People who get rich are not the hardest working. They're the best at actually buying
back their time. Being time poor shouldn't be glamorized. It's
a trap that keeps you broke and worse, burned out.
What are you buying with the money you have to print money while
you sleep? And what I learned later was it's better to have 10% of a
watermelon than it is to have 100% of a grape. And the only way to do that
is to stop and ask yourself, where is my leverage?
I'm Lloyd James Ross, seven-figure investor and entrepreneur, and I've helped
thousands of business owners and professionals turn financial stress into
success. If you're stuck in old money habits, overwhelmed by investing,
or unsure where to start, this is for you. I'll give you the mindset
and strategies to take control, grow your wealth, and achieve
financial freedom. It's time to make your money work for you. Are
you stuck on the hurry hamster wheel? Are you suffering from
a bout of the busyness bug? Because if you
are, chances are you actually believe that busy
equals success. But I'm here to tell you that's an absolute lie. I
know that most people and most entrepreneurs confuse movement and
doing things with progress. They confuse being busy
with progress and they wear their busy badge on their shirt
with pride. I'm busy. But
being time poor shouldn't be glamorized. It's
a trap that keeps you broke and worse, burned
out. The real currency is time. Because
you see, money is actually abundant. You can always get
more money, but you can't get more time. And time is, it's got
an expiration date. We all die, we all part this
physical life. And the time between now and when we do that is
called our time. And here's the thing, if
money weren't abundant, we'd only be able to accumulate as
much as we were old. So for example, if I lived to the age of 120 and
money wasn't abundant, I could only make 120 bucks, perhaps a dollar per
year I'm alive. But we know that people have made hundreds of
billions and trillions of dollars in
that life of a hundred years. So we know one thing is for sure, that
money is abundant. But we also know one thing for sure, our
time here on earth is also not yet abundant. It
might be in the future. It might be when science discovers how to give
us eternal life. But for now, we have a finite window
to make things happen. And if you're not in control of the time between
now and when you pass away, those very precious moments, then
you're going to have a life that's not fulfilled and not living
life in your own terms to bring the most amount of joy and happiness that
you can create. And so part of the process of becoming wealthy is
not just to have money. It's also to have a
level of life that you enjoy and fulfillment and
bring a level of juiciness to your life that you can only get if
you have both money and time. Because after all, what's the point in
having a gold Rolex if all it tells you is what time to be back from lunch? What's
the point in working your butt off to have a wonderful beach
house if you can't enjoy it with your family? People who get rich are
not the hardest working. they're the best at actually buying back their
time. Because here's what you don't want to do for sure. You don't want
to have to get rich and then build yourself a prison at the same time. You
don't want to build a prison, you want to build a business. And most people who
build businesses, they think they've got a business, but it commands and
demands all of their time. So if your business doesn't run without you,
it's actually not an asset, it's a liability. And most people who
have a business are actually just self-employed. And I used to be in the
same boat. I used to be in real estate and I was still selling real estate
and I would always have to be in the office to do the deals.
I'd always have to be doing something to make money, working six days
a week, having to do something to make money. Now,
without a doubt, when you first start, you're going to have to do something. You have to work but
I had no ability to get leverage, meaning I had to do all
the work myself to get paid all the money myself. At
that point in time in my life, I had what's called 100% of a grape. And
what I learned later was it's better to have 10% of a watermelon than
it is to have 100% of a grape. So what was I going to do to
create 10% of a watermelon? The reality is I had to find
or develop a business and build a business that had more leverage. And
so I started out building a network marketing side hustle where
the money we made was based on product purchase from customers while we
weren't there. and the scaling of that than it was about me
being there to provide a service. And that's why I do love product-based businesses over
and above service-based businesses. So I had to figure out how we're going
to create more money and more time
at the same time, right? Because that's the goal. It's about getting freedom,
not just money. That's what becoming time rich actually means,
to enrich the ability for you to control and manage your time. Meaning,
who do you want to be with? What do you want to work on? And this is the things that I
wanted to do. But you got to have a business vehicle or some way to
exchange value with the world that allows you to do that. So network
marketing was our first step out
of this prison of I have to be there to make the money. Because
what happened to us was once we started that, one
day I looked at my bank account and there was more money in there. And
I hadn't done more work. The money that was coming into our account was
based on work we had already done. So the residual efforts of
our work, we're starting to get paid the fruits of that.
And that's when I realized we had a real business on our hands that would
actually pay us while we slept. It had turned into an asset. And
so once we figured that out, we're like, well, let's do more of this type of work.
