▷ Your time invested profitably every day: What are your EPAs?

Your time: your most important capital. Especially if you are self-employed or a sole proprietor. Like your money, your time can only be used once. That’s why it’s essential to the success of your business that you invest it correctly. And put as much care into choosing your daily activities as you do into your stock portfolio.

Bodo Schäfer, a successful management coach 20 years ago, advises you to focus on your EPAs every day and do them as often as possible to increase your income. What’s behind it? And how do we use this principle today to help our personal business be more successful?

What exactly are EPAs and what makes them so profitable for you?

Schäfer sees entrepreneurial success as linked to the fact that we carry out exactly 20% of our activities on which 80% of our income depends: that ANDincome Pproduce Aactivity. Short BEES.

His advice: Whatever it is, do it as often as possible. This way you will automatically increase your income, even if there are dry spells in between where nothing seems to go right. Hang in there and stick with it.

What can we take away from here: Identify the most important tasks in your diverse daily routine as a self-employed person and find out how you can increase your profit or sales, even in the medium term. Where is your development potential?

EPA: Find the bottleneck in your business

But what are your EPAs? If you’re like me, you have no problem making your own products. You create excellent online courses, program websites that add value for your customers, or know exactly how you will educate customers to improve their lives. And you do it every day.

In a word: producing your own offers probably won’t be something you need to do more often to increase your sales and expand your business.

So take the time to find the real bottleneckthat has limited your business and prevented you from achieving long-term success and generating the income you desire.

But can it really be that easy?

If it’s a profitable use of our time, why don’t we just do it?

According to Bodo Schäfer these are usually very simple tasks that do not require much from us, but which have a great impact on our success. Before you get started, think about what exactly your EPAs are. What fits your business, what drives it forward?

If we, for example

call potential customers,
write acquisition emails,
develop new product ideas,
or post on Facebook,

We will get more sales and therefore a higher income simply based on the number of attempts we make.

But is it really that easy for you?calling cold addresses or being present on Facebook every day with new stimuli for readers? If that were really the case, you would have done this a long time ago and I would have reaped the success of your efforts.

Why isn’t it that easy?

Let’s stay on the topic of cold calls. Or an active presence on social media. Not really rocket science to do it. If you believe that this is exactly your path to acquiring more customers, then why not do it every day with enthusiasm and invest your time right here?

Schäfer suspects that you are afraid of failure. Simply put: fear that your calls won’t bring you new customers, fear that no one will respond to posts in your Facebook group. And perhaps sometimes you have experienced these very problems and suffered failures. What made you abandon this path (with some relief). However, these failures are not necessarily your fault or, more importantly, the final elimination criteria. There could be two reasons why it didn’t work:

The system is against you right now.
- Your contact list does not contain enough identifiable addresses of genuinely interested business partners who need your offer.
- Members of your Facebook group aren’t particularly interested in your posts because you run a seasonal business (“Christmas trees, Easter decorations”).
You make crucial mistakes in implementing your business
- Your calls come from the other side of the door and are not convincing.
- Your posts don’t have the right tone to connect with your readers.

Learn to deal with failure better

If you find that the system is stacked against you, you still have one option: stick with it and simply do the EPAs you’ve identified as essential to your business more often. This increases the chance of hitting.

Schäfer clarifies that in every activity there are moments of pause that must be taken into account and overcome. This can be achieved through increased use of intelligently chosen APEs. The important thing is not to give up when you are sure you are doing it well.

The situation is different regarding errors made in the implementation of EPAs. Use them constantly to improve your processes. Because mistakes are the feedback you need to work more effectively and be more successful.

If your customer calls don’t lead to an order: Check your word choice, conversation stages, and evaluate whether your contact list provides information on who you should call with the greatest chance of success.
If your posts don’t resonate on social media: Check whether you are really in the right place here (or better on Tiktok), whether your topics are relevant to the target group or whether you should change your formats (more videos, fewer long texts).

Implement EPAs: Check your processes first

So, if you notice that your EPAs are not working simply because there is an error in the implementation: check your processes! Use the feedback you receive. And let yourself go Deming cycle if the feedback is not yet clear (for example because you don’t have enough concrete experience to draw on).

Create your controlled experimental setup according to this scheme:

Plan your process: What does your phone script look like so far? How do you design your Facebook posts? Is there a process you always follow? And where you could change this process in detail. A detail that, in your experience, you suspect makes the process better. Take these a change and then redesign the process.
Six: Now proceed consistently with your new process: call customers, for example, only in the morning and never post on Facebook without photos.
Check the result: Because what has not been measured does not exist. Give your new process some time and then compare: How many cold calls have been successful now? Has the percentage increased compared to the old no thanks conversations? Are your Facebook posts now being shared or commented on more often? You know best what your metrics are with which you can measure the success of your campaign.
If it’s good: Adopt the new process. And implement it as often as possible. This way you can continually improve your EPA.

If you don’t see any difference compared to before (or if you have another idea for optimizing the process), run the Deming cycle again. Things can only get better!

Prioritize your day based on your EPAs, use your processes

Now you know which actions make the difference when you want to increase your business and sales. Know your personal EPAs and the processes you should use to achieve them to truly get results.

Maybe now you have become their friend because you have learned how much good they are for you. And how you can improve them. Better: This can also mean that you make things easier for yourself and thus break your inner resistance.

From now on, consider your EPAs as priority 1 in your daily planning. Set aside time for them every day. Maybe you use timeboxing to set aside a period of time to call a few customers each day using your new system. Or preparing your Facebook posts for next week. And if you’re having trouble getting started: start your EPAs first thing in the morning. Then you can sit back and enjoy it, because the day can only become more enjoyable just because you’ve already solved the hardest things.

EPAS in brief summary

Find out where your business reaches its limits and which activities will make the big difference here. No, these are usually not your products, but everything that brings them to your customers or makes them suitable for them.
Check the processes you carry out here and optimize them step by step. Trust the data collected during the trial period.
Still not satisfied with the result? Restart the Deming cycle and see what new elements you can incorporate into your process.
And then spend time every day implementing your EPAs.