I don't have the money, like I almost don't have profits now, and it's because you're spending all your time doing minimum wage work, work less valuable than your buyback rate. That's why you don't have profits. So this is a bit of a journey to get there, but I want you to really let that principle sink in and start identifying how you you can start doing things and going wow, this is something that's below my buyback rate or above it.
Speaker 2:When I first hired my first virtual assistant, it was really scary for me, because it was one of those things where it's like, how do I trust this person and all these different elements of that, and the first one actually didn't go well. I ended up letting them go. This was long before I ever thought about doing what I do now. But then I met Kim. Kim was a virtual assistant and I'll never forget this.
Speaker 2:I had a project that was due. It was a presentation. The project was for me to create a presentation. I was going to talk about it and normally I spend hours creating these presentations, but this time I left her a voice memo and I just kind of roughly talked it out. I didn't even outline it. I said, hey, the topic is on this and I just went through it Could you just throw some slides together? And I remember thinking gosh that that was maybe 10 minutes of my time and I don't even know if I gave her good information. But whatever she gave me would help me minimize the hours I would normally spend on a PowerPoint and within I went to bed. The next day I woke up, it was done and it wasn't perfect, but it was 10 times better than I could ever done on my own. It was so much more thoughtful and creative and I just did some minor tweaking and I calculated my time. I spent exactly 30 minutes on something that would have taken me three to four hours. My VA, who costs $12 an hour, did something for me that I would have spent three to four hours of my time. That's how you get profitable again is by understanding these relationships and helping you get to that place.
Speaker 2:So the next part of his book is going into something he calls the time and energy audit. So now that you know your buyback rate, you have to understand where your time is going to go. Like, where should you be spending time? Because some things might be worth your buyback rate but maybe it drains your soul. So before you can buy back your time, you have to know where your time is going. And Dan Martell's time and energy audit has you list out everything you do in a week and then rate it. It's very simple you just list everything you do in a week.
Speaker 2:I recommend having a piece of paper and a pen wherever you go, and every after you do something you write it down and then you say does this drain or energize me? Am I great at this or am I just good enough? Your goal is really simple To eliminate, delegate or automate anything that drains you or doesn't require your genius. Think about that Eliminate, delegate or automate anything that doesn't drain you. Right? He uses the word genius and I just want to put a side plug in for one of my favorite books that's been transformational called the six working geniuses. There's an episode from Michelle Bambinick from the willpower podcast. Go back and listen to that episode. That episode will actually help you understand how to identify what your geniuses are. And this isn't some like a theory or like personality test guys. This is a tried and true tactical application that I have seen in very successful billion yes, billion dollar companies that I'm associated with. So as I've gone into my world of like identifying what gives me energy, that alone has freed me up mentally.
Speaker 2:I used to do a lot of coaching. When I first sold my private practice, I started a billing company and I started coaching people because that's just a natural progression and I knew I'd be very good at it. And I had this dream of being famous in a way of like not famous, but like having this large clientele base and being this big, impactful coach. And guess what? I was really good at it. This isn't I mean, there's a lot of things I suck at but like that I was really good at it. But I felt horrible. I did this for three years.
Speaker 2:I remember having a day where I had back-to-back coaching clients and I'd go home and tell my wife that I am just drained, maybe my testosterone is low, like something was wrong with me. And then I took the six working geniuses test and realized that I don't get energy from coaching one-on-one. As a matter of fact, it's one of my sabotages. So when I realized that what I do get energy from is galvanizing or teaching groups of people which again, I didn't think there was a big difference between the two. But boy is there, put me in front of a group of people all day long, but do not put me one-on-one. It's just who I am. So identifying how our activities drain us or fulfill us is an essential step of getting free, because once you understand what you should and shouldn't be doing, then you can understand where I want to put all of my time and energy. And that's what's cool. Imagine a long day of work that you're doing things that you love. How differently you show up when you get home. It's truly amazing.
Speaker 2:Now let's get into Dan Martell's breakdown of the different task levels. He says that there are four different types of tasks. There's $10 an hour tasks. These are things like admin work or scheduling emails, et cetera. By the way, how much time do you spend in your email? The second classification is $100 an hour tasks. This would be content creation, networking, hiring, like higher level stuff for sure. 10 times the other task. Then we go 10X above that. The third classification is $1,000 an hour tasks. These are strategic decisions product development.
Speaker 2:If you've ever paid a coach to come help you build the high level function of your company, you understand this $1,000 an hour piece. But then you've got the fourth level. That's $10,000 an hour task, right, this is huge. This is public speaking, book writing, scaling companies to the next multiple. So you have these four levels, right, and if you want to grow your business and your joy, you've got to live. You have to live in the third and the fourth level. So if you're not doing $10,000 an hour work, you're building someone else's dream. That's a real quote from the book. Now, that path from here to there might seem impossible, but I want you to just stay patient.
