Audit Your Time - Kimberly Fischer on Being an Owner

Kimberly Fischer was working twelve to sixteen hour days at her restaurant and crying on the couch when a ruptured disc forced her to learn how to be an owner instead of an employee of her own company. Kimberly Fischer now teaches small business owners how to do the same at kimberlyfischer.com, and she tells Jeremy Rivera how the energy money matrix, AI and what she calls motipulation got her there.

Kimberly started her first business in 1999 and owns Main Event Grill & Catering in Alaska. "I was sort of dabbling in being self-employed more than being an owner." Her book, The Motipulation Method, is coming soon, and you can reserve a free copy now. The full episode recap walks through each lesson.

In this episode

• The energy money matrix - line up everything you do in a day by whether it gives you energy and whether it makes you money. Kimberly says 80% of her day should sit in the box that does both.
• Protect what gives you energy - those tasks get given up first. She has gone to the gym every day for about 550 days. "It can never be sacrificed."
• Stop letting AI be your boss - "A lot of people utilize AI to help them, but actually they turn it into their boss." Her question for it: "I don't say, how do I do this? I say, how can you do this without me?"
• Speed to lead - Jeremy raises Ignitvio's lead response study: 68% of 1,824 local businesses never responded within 24 hours. A missed-call text back beats a voicemail and no reply.
• What an hour really costs - Kimberly tells the story of a house flipper who spent three hours on a water heater and, by his account, missed a call on a deal worth a hundred grand. "We don't realize what that hour is actually costing us."
• A quick AI win - she took her leadership team through a shared second brain and asked for one problem in the company they could automate. Jeremy adds what he took from Gleb Tsipursky on getting a team's buy-in.
• Shared context - Jeremy's point, from a conversation with the team at Oleno: shared workspaces and shared SOPs give everyone the same context to work from.
• Communication is the number one skill - for your staff and your AI, a point Jeremy connects to Delina Yasmeh on context and prompts. "Just because you said it doesn't mean they understand it." More in Kimberly's post on telling an employee ten times.
• Motipulation - three parts: "It is my words, my actions, and what motivates other people." Her BETTER model stands for build, encourage, train, trust, empower and reproduce.
• Audit your time - her one takeaway, plus a favorite book, Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time.

Chapters

• (00:00) Meet Kimberly Fischer: from self-employed to owner
• (03:09) The energy money matrix
• (06:28) When AI turns into your boss
• (11:37) What an hour really costs
• (13:42) A quick AI win: the shared second brain
• (19:39) Communication is the number one skill
• (28:10) What is motipulation?
• (34:29) The one takeaway: audit your time

Notable quotes

"Communication is not about what you said. It's about what they received." - Kimberly Fischer

"I sacrificed time with my daughter for her birthday to go get hamburger buns." - Kimberly Fischer

"It's just amplifying the human. It's not taking away the human." - Kimberly Fischer

Find her Motipulation podcast and her courses at kimberlyfischer.com.

This episode is supported by our sponsors uSERP, ClearLead Digital, OppAlerts and Blawgy, white label SEO content for agencies.

Sponsor disclosure: uSERP, Oleno, ClearLead Digital, OppAlerts and Blawgy are paid sponsors of the Unscripted podcast network. Links to them are marked as sponsored.

Unscripted Small Business is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. More episodes at unscriptedsmallbusiness.com.