Reflection of the Week
Reclaiming Your Time
Happy Friday, all!
I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving. We dropped another timely (pun intended) episode last week. I chat with Conrad Ruiz, the founder and CEO of Well Aware, a company dedicated to helping business owners reclaim their time.
With a biomedical engineering and consulting background, Conrad blends technical insight with an entrepreneurial spirit to help business owners simplify complex operations and master time management. He shares his journey into entrepreneurship, which started with a medical crisis and offers practical advice on creating efficient systems and finding balance in business.
Episode Highlights
Mission-driven businesses start with why.
For Conrad, a mission-driven business emphasizes the “why” behind the work. Once a business has a clear sense of its “why,” it can use its resources — time, money, and systems — toward fulfilling that mission.
“Being a mission-driven business is recognizing wholeheartedly why you’re doing what you’re doing and what that impact is for,” Conrad said.
Your why is your compass.
Conrad explained that having a clear “why” is like having a compass to direct a business’s decisions and actions. By staying focused on the mission, entrepreneurs can avoid distractions and stay aligned on their goals.
“The why is the compass north,” Conrad said. “If you find yourself going in a million different directions, you’re ultimately going nowhere.”
Buy back your time.
Conrad’s business, Well Aware, helps very busy people buy back their time. He encouraged business owners to invest in affordable solutions, such as virtual assistants or scalable systems, to free up time.
“We decide with them how they want to approach this mercantile equation of money versus time,” Conrad said. “Let’s go ahead and make the equations easy.”
Audit your time in 3 key areas.
One of Conrad’s key recommendations is to perform a time audit to identify where you truly spend your time. He suggests looking at three key initiatives: time spent marketing, time spent selling, and time spent delivering services. Once you see those three, you can look at how finance (money) and administration (time) unpin them.
“I love auditing on the basis of time,” Conrad said. “There’s a three-legged stool of marketing, sales, and service delivery, and from there, the underpinnings are finance and administration.”
Questions of the Week
- What is your “why,” and how does it act as a compass for your business decisions?
- How could you “buy back” your time to focus on what truly matters?
- What does a time audit reveal about where you’re investing your energy?
Tools of the Week
I love Conrad’s suggestion of time auditing. Especially as the year ends, I highly recommend doing one and seeing what comes up.
You can also learn more about Conrad and Well Aware at the links below.