What I’m thinking about: How many hours (weeks, months, years?) do business owners waste on tasks that shouldn’t require our brain power at all.
Your business only has ONE true constraint at any given time. Everything else is just noise.
Attack that limitation with all the resources you have. Solve it. Then move on to the next one.
(There will always be another fundamental limitation; the game of business is infinite.)
For our company, the limitation is very clear: Flow of high-quality leads, with larger deals.
More experienced operators. Deeper relationships. Flow of routine transactions, not one-time transactions. Less focus on chasing volume and more creativity and determination to find alpha in a difficult market.
From the “task” point of view of solving this constraint, the best thing for my business is:
- Build relationships (phone/zoom/in person) with land operators and capital partners
- Enter into agreements and develop appropriate agreement structures.
- Create content to continue consolidating our brand as a company that attracts more operators and external capital.
Everything else I’m doing that doesn’t directly move that needle? It’s a distraction at best… and a bottleneck at worst.
Zero Scale: Why Your Business Can’t Afford to Need It
Another concept from Alex Hormozi (small business strategist and author of Offers of 100 million dollars) That’s been running through my head lately: Zero Scale.
Essentially, if your business requires YOU to make critical decisions or shape operational pathways, the process is already broken.
The only way to achieve unlimited scale is to move away from those paths completely.
So here’s what we did over the last few weeks to start fixing this problem…
We launch a time audit process for every repeatable task across the company.
and I want to say each task.
- Publish a podcast (including generating headlines and show notes).
- Preparation of SEO articles.
- Registration of offer submissions from our website.
- Respond to various emails (e.g. title companies, financing inquiries, due diligence follow-up).
- Updating our accounting spreadsheet.
- The process of writing THIS blog post.
Most people underestimate how many tasks are truly “repeatable” within a company. Probably 90%+ or what happens day to day in your business follows the same core process, with only slight variations, with the classic if/then decision trees.
And the longer a business runs, generally, the higher the proportion of repeatable tasks. If a scenario occurs more than once (even if they are more than 6 months apart), I consider that this task is repeatable.
The 15 Minute Time Audit: Finding Every Repeatable Task
While many tasks within your business will easily come to mind as “repeatable,” others will not.
Therefore, our recommendation is to first run a 15-minute hourly audit on the workday over the course of a week (most companies will have a weekly cadence and should capture most repeatable tasks).
And apply this to EVERY employee/contractor…including yourself.
Using AI, we created this 15-minute time audit template that you can save and use in your own business. A sample of a completed time audit is also included.
Practically, only the ‘Task description‘and the’Notes/friction‘Cells should be filled during those 15-minute blocks…the rest can be filled at the end of the day, perhaps with the team, to ensure consistency.
After running this process for a week and observing which tasks are repeatable, you will start to see patterns.
The Loom Time Audit Process (Tactical Breakdown)
Step 1: Trigger a Loom recording for any repeatable process.
Step 2: Verbalize each step as you go. Don’t rush. Don’t try to be more efficient than normal. We want to capture the current time it takes in a normal day.
Step 3: Let the recording run for the entire duration of the task. Get the complete transcript of everything that is verbalized.
Step 4: Connect that transcript to this custom AI Deployment and Time Audit GPT (tested in our own business, credit to our operations manager for building thisis one of the most practical AI tools we’ve created yet) to identify the low-hanging fruit to automate or scale.
CustomGPT analyzes:
- AI automation opportunities (categorized as High/Medium/Low)
- Dependencies between people, data, external systems and processes
- Suggested process improvements (e.g. creating a custom WordPress post template for our SEO articles with a pre-inserted CTA block, which prevents later corrections)
- Approximate time savings for each substep within Loom recording and subsequent steps (including difficulty, tools required, and implementation time)
In particular, I had rough estimates of how long certain tasks took on our team, but when we recorded a full Loom of each task from start to completion, I was surprised how long various tasks took, particularly when it comes to publishing content on multiple platforms.
To demonstrate effectiveness, the time savings initially estimated for our team is dramatic, when averaged over the repeatable tasks we have performed AI analysis on so far. When we implement the new workflows, We are expected to reduce the total time required for repeatable tasks by approximately 40%. (with some individual tasks up to ~80%). When distributed over a month’s or a year’s work, the effect is substantialNot to mention increased equipment capacity, along with reduced burnout and cost savings.
(As always, I credit Callan Faulkner and the team at UnCommon Business for our rapid progress in applying AI to REAL business use cases.)
Data hygiene matters more than ever
Having a single source of truth within your company is becoming more important than ever to get the most informative and accurate answers from LLMs.
This is an ever-evolving process for us, but we’ve consolidated it all into Notion and Google Drive.
For example, during this time audit process, we had Claude (via an MCP connection) build us a custom Notion database to house all time audit and AI analysis videos, all organized and tagged by AI to simplify human (and AI) review.
We can easily analyze which tasks have the highest priority to improve AI workflow… and which simply need better systems or delegation.
You will no longer have to guess which processes consume the most time…
Just clean up the data that we can act on.
Cultural change: no question asked twice
Related to the above (and a guaranteed path to discovering more “repeatable” tasks that may have gone unnoticed in the time audit), this is the standard we are setting internally:
If anyone (including me) has to ask the same question twice, the system has failed.
Questions are answered once, properly documented, and never need to go back to the person who made the original decisions.
This is hard enforce in practice. Especially when you’re moving fast and it feels easier to just ask someone a quick question instead of looking up the answer yourself (if the process is documented in the first place, which probably isn’t).
This creates a culture where people expect to be asked the same question multiple times… which means no one is incentivized to build better systems, and solving the central constraint does not receive the attention it requires.
So I’m following every repeated question that comes my way (and vice versa). And every time it happens, we write it down and fix it permanently.
This is the boring operational work that most entrepreneurs avoid (including us, to be honest!)
But these are the EXACT steps needed to get to the next level.
What this really means for our business
Here is the end of the game:
My time needs to be spent relentlessly attack our main limitation (flow of high-quality leads, with larger deals).
That’s my zone of genius. This is how we multiply our business by 10…
Everything else? It needs to function without me.
We have already begun to see the first results of this change. More time spent on the right things. More efficiency in all areas. And the team is raising their level of decision-making because they are not defaulting.”just ask chris.”
We have financed over $6.25 million in land deals, with industry-leading 41% operating margins and a 100% close rate on committed transactions. And that’s just the beginning… as we relentlessly move away from the noise and obsess over the restriction that matters: a bulletproof subscription coupled with quality carrier relationships.
Send us your best opportunities. $50K+ check sizes. Experienced traders with routine transaction flow preferred.
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Originally published on SeriousLand.capital on January 29, 2026.