Speaker 2:Today's episode is just about understanding these concepts. Maybe you have to listen to this episode repeatedly, but it's important that you understand them, because once you get it, you will not tolerate any activity that's not worth your genius or time, and that's what we call setting healthy boundaries. We talk about this throughout the entire season how creating lasting freedom is about creating boundaries, and what's really powerful is when you pay someone else it can be a VA or somebody else who sets them for you. I am a huge people pleaser. I have the hardest time saying no. So please don't ask me to do anything, because I'll probably say yes, but my VA. I put her in charge of my calendar, my email, and said do not let me touch it. Do not let me touch it until you've touched it first, or I, in the calendar's case, approve it. She has to approve what I add, and that has changed my life. She has eliminated and been the bad guy telling people no left and right, and has freed me up. Do I feel like I'm letting people down? Not at all.
Speaker 2:I've learned that there's a lot of takers out there. Healthcare entrepreneurs are typically givers and those takers they don't care If they don't get it from you, they'll just go try to get it from somebody else. Isn't that interesting? So okay, guys, now we're going to talk about how to replace the things that we're doing. We mentioned now what you're worth. We talked about how to measure energy. Now we're going to talk about how to replace, actually get rid of the things off your plate.
Speaker 2:So there's a thing called the replacement ladder that Dan Martell talks about, and it's the order of who we have to hire next. Because, when we remember, why do we hire? To get our freedom. We don't hire to grow, we hire to be free. Here's the order First, administrative assistant. Two, a customer support or ops help. Three, content or marketing support. Four, sales assistant. And five, delivery. The fourth one is the one that healthcare providers struggle with, because this book was obviously written for general business owners A sales assistant.
Speaker 2:Who is that in your business, can you guess? Well, for a lot of private practices that could be the front desk. Who's the person receiving inbound calls to schedule new leads or clients? For many it's the front desk. It could also be your providers it depends how you're structured. But getting support in those areas from people who are great at it is a game changer.
Speaker 2:And talk about return on investment. Instead of having the person who's showing up to work like they're doing you a favor, what if you had a front desk or a sales assistant who took the calls, who understood how to do sales and got more new patients on your schedule? They would be worth their weight in gold, wouldn't they? So imagine having those five roles taken together so to climb the ladder in this order. You'll just create chaos, right? You can't necessarily do everything the exact same way. So remember, how you help clients through this ladder at your business is going to be dependent upon where you are, but that's the replacement order for that reason. So if you don't know where to begin, just start with number one administrative assistant, and if you need help, of course I'm happy to recommend my company or someone else's that can help you find that offshore person who can help you. All right, guys, that is really the book in a nutshell.
Speaker 2:This is a micro episode. I didn't want to overwhelm you, but I am so excited about this. Just remember that Dan Martell and myself don't want to just save you time. We want you to love your life again. Like we said at the beginning of this episode, the most powerful part of this journey is for you to wake up excited and energized. If we can help you achieve that, that is my life's mission, at least, because the whole purpose of this podcast is to free you up so that you can save healthcare, so that you can improve the patient journey, but so that you can make it to dinner with your kids and be present.
Speaker 2:I know all too well how hard it is to be at that dinner table, exhausted or distracted. So please, let's follow the challenge that Dan Martell leaves at the end of his book. He says don't wait until you're burned out or max out to buy back your time. Don't wait until you're burned out or maxed out to buy back your time. Start today. Small steps, big freedom.
Speaker 2:So you listening to this podcast alone. If you feel overwhelmed, just take one of those things we talked about. That's all you need to do. You have this recording. You can come back to this. You don't have to read the book, but if you want the book, I'll buy it for you. I want you to be free.
Speaker 2:So remember if you're feeling stuck, your calendar is a reflection of your priorities, your fears and your beliefs about what's possible. What's on your calendar right now? Rockstar? That doesn't belong? What's on there? What could happen if you were able to free that up, even by five hours a week? What would life feel like for you?
Speaker 2:Interesting, if this episode hit home and you're thinking I need help buying back my time? You're not alone. This is exactly why I started my company, virtual Rockstar, and in this podcast in general. But just remember, guys, to be patient. At the end of the day, that is the most important piece is to never give up, because when we fight for our freedom, when we are fighting for this life of ours that we deserve, we're really fighting for the people who have helped us get here Our kids, our spouse, our family, our parents. They want us to be happy, they want us to be free. So remember, what you're doing is special, but it can't come at the cost of your freedom. Thanks for tuning into the Willpower Podcast. As always, this is Will Humphries, reminding you to lead with love, live on purpose and never give up your freedom. Until next time.