Let's do more of the work that once we do it, will pay us not once, but
over and over and over again, it will repeat. And the
objective is, if you want to get money as well as time, you
have to find a repeatable exchange of value in
the world. And so we had this business where we
could solve someone's problems, they order the product, and if they wanted to keep solving the
problem, they had to keep ordering the product. And
that created a subscription-based income for us. We
all pay subscription-based bills, so why not have a subscription-based
income? And it's not easy to get off the ground, it's not easy to
start without a doubt. but it is
the path to getting more money and more time at the same time. Just
quickly, if you're ready to take control of your finances but feel stuck on
where to start, I have a solution. My book, Money Buys Happiness,
simplifies investing and wealth building with practical steps to help
you achieve financial peace. Get your copy via the
link in the show notes and let's get your money working for you. Now back
to the episode. Now, as we scaled that, we started to realize it was
taking a lot more of our time to build it to a new level. So what we had to do was
we had to implement some systems in place to take the heavy lifting out of
it for us. And we had to find some people to
do the work with us so we could also earn from their efforts.
These two types of things are called people leverage, where it's not you
just doing all the work, it's other people, and systems leverage, where
it's actually systems doing the work for you while
you do something else. Now, systems can be hard systems and soft systems.
The difference are soft systems are a process to follow to
save time. Hard systems are things that actually do the work for
you. So think of software, machines, robotics,
right? And so we had to implement some soft
systems to process things, to teach more people, to
achieve more by doing less. And we had to implement software and
certain processes like a selling system, a webinar, a
repeatable marketing and selling system, a training system that
was through videos was able to be used by the team to do things while
we weren't there. And so you have to have both hard systems
and soft systems in your business to run without you.
Otherwise, you don't have a business, you have a job. And so once
we had established those systems in our network marketing business, we
could actually still work on it, but we were achieving a lot more output for
the input. And that's what leverage is all about. Now once
we had got to that point, we wanted to get more wealth but
we also wanted to save a lot of time. And so one thing we
did was we carved out some capital from that business and we started
to scale our message through books, courses and podcasts. And
by leveraging those forms of media, that's another way
to achieve more by doing less because the people consuming our books
in our podcast, in our courses and content, they were doing
it while we were sleeping, meaning I didn't have to be there for them
to do that. That was another form of leverage. A book is one
of the most effective and wonderful ways to get your message out there on
repeat. You may be reading one of our books right now, but I'm not there reading it to you.
That's where media can have a very big impact
on the leverage you can create for yourself, why starting a
YouTube channel, starting a podcast, writing a book, developing courses
and doing it at a bit more scale can actually allow you to achieve more
by doing less. You can help more people solve their problem without
you requiring to put more hours into it. These are the types of things
you want to develop from the capital you develop from your business or
your job. You want to deploy the capital to create a
book, to create a podcast, to create a YouTube channel, to
develop your business along the way so that you can actually leverage
that capital and create more by doing less. And so part
of becoming time rich is to really ask yourself the question,
if I'm overwhelmed, which many people are, and you might be overwhelmed listening
to this, if I'm overwhelmed, it means
I don't have enough leverage. In which case, which leverage
lever will I pull? Will I pull the people leverage
lever? We're actually asking people to do work for me. And don't forget,
Your delegation is someone else's personal development. Meaning,
don't ever feel guilty or shameful by giving someone work to do because they're
pining for it. They're seeking to build their skills. And
by you not delegating your work that you can easily do, you're not giving them
the chance to build the skills they wanna build. So in saying that,
if you don't delegate simple tasks, you're selfish. because
you're preventing someone from learning the skills they wanna learn so one day
they can be you. So never feel guilty or shameful about
delegating. But people leverage lever requires you to
pass the work onto someone else. Yes, it means you're gonna have
to give up control. Freaking control
freaks out there, you can't control everything. Stop trying to control all parts of your business.
Stop trying to control all parts of your life. You can outsource many
things. Some of you are still cleaning your house. I
know you do a good job but there's people out there better than you and
you can pay them to do it. This is what I mean by pulling
the people leverage lever. Next thing, if you've got
some people leverage, the next lever to pull is if you're overwhelmed still,
if you're still doing a lot of things yourself, if you're still booking your own calendar appointments, if
you're still writing your own emails, if you're still you know, running
webinars live. Like if you're still physically doing things and
you're overwhelmed, then it's time to pull the systems leverage
lever. And that means, okay, can I
get chat GPT to write that for me? Can I sequence that and get an email
nurture software sequence so I can email people that happen to be there and
do it? Can I engage Spotify and
YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and these social media platforms to
put my content out that's repeatable over and over again? Can
I use software to scale my activity and
my tasks and my content? Can I use Calendly to
book appointments for me? Can I use Zapier
software to link things up? Can I use whatever it
is, whatever software is available to you to use,
the objective of it is to do the repeatable tasks for
you. Better yet, if you have a person from people
leverage, and then you have software for them to
use, you have the elements of scaling your activity drastically.
