If you thought of someone making 730k per month, how long would you guess they are working? Most would guess 12 to 14 hours a day. I'm doing the complete opposite. I'm currently on pace to do $9 million a year and only work 4 hours a day. It wasn't always this way. When I was 22, I ran a coding bootcamp in Canada, where I was working 15 hour days and being run into the ground. It was a nightmare. I thought I'd figured out how to be an entrepreneur, but I got it all wrong.
I had no control and no freedom. Fast forward to today, I only work 4 hours a day. I get to travel the world for 6 months out of the year, have total control over my time, and I'm in the best shape of my life. I create the life of my dreams and I want to show you how to do the same. I'm going to show you a step-by-step approach to make more and work less. What I've discovered is that it all comes down to 4 pillars of leverage. Imagine total freedom. What do you picture? What does it feel like?
If you had total freedom, what's the first thing you'd change about your life? The 4 pillars of leverage are deep work, automation, the founder flywheel, and the chief of staff. We'll cover each of these in 60 seconds, but first, why should you even listen to me? Well right now, my portfolio of internet companies makes me 730k per month and I only work 4 hours a day.
In the last 6 months, I've traveled to Tokyo, Medigene, Mexico City, LA, New York City, and Hawaii, all while working 4 hours a day, which is insane because it hasn't always been this way. It's not about working 14 hours a day on social working, that will kill your spirit. It's about working 4 hours a day in your zone of genius, moving mountains. It's about making great money while not sacrificing your health and wellbeing.
So would you need to focus on to generate 730k per month while only working 4 hours a day? Let's get into it. First pillar is deep work. My belief is that 1 hour of deep work is better than 8 hours of shallow work. My typical deep work session looks like this. I curate what I need to get done the night before. I then wake up and deep work from 6am to 10am. No phone, no distractions, no talking, put that shit in the other room.
It's me alone in my little world drinking my isemaricano creating magic. I have my deep work playlist on brain.fm, I listen to music that is designed from the ground up to guide my brain into a peak mental state. The key is to get deep work the second you wake up. Neuroscience research has shown that your ability to achieve deep work is highest first thing in the morning. Your brain is ready, it's primed and your motivation is highest. So use this to your advantage.
Deep work is time you have to work on your zone of genius. What is your zone of genius? I use my mornings to focus on 3 things in my zone of genius. Writing, creating systems, and automation. Writing is a superpower. It is the most critical skill for your career in life. Writing online increases your service area for clients, community, connections, and growth. Plus, writing brings me enormous clarity. SEO is writing. Sales is writing. Email is writing. Audience growth is writing.
Hiring is writing. I write every day. When I'm writing, I focus on 7 core areas. Tips, lessons, systems, playbooks, personal stories, benefits, and examples. These 7 prompts allow me to come up with endless content ideas around any subject. Now writing is not just important for audience growth. It's also key for building systems. Systems allow me to gain leverage and then remove myself from operations. As a founder, you are as strong as your systems.
As James Clear famously wrote, You do not rise the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. So you need to create systems. Systems for sales, hiring, design, finance, product, operations, creative, technology, monetization, you need systems. When I build systems, I create them in a Google Doc. I then film myself doing the task in a loom video and then I add the system to my company wiki and notion and then train my team on them. This allows me to remove myself from operations.
It gives me time freedom to spend time doing things that I just love in life. And then I delegate the tasks that I just don't want to work on. My goal each morning during Deep Work is to get 1% better, which I know will help me become 37 times better in one year. It's all about compound growth. It's a game of tiny wins stacked up daily to produce exponential results. So now that you have 4 hours of Deep Work schedule in your calendar, let's move on to the next pillar, your founder flywheel.
If you're not familiar with a flywheel, it's a device using vehicles and machines to store kinetic energy. As the flywheel turns, it builds momentum and gets easier and easier to turn. The flywheel multiplies your effort and it becomes self-propelling. According to Nathan Barry, my good friend and founder of Converkit, a $200 million bootstrap newsletter platform, there are 3 laws to a flywheel. 1. Activities in a flywheel throw from 1 under the next.
2. Each rotation of the flywheel gets easier than the previous rotation. And then 3. Each rotation produces more than the previous rotation. As founders, we want every action to multiply. We want there to be compounding effects on everything that we do. So how do you build your own founder flywheel? Start with building an audience around your personal brand. This is what I've done with my audience and portfolio of internet companies and grow them to $8.7 million per year.
I invented the founder flywheel. The founder flywheel is a self-propelling system I've developed to 10X the results of my efforts and exponentially grow my brands. Here's what my founder flywheel looks like. First off, I've got my personal brand. Attention is the new oil and your personal brand is the pipeline. Your focus early on in your business should be to set your audience growth on fire. And the best way to do this is to put your face out there. Share your point of view.
Share your stories with the world. Your mistakes, your failures, your successes, your achievements, go to an audience around you and your business. This is exactly what I've done to grow an audience over $16 million. The content I share goes viral on a regular basis. In the last 14 months, I grew an audience of $2 million around my personal brand. Here are my social stats in just 14 months.
580,000 followers on Instagram, 284K followers on Twitter, 282K followers on LinkedIn, 120K followers on TikTok, 10K subscribers here on YouTube, and 65K newsletters subscribers. The growth of my personal brand feels enormous revenue for my businesses. The more people that hear my story, the more they want to join founder West and the more brands want to work with the herb. The growth of my portfolio of internet businesses has skyrocketed. Here's just the last 12 months.
