Success and Freedom

3 Reasons to Forget the 80/20 Rule and Focus on the 4 Percent

The number one mistake entrepreneurs make is that they don’t know the ROI (return on investment) of their time. As an entrepreneur I’m guilty of that as well. It’s easy to get distracted and focus on a billion things at once and not see much success from it. In fact, we feel compelled to dip our hands into many different projects.

It wasn’t until recently that I figured out how to leverage my time to see an insane ROI. I would never have figured it out if I hadn’t sat down with the Freedom Entrepreneur himself, Chris Duncan. Christopher Duncan is the embodiment of the freedom entrepreneur. In fact, that’s the slogan by which he lives. He works smarter and not harder which allows him to run eight companies- three of which do seven figures a year- and still be able to work wherever he wants.

When he says that you can live a life with total freedom, that’s exactly what he means, but because people usually don’t know the ROI of their last hour or the ROI of their staff members they are not able to grow their businesses as fast as they’d like. The problem with not measuring output and productivity is that life can become an endless, unproductive hustle. Here’s a new concept I learned from Chris. Most entrepreneurs know the 80/20 rule- that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts. However, if there’s an 80/20 rule then there must be an 80/20 of that 80/20 which is the 4% that will bring you 64% of your results. This means that you only need to know the needle movers of your business that make most of the difference. You don’t need to do everything else that people think they need to do.

The 4% is what Chris calls the money-making activity. It’s what you can do repeatedly to make all the money. Here are three things you can do to make sure you’re utilising the 4% concept to its fullest potential.


1. Anything outside of the 20% must be delegated.

Now the question becomes how to figure out what that 4% is. The answer is quite simple. The 4% is the money-making activity which I mentioned above but if you don’t know what that is, you should track where you’re spending your time and what activities bring you the most money.

Put a timer on your phone for every 30 minutes between the time you wake up and the time you go to bed. Every time the timer goes off, write down what you did that past half hour. The point is not to change your daily routine just because you have the alarm. The point is to track what you do on a daily basis so that you can figure out where you’re wasting your time and what you can delegate.

Here’s an example.

12:00 pm
Hired someone on Fiverr to make a media package form.
Created some part of form.
Wrote down services for future reference.
Created Google Drive for web developer w/ info.

12:30 pm
Set up Calendly.
Created contact page w/ Calendly.

1:00 pm
Talked with client about his press.
Scheduled more calls.
Friend came over.
Created my own form instead of Fiverr.

This provides a clear picture of what you do day in and day out. You can eliminate the activities that aren’t beneficial for your business and delegate repetitive tasks that don’t do much to grow your business.

2. The 4% is cashflow.

The 4% is the needle movers in your business- the few activities that if you did more of would grow your business exponentially. Chances are if you track how you use your time, you’ll find that the 4% is cashflow. Make sure that the money coming into your business is more than the money going out of your business. This way your business will survive and thrive. If you don’t master cashflow then you will be simply getting by. After identifying what you should be doing and what should be delegated, you should do double what makes the money.

It can be easy for entrepreneurs to get sidetracked by doing things that don’t yield many results. Here’s an example I recently found on Facebook that shows the difference in results by only focusing on what matters.

3. Double what works.

Once you know that you should live by the 4% rule, you need to focus more of your time and energy on that. It’s one of the reasons successful entrepreneurs like Gary Vaynerchuk say that you should focus completely on your strengths- not your weaknesses. It’s the reason why other entrepreneurs tell their followers to increase what works. That’s the way to build a business faster.

In the previous paragraphs I talked about how to identify what the 4% is and how to leverage it in your business. I’m going to use Chris as an example. Chris knew that in his business he was getting massive results- crushing 60K- by putting on webinars and not doing the traditional blog posts to generate leads. Since he knew this was the moneymaker for him, all he needed to do was to get more people on the webinar or put on more webinars to make more money. He grew his business to six-figure months by solely focusing on partnerships and webinars. Anything outside of that activity he hired or delegated.

If you know that 4% of your efforts bring in most of the results, then you should double the amount of time you spend on the 4% to increase your results.