In 2020 when most event companies were shutting down, Grow Disrupt experienced 149% growth over 2019. In 2021, we grew again, and in 2022, we’re on track to report year-over-year growth once again. One of the biggest factors to this has been a team, helmed by Stephanie, that works hard to stay motivated, engaged and driven. One of the biggest tools in our arsenal to ensure that happens is the Energy Advantage Exercise!
Frankly, it’s one that Stephanie has been teaching and talking about for years, we’re just now realizing that we’ve never taken time to write it up and make it publicly available! To be fair, Stephanie is not the inventor of the original exercise, but she has fine-tuned this version over the years to not just benefit her, but the whole team.
What is the energy advantage?
The Energy Advantage stems from the somewhat controversial take that time is not your most valuable resource. While most individuals will agree that money is no longer the most valuable resource on the planet, Stephanie has long proposed that time is not the most valuable resource either.
Experiment: Have you ever had an evening stretching before you, but you’re too tired from work to do anything with that time? So you sit on the couch and veg? You had time, but no energy. So was the time really worth anything?
Now think about another time when you were motivated, excited and energized. How much were you able to accomplish in a short period of time?
Remarkable right?
Understanding that Energy is our most valuable resource, we can then reasonably derive that it’s critical for us to invest that resource wisely, and protect it as best we can. This means putting our energy into things that ultimately give us more energy, and eliminating those things that suck our energy or wear us out. Here’s how we do that!
How to Run The Exercise
In an ideal world, we would only do things that ultimately energize us and keep us motivated. We rarely operate in such a utopia. Instead, we end up pulled into a hundred different directions with at least fifty things on our plate that drain us thoroughly. Unfortunately, when we end up in that energy-suck, it’s hard to tell where exactly it’s coming from, or how to stop it. The Energy Advantage Exercise is how.
First: start by logging every single activity you do for a period of time. Stephanie recommends at least two weeks and log EVERYTHING. Knocking out the dishes on your lunch break because you work from home? Log it. Cleaning the bathrooms on the weekend? Log it. Dealing with employee squabbles? Log it. Processing payroll? Log it. Literally everything should get noted down. At the end of two weeks, if there are any activities that you only complete once a month, add those to the total log.
Pro Tip: Stephanie prints off a few copies of a chart she carries with her for two weeks because it’s faster to log “Activity. Start time. End Time.” than trying to remember at the end of the day. Find the method that works best for you, as long as it’s accurate!
Second, go through and start scoring each activity on a scale of 1 - 4.
- The things you do that both energize you, AND directly generate revenue
- The things you do that energize you, but don’t necessarily directly generate revenue
- The things you do that don’t energize you, but don’t drain you either, but DO directly generate revenue
- The things that either don’t energize you and don’t generate revenue OR the things that absolutely suck your soul…even if they directly generate revenue!
For example, Stephanie might score the following list like this:
- Running sales appointments - 1
- Creating marketing content - 2 (Because while it helps generate revenue…it’s the sales appointments that ACTUALLY generate revenue)
- Processing credit cards - 3 (it does directly generate revenue, but it’s not really an energizer for Stephanie)
- Replying to emails - 4 (Some days this is definitely more of the ‘sucks Stephanie’s soul’ side of things…but most days it just doesn’t energize her, and it rarely produces revenue)
Third, once you have your list, it’s time to start culling the 3s and 4s. Select one three and one four that you can reasonably move off your plate and prioritize that for the next three months. You don’t have to get rid of all of them right away, but start making progress in that direction. This isn’t an overnight solution to get you back into your energy zone. It may take a few iterations of the exercise over a few months, but when you get there, it will transform how you focus on growing and managing your business.
How Often to Run The Exercise
When Stephanie started running this exercise back in 2015, she ran it every single quarter. It took time not just to move the 3s and 4s off her plate, but also to start to feel the effect of working in her energy advantage more frequently. Now that she’s relatively firmly entrenched, she tends to pull out the energy advantage every three to six months instead. She brings it back to the forefront for her team every time enthusiasm starts to flag and, without fail, someone discovers something they’ve been doing that they’ve fallen out of love with.
Now Stephanie’s greatest reminder to pull it back out for herself is whenever she starts to notice she’s working longer hours, getting short tempered, drained, or feeling exhausted in general. Sometimes she’ll discover that she’s got 3s and 4s that used to be 1s and 2s. Because people change. It’s still okay to move them off her plate so she can focus on what’s working best for her in the moment.
And the same holds true for you.