TSheets is growing fast and needs to fill 4 sales positions!  This is not for the unprofessional. This is reserved for the elite professionals that can communicate in such a way that influences decision makers within small business vertical markets across the United States.

The perfect candidates for this position will posses the following:

• Preferably based in Idaho
• Strong work ethic
• Likes to have fun
• Familiarity with computers and the internet
• Positive attitude
• Strong verbal communication skills
• Ability to influence
• Tenacity
• Ability to take an account from a prospect to a customer

Primary Responsibilities:

• Sell company services
• Maintain relationships
• Achieve and exceed monthly goals

Working Conditions:

• We work really hard so that we win
• As we win, we have fun!

Compensation:

• Base Salary + Commission
• Designed for a $60k + per year position at base goal attainment level
• No caps on commission

Apply by sending your resume to matt@tsheets.com.

Good Luck!

The Quest

As the CEO of Tsheets.com, a productivity tool, I set out to interview CEOs and find the Top 10 Productivity Tools they use to manage their time. After an initial round of interviewing about 20 CEOs, I started getting a bit nervous, as I wasn’t finding any common tools that that they were using. I considered that the effort might be a flop – that is, until I interviewed Jason Fried of 37Signals. During the conversation I started to see a common thread. The “Light Bulb” moment hit me, and I blurted out, “That’s fascinating. I’m beginning to see some brilliant common threads.” Jason’s immediate response was, “Yeah? Well, what are they?” After mentioning a few of them to him, he said, “Very interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing the end result.”

After I hung up the phone, I realized that the productivity commonalities weren’t tools at all – but rather principles! I knew that I was onto something, but I also knew the title had to change.

One of my final interviews was with Andy Sorcini, an obviously successful social media expert as he is the # 1 Digger in the World! At the end of the conversation, I realized that he had some brilliant concepts that led to extraordinary productivity. Clearly these principles didn’t apply just to the most successful CEOs. Thus the Title:

“Productivity Secrets of the Most Successful People”

Dictionary.com defines Principle as: A fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived. E.g. the principle of modern physics.

As defined, I have truly embraced the idea that principles are as factual as the law of gravity. Only the highly misinformed or the delusional are going to argue with you that jumping off a building results in a fall; yet the same applies to business principles.

***This document has been abbreviated to accommodate quick reading; please visit mattrissell.com for the full conversation***

From C-level executives of billion dollar organizations to companies of smaller, yet successful entrepreneurs, here are the resulting Top 10 Productivity Secrets of the Most Successful People:

1. Passion!

This is your “Want”. The very premise of all productivity is a love for what you do. I asked every interviewee, “If you could take everything that we have talked about and boil it down to just one thing – What would be the key to productivity”? The most common response? Passion.

For many – intellectuals, to be specific – this can be a tough concept because it deals with heart and not the head. Passion doesn’t need to be for the product itself, but what the product or service does. E.g. A productivity tool in and of itself may not be a thing of passion – but the end result of increased productivity could be.

Productivity Principle Summarized: If you’re not passionate about what you are doing – then stop now!

2. Surround yourself with people of Excellence

Notice that I didn’t simply say, “hire great people” but rather surround yourself with people of excellence. The obvious is to hire great people to be productive, but personal productivity goes MUCH further. Who is your mentor? Who are your friends? The same principle that applies to my three year old daughter applies to us as business leaders: Show me your friends and I can tell you what you’ll be doing in 5 years. Powerful isn’t it?

As I mentioned above, hiring great people isn’t the end-all but is significant in surrounding yourself with people of excellence. When you hire excellence, they bring both the problem and the solution. It doesn’t matter how you describe them: Great, Phenomenal, Extraordinary, Best of the Best – when it comes to your people DO NOT settle for “Good”.

Productivity Principle Summarized: Surrounding yourself with excellence personally and professionally defines your current productivity as well as your future.

3. Create an Environment where Great People Can Succeed

It’s one thing to surround yourself with excellence; it’s another to keep excellence around you! While I’ve heard the saying many times “hire people smarter than yourself.” The most successful take it step further and say “why spend so much time and money recruiting smart people and then allow insecurity to take over and spend all of your time making sure that everyone knows how smart you are?”

Examples of how to create environments of excellence for productivity:

• Pay them well – visit www.mattrissell.com for out of the box ideas
• Show Gratitude – This caught me by surprise and came up often enough to stand on it’s own as a productivity principle. See principle number nine.
• Understand the Vision – See mattrissell.com for a great example of employee vision in the Roman Empire.
• Do not be delusional – others are not motivated by building your dream
• Allow for creativity
• Candor is required

Productivity Principle Summarized: Hire the best and treat them as the best, and the productivity will follow.

4. Simplicity!

What a paradox this one became! This was the most frequently occurring topic in my interviews with the most content, and yet shouldn’t it have been simple? I discovered that the most successful leaders keep things as simple as possible, so much so, that even leaders of the most technologically advanced companies keep things relatively low-tech to stay productive!

A familiar example given was to pick one project and complete it; not getting caught up in the tyranny of the urgent by multi-tasking. Taken a step further, that example was compared to the difference between a shotgun and a rifle. A 12-gauge shotgun cartridge has two times the amount of powder that a .270 rifle cartridge has. Yet because the energy is spread out between so many different objects, it’s practically useless beyond 50 yards. While a .270 cartridge, with less energy focused on one object, can be effective out to 1,000 yards. We are back to the relationship between productivity and physics again, eh?

Productivity Principle Summary: Do one thing at a time with less energy, and you’ll make a great impact.

5. Know your Motivation

This is your “Why”. Many confuse this with their “Want” or passion, but these are two very different items. The “Why” is your motivation to build your passion. The “Why” is critical to productivity because it’s what keeps you going when times get tough.

Where are you headed in your life? Who do you want to be in 10 years? These are big but important questions pertaining to productivity.

You may be thinking your motivation is money, however my interviews confirmed the timeless quote of Warren Buffet, “Money has to be the by-product of your definition of success – not your definition of success.”

Some examples from the CEOs and business leaders interviewed:

• To become the standard
• To be the best or to win
• To purchase the NY Jets (J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets!)

Conversely, an example of a poor, but common, motivator for entrepreneurs, has been: “To be focused on the exit plan… To plan on being bought out for $X amount in two years”

Productivity Principle Summarized: Know the answers to your “Why” Questions before you run into difficulties; Money isn’t enough of a motivator.

6. “Secret Sauce”

If you want to have a provocative conversation with successful people, talk to them about two things: Getting stuff done and their ‘Secret Sauce’. On it’s own, this is at least a two-drink conversation.

It was unbelievable to me that all the successful people I spoke to nailed this. They all knew what makes them a limited edition or gives them the competitive advantage.

Some examples:

• Their opinion that others want to hear
• Love for people
• The Gift of ‘understanding what people want to know’ even when it changes
• Genetics
• The people that they surround themselves with

7. Make your decisions be great

Notice that I did not say, “Make great decisions”. Overwhelmingly, the successful people out there say things like, “Just make a decision, and if it’s not a good one, learn from it and go on”. We all make bad or “wrong” decisions at times but on the other hand, the cost of not making a decision is much more expensive than making one. Beware of the trap of becoming paralyzed in your productivity from fear of making wrong decisions.

Here’s a perfect example: An IBM Executive made a “bad decision” that cost the company $3 million. The next day, he started packing up his office. Thomas Watson, the CEO, walked by his office and asked what he was doing. The exec responded that he was ready to be let go because of his “wrong” decision. Watson’s response? “B.S. You better not leave me now – I just invested $3milion training you.”

It’s not about right or wrong decisions in building productivity, it’s about what’s working or not working and constantly adjusting… Are you Familiar with the definition of insanity?

Productivity Principle Summarized: More productivity is lost from indecision than from making the wrong decisions.

8. Balance

This is for long-term productivity and shoots up to the top of the list for most of the successful people I interviewed. A quote that absolutely stopped me in my tracks was from John Pollard, CEO of Jott.com. “Anyone can work 16 hour days. The secret to being productive is being able to get done what needs to be done in an eight to ten hour day, still get a workout in, have a successful marriage, relationship with your kids, and sustain life outside of work; otherwise, you’ll lose the “Why”. You need balance in your life if you are going to stay at peak productivity.

Another comment I heard all too often in my interviews was, “I’m not too sure how much longer I can keep this up”.

Productivity Principle Summarized: Balance is essential to stay at peak productivity for the long haul.

9. Execute

Productivity requires action.