So when you've got people to run the systems you're putting in place, you
can start to scale your message, you can start to scale the amount of clients you get, and
you can start to deliver at a higher level. And the final leverage
lever to pull is the capital leverage. So if you're making money in
your job or your business, how are you deploying that capital
into other assets to produce money for you with no effort? So
for example, if I happen to have $100,000 and I
bought shares in an index fund that paid me 13% dividend,
yes they are out there, and paid monthly, it means that I'm
making $13,000 a year, on
a monthly basis, about $1,000 a month. Now,
if you're making $1,000 a month, which is about $250 a week, which
is probably around about $40 a day, $40 a day, it means that you
are not having to do that hour task that's going to take an
hour from you and give you $40 in return and most jobs these days are
about $40 an hour job, it means you don't have to spend that hour doing
that because you're making the $40 for that particular
day from an asset and that's how you leverage
capital to buy back your time. That's how you use capital to
become time rich. So what people
leverage are you pulling? What systems leverage lever
are you pulling? And what capital leverage lever are
you pulling? Meaning, what are you buying with the money you
have to print money while you sleep? If
the answer is none, then it means you don't have any leverage.
If you don't have leverage, You cannot turn
your 100% of your grape into 10% of a watermelon, which means
you can only make as much money as you can work in
the day. And we all know we've only got 24 hours in a
day, can only work 16 of those, which means your
money is now capped. So learn to
pull the leverage lever in all those areas and
start to actually achieve more by doing less
so you can get wealthy without getting busy. And
we all suffer at some point in our lives from the busy
bug. And if you're someone who's overwhelmed, you're anxious,
you shake your leg, you're in a hurry, the objective would
be to eliminate that from your life. And the only way to do that is
to stop and ask yourself, where
is my leverage? And if I know it exists, but I haven't done it,
what internal story am I telling myself that's preventing
me from doing it? What's the guilt and the shame of
me not delegating? What's the lack of control that
I can't deploy because of software? What sort
of self-sabotaging story am I telling myself that prevents
me from implementing software? Do I not trust it? Do I not think I'm a tech person?
And what's preventing me from getting partnerships in my business to do things that I
can't do? Am I worried or scared that someone's going to kill my business? Am
I worried or scared that they're not going to be fun to work with? What is the deep-seated worry
and concerns and anxieties that you have on a programmed level
that you've learned that's preventing you from getting leverage. Because
I promise you, it's just a story that you're telling yourself that's not
real that's preventing you from doing those things. And everybody can
do this. You can start very small. If
you're still cleaning your house, the very first step to do is
to go to Air Tasker and find a cleaner and outsource
that. If you're still cleaning your pool, the next step is
to get a pool cleaner and pay them. This is the very beginnings of
people leverage. If you can't use systems, the very first
step you can take is to get your phone, pull up
ChatGPT and start getting it to write your
emails. For goodness sake, why are you still writing your
emails? Why are you still writing your sales copy? Why are
you still writing your Job description. Why
are you still running cover? Why are you still writing emails to your kid's principal when
you can just get Chatty Petite to write an amazing email, right? The
other day, something happened to me. I got an unwarranted parking
ticket on a private property that was way out of order. So
I went straight to Chatty Petite and I said, Chat, you are a Queensland lawyer,
highly trained in parking ticket infringement law.
Please write me an email that subjugates and prevents me from
having to go and fight this to the next level and write it in a nice way that's
not too conflicting and not too combative." It wrote that for me
and I sent it across and I haven't received an email back, which means I
feel like I've got a lawyer in my pocket. Now, I'm not suggesting that for every single
thing that happens to you, but why would I go and craft things when
I have that powerful engine in my pocket? And I find
that people just do not know how to delegate their thinking.
They don't know how to delegate their activity. They believe wrongly
that they have to work harder to get ahead. But we live in
2025. Finally, you're living in a time in our lives where
we can actually work less and achieve more. I'm
not suggesting you don't have to work at all, but I want you to work smarter, not
harder. You've heard the saying, work smarter, not harder. Well, let's
see what you've got. This is not as easy as what you think. People
have a grip on control of they must do everything themselves
and I'm here to help you loosen the grip because I
don't want you to be just rich. I want you to be time rich
because I want you to have money and the time to enjoy with your family and
just do the things that bring you actual wealth, which is not a
beach house incidentally. It's actually not a jet. It's the ability to
say, yes, honey, let's go on a walk with our dog at 10 o'clock this morning.
Yes, let's have lunch together today. Yes, let's go to the recital. Yes,
let's go on a family holiday. Let's do those things we want to do. That's wealth.
And it's not just sitting around bouncing around from task to
task and event to event and thing to thing. You do not
want to build a new prison when you escape one. So my advice
to you about becoming time rich is this. If you are
overwhelmed, you just don't have leverage. Now you know how to
get it, go get your leverage. Start
with small tasks and start today. Because
if you don't become time rich, it will not matter how much money
you make, you'll never ever be happy. So
if you've enjoyed the episode, hit the subscribe button, share with a friend, and
I wanna see you not just become rich, become
time rich. See you at the book launch. Thanks for listening to Money
Grows on Trees. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a five-star review on
Apple Podcasts and Spotify and subscribe to us
on YouTube so you never miss an episode. And if you're serious about building wealth,
make sure to check out the links in the show notes and follow me on all
social media platforms at LloydJamesRoss for