03 Oct What is the Time Control Tool?
Our last Business Brokerage Press webinar “The Future of Business Brokerage: 5 Tools We Need for the Years Ahead! Tool #4: Our Time Control Tool” continued our series with business broker legend, Glen Cooper. Mr. Cooper has had a stunning career and has been in the business brokerage industry since 1979, In that time he has authored books, coached other business brokers, was a founding member of IBBA and a great deal more. In this article, we’ll explore Cooper’s “Time Control Tool” and how it can benefit you. His tools in general represent a way for business brokers to predict the future and then act in the most prudent manner to take advantage of the changes ahead.
Getting into the Flow
Mr. Cooper’s 4th Tool centers on what business brokers and M&A advisors need to do to control their time. At first, this webinar may seem to be about traditional time management, but this isn’t exactly the case. Instead, Cooper, who has been quite ill for the last year, focused on the role of well-being and its role in productivity.
He emphasized the importance of “getting into the flow,” much like athletes do. He observed that if business brokers are able to get into the flow that “productivity happens by accident.”
Time Management Tips
Cooper noted that time management has to be about focusing on tasks that need to be accomplished, of course. But it goes even deeper. As he commented, “It seems to me that our ability, especially to manage time in today’s world, has many variables including being healthy, surviving all the bad things that are happening in our society, in our environment, even in our own occupations and economy, the covid pandemic and a lot of other stuff that has caused us to collectively lose a little bit of our mental health.”
It is clear that Mr. Cooper is seeing time management as a multi-dimensional issue rather than the traditional black and white way of thinking about the topic.
The Grateful Flow Tool
He mentions that his ideas are inspired by the famous psychiatrist Phil Stutz, who has a tool called The Grateful Flow Tool, in which people are advised to focus on gratitude. Stutz’s tools are part of his New York Times bestselling book The Tools. They are designed to help people realize that they are connected to everything else, or in other words “no person is an island.” Cooper notes that getting into the flow, like athletes do, is often the direct result of “practice, practice, practice.”
Cooper has a unique view on time management that is firmly grounded in logic. In our next article on this continuing series with Mr. Cooper, we’ll explore the steps business brokers should take to maximize time.
