296: Focus Your Time with Phil Wofford
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Phil Wofford, Entrepreneur, Fractional CFO/COO, Business Coach, and owner of Scale and Thrive, is on a mission to help business owners scale profitably, improve operations, and build teams that run without them.
We explore Phil’s entrepreneurial journey, including the successful exit of two healthcare clinics, and how he now supports other leaders through coaching and fractional leadership. He shares his Focus Time Framework, which helps owners regain control of their day by:Writing 3 top priorities above a line, 2–3 secondary tasks below it, and staying focused on what’s above the line. We also discuss how strategic financial oversight drives long-term profitability, what makes a business attractive to buyers, and why every owner should be asking what truly matters in life and business.
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Focus Your Time with Phil Wofford
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Phil Wofford, the owner of Scale and Thrive, who helps business owners scale, increase profitability, and build teams that run without them. Phil, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Well, great to have you here and great to talk about some of your frameworks and what you are doing as a coach, as a fractional CFO, COO, as an entrepreneur. So a lot to get into here. But let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it?
Yeah, my personal “Why” is
I just really enjoy using my experience and background to help business owners and CEO grow their business.
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And really that manifests by us really drilling down into their business and understanding what are the key components that affect their profitability, their operations, all the things that are really important. So I just really enjoyed doing that because I’ve done it in my own businesses over the years and so now it’s my chance to give back as well.
Love it. So, you say that you like to drill in and see what prevents people from growing, being more profitable. What do you see as being the most common two or three things that is creating an obstacle for entrepreneurs, business owners?
Yeah, it’s kind of a two-pronged thing. Some businesses don’t understand their KPIs or their key performance indicators. And it may be that they just haven’t been exposed to it and they haven’t created those. In my world that I’ve operated in, those have always been really important items that we use to manage the business day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter. And then you have the other side, the business person that’s really into it and they want to measure everything. They have 48 components of KPIs and it just drives them and the staff crazy trying to keep up with that many.
When really there should be three to six really key things that we're keeping our eyes on,
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depending on the business, that really help guide us to make decisions day by day.
Yeah, that is true. And if you have too many KPIs, then essentially you diluted their power and then it just becomes noise. But if you have a few good ones, then you can really drive the business. And Jim Collins even talks about the profit per X having one big differentiating, and that’s going to be very powerful. Okay. So you’re an entrepreneur as well. And you’re in the process of exiting some clinics in Alaska that you created. Tell me a little bit about how that came about and what did you do there and why are you exiting?
Yeah, I’ve done many international startups and that led me to becoming a business coach and a fractional COO, fractional CFO. And a few years ago, my friend from kindergarten that we grew up together, we ran across the business opportunity in the healthcare field. And so we created a clinic here in the Atlanta area. And subsequently that led to a second one. And we exited the first one, middle of COVID, but we had started up the second one in the middle of COVID. And we just a few weeks ago, finally exited that clinic successfully. And so now I’m redoing and re-kicking off my coaching and consulting practices again, through all of that, that I’ve learned over the years. Again, it’s my chance to give back and really be effective for other business owners. Because really, I’ve been there and done that. I made that payroll every two weeks and struggled on these things and successful on these things. So I think
I bring a lot to the table for the business owner or the CEO.
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Yeah, definitely. And so it’s Atlanta, not Alaska. Sorry for my typo there.
Yeah.
All right. So let’s talk about your frameworks that you have developed as a coach, as an entrepreneur. And we talked specifically about time management and how important that is. You have a framework around that called Focus Time. So please tell me about what you see with time management that is the big obstacle for people and how does your framework help solve that?
Okay, if you’re a business owner, you probably know that a lot of times you’re running around putting out fires, what’s happening today, and so you really never get a chance to work on the business. It’s the whole thing working in the business instead of on the business. Well, a couple of frameworks that I’ve utilized with some of my coaching and consulting clients and personally as well. The first one I call the Above The Line method. And, basically,
what we're doing is taking a look at all the things we have to do today and really establishing those three top things that we need to get done that will move the business along toward our goals.
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Not the ones that necessarily fix things, but those that we’ve said, hey, this is where I want to be in a year, two years, three years. And now I’ve broken that down into a quarterly framework, okay, what moves me forward in that quarterly framework? Well, these two or three items. So, I take those two or three items, write them down on a sticky note, and I draw a line underneath them. Then I take two more items from my to-do list that would be really good if I got to those today. Emphasis on today. So, I add those to that.
So I’m always working and focusing on those items that are above the line on that little 3M note. And I take it and stick it somewhere on my monitor or on the wall because as I’m jumping around from things day to day, as I complete one, or if I do put out that fire, I can look back over at my list very easily and say, okay, let’s get back to that. So that concept has really helped me and some of the business owners I’ve worked with to really stay focused. The key is that focus time. As a business owner, you do have to put out some fires. But you need to schedule time with yourself every day to work on these focus items. So I put an item on my calendar every day that says focus time. Sometimes, it’s 30 minutes. Sometimes, it’s a couple of hours, if I know there’s really something important I got to get done and I treat it just like I’m meeting with someone else. But
I'm meeting myself, looking at my three focus items and picking those to work through.
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And I may not solve that day, but if it doesn’t, it just goes on tomorrow’s. But I’ve moved m
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