Founder West went from $0 to $280,000 revenue a month. It also went from nothing to over $210,000 profit a month. It went from nothing to over 9,000 sales in just the last year. An herb grew by over 120% to run rate revenue of $7 million all in just last year. And my business's growth helped propel massive word of mouth. Happy customers tell more customers. People don't buy what you sell. They buy what others want to buy.
The more testimonials that we share across our websites, social and newsletter, the more founders join founder West. This creates a referral flood. The referral flood is an endless flow of customers that you generate for your business without spending a dime on ads. Get a pen, get paper and write down how your personal brand fuels your business brand. How can you leverage your audience to drive endless leads?
3. Automate Eliminate Delegate Now, as you grow your business, you need to focus on AED. As Tim Ferris puts it in the 4 hour work, we never automate something that can be eliminated and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else's time instead of your own, which now waste your harder and cash. I invented the AED system to give me time and financial freedom.
It makes it easy for me to automate, eliminate and delegate, and you can use it to tenix your cash flows and work less. Here's how it works. Step 1. Magnode of all the tasks you've worked on over the last eight weeks. Step 2. Indicate whether task gives you energy or it drains your energy. Step 3. Mark whether you can automate, eliminate or delegate a task. Step 4. Any task you can eliminate, you should stop doing immediately.
Step 5. Any task you can delegate, create a loom video of you doing it, and then pass it off to the right person on your team. You should delegate tasks that are below your hourly rate. I decided on an ambitious hourly rate of $5,000 an hour, and it transformed the way I saw a task. Social Media Management $50 an hour? Delegate. Building a web flow website? $90 an hour? Delegate. Coaching a founder for $500 an hour? Limit it. Get clear on your desired hourly rate.
Begin eliminating or delegating tasks that do not hit that hourly rate. Step 6. Any task you can automate, you should figure out the best tool and then automate it. When you're ready to automate, there are seven tools I recommend you use to save 30 hours a week. Convert kit for newsletter automations, high fury to automate your content calendar, and create a 60 day content backlog and then get off the content hamster wheel.
Chat GBT to automate content ideation, I created this prompt to generate a content matrix and quickly come up with 30 content ideas in three seconds. Text Expander to save snippets you always use so you don't need to repeatedly type things, and yes, where to automate your sales emails and leverage them over and over again very easily. Seemless AI to automate your lead generation and 10X your revenue and could jab you to automate your sales funnels and put your business on autopilot.
10X your profit and gain more time leverage. Now the next pillar is higher a chief of staff. Now as you're growing your business, there are tasks that slip through the cracks. A random email request, someone trying to book a meeting with you. Travel plans you need help booking or help interviewing a potential hire. Being a CEO is hard and you need reinforcements. You need a chief of staff. So what is a chief of staff?
Well, a chief of staff pulls the strings to ensure daily operations run without you. Matt Malkrey is a prolific CEO coach to the CEOs of Coinbase, OpenAI, Canva and Sequoia. Creating tech CEOs trust Matt to bring them clarity, focus and higher performance. So what is Matt's number one requirement of all CEOs he works with? They must have a chief of staff. This might sound weird at first, but you hear me out.
When you run a company, there are way too many actions going on that you can keep up with by yourself. If all you do is work on admin tasks, your mind isn't free to work on creative tasks. And if you don't have time to be creative, then you can't move the needle forward in your business. You need to focus on tasks that only you can do. Most founders make the costly mistake of trying to do everything by themselves. And this is why 90% of businesses fail.
It's also why so many founders are burnt out. They're depressed. They're anxious. And they're running a business that's running them into the ground. There's a better way. The highest leverage hire a founder can make is a chief of staff. My chief of staffs are so important in all my businesses they are literally the first hire I make when I start a new business. They protect my time. They manage internal and external communications. They organize my calendar.
And they are my first line of defense to any task that could interrupt my time, which is my most valuable asset. What should you look for in a chief of staff? Well, look for someone that is super organized. They should be an expert communicator and they must have solid business knowledge in at least two years of related experience. You can test different candidates' ability to perform these tasks that you dream you want to delegate. And if they pass that challenge, well then bring them on board.
Training them is the key to getting massive leverage out of this critical hire. The main thing you need to ensure is that you're giving them full information into everything. Yes, everything you spend your time on. Hiring, scheduling, email, slack, your calendar, meetings, everything. The more they become your second brain, the more that they're going to be able to perform tasks without your help. Whatever you have access to, they need access to.
You need to give them 100% context on what you work on. I know that's a little scary, but it's worth it. Trust me. Have a daily 15 minute stand-up where you train them and let go of more and more tasks and get back your time. My experience over the last 10 years has shown me that this one hire can bring 10X more piece of money. It increases my happiness and has been a game changer to my success. Take the leap of faith and start recruiting your chief of staff today.
Launch your growth trajectory into orbit with these four pillars of leverage. Your most valuable asset is your time and when you control your time, you achieve true freedom. Gone are the days of working 12 hours a day on sole sucking work. Embrace time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom. Pull your business on autopilot and remove yourself from operations. Hit $5 million revenue a year, travel the world, and make memories with family and friends. Let's build your automated empire.