Few people actually execute; rarely do they say what they are going to do and then roll up their sleeves and get to work. While dreaming, talking, and thinking can all be included in the productivity world, the successful don’t forget the “do”.

The most successful also execute on the important things – not just the urgent. An easy phrase to help distinguish the difference is a quadrant (learn more on the Vlog on mattrissell.com). Kevin Dixie, CEO of Fuel My Blog, had a great point regarding executing on the important: when he goes through his list of tasks, he finds the item he wants to do the least and does it first, as it’s usually the most important.

Productivity Principle Summarized: Execute. Execute. Execute.

10. BUILD YOUR OWN SYSTEM!

Surely we’ve all heard of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system. Not one CEO or successful leader referred to his name or system. . While Mr. Allen has good solid principles in his book, the applications that he suggests are built for a very small % of the population.

To accentuate the point that a successful system needs to be “your own”; here are some quotes from the Most Successful when comparing their methods to the standard.

• “I do things different”
• “I don’t do things right”
• “I do things backwards”

While they may not do things according the to book, the most successful each have a system of productivity that works.

Productivity Principle Summarized: A productivity system is integral to success; however, must be made your own.

The CEO of TSheets, a web based time tracking software, Matt Rissell talks with the Oprah Winfrey of the internet, Liz Strauss, about closing the gap between the online and offline business worlds. In her post entitled Part 1: A Timely Interview with Matt Rissell of TSheets, she asks Matt about what makes him tick and the theory of “Time”. Liz closes this post with a cliff hanger…. Check out the post, give it a read, and engage in the conversation!

Whether you are a Coal Miner in Pennsylvania, a freelance blogger, or a CEO of a Time Tracking Software company, chances are ‘You’ve got your mind on your money, and your money on your mind’, both personally and professionally.

From the time that I was 7 years old, I have always been a saver. I remember having $75 in my wallet at the age of 7! That was big money. When I turned 21, I began tracking my net worth on a homemade spreadsheet that I have since updated twice per year… It’s been amazing to watch the growth.  Granted, I still have a bit of trouble trying to get my windows 98 document to open, but you get my point.

In addition to tracking my net worth, I have always been passionate about building budgets and forecasting revenues and expenses, a CFO-like role for my personal finances. Then the last business I built had a very complex financial model with about 100+ line items on the Income Statement. After about 6 months of studying my own financials and with assistance from CFO’s of large corporations, I became an expert on financial engineering. Even to the point of doing several consulting projects for businesses of which my hourly bill rate was $925/hour to build their financial pro forma to get both a clear picture of the past and build a road map for the future.

Someday on my own personal blog, I will go further in details on how to do financial engineering; however, for now I’d like to share with you the absolute best Personal Financial Management tool that I have found on the market. It’s incredible and it’s free! In full disclosure, I get absolutely no kick-backs or benefits for me writing about this software, it’s just simply the single best tool that I have found for you to manage your personal finances.

The tool is called Yodlee.com. If you have a budget or are considering building a budget and don’t want the arduous process every month of having to update it, Yodlee.com will completely automate your budgeting process. You can customize each expense item from different stores and each revenue item to automatically go into your desired expense category. For those of you who are in the 60% of American’s who struggle with debt category, you can even set up your own “get out of debt” plan!

After building four different companies and having a fairly complicated personal income statement and balance sheet, this tool has taken my arduous personal monthly budget process that on average took 5 hours and turned it into a 30 minute cake walk!

Needless to say, the financial tool Yodlee.com has the endorsement of Matt Rissell . . . and his accountant!

Blackberry buzzing at 4am to report previous days’ sales figures. Review budget and change sales forecast. 6am Breakfast with potential investor. Blaze through 100+ emails. Oh, and don’t forget the ‘Tweets‘ in between. All this and more before 9am. And do they love it? Do they live and breathe it? You bet they do. And how do you get a CEO to unguardedly show their frustration? How do you get the coolest of cool to boil like a 4^th of July lobster pot?

Bring up the topic of “Productivity”.

As the CEO of TSheets, a productivity tool for business leaders, I have set out on a quest to find and interview CEOs on every level to find out what makes them tick, what makes them productive, and what their “secret sauce” is. I am calling this list the “Top 10 Productivity Tools CEO’s use to Manage their Time” From Steve Jobs to the start up CEO in their garage, I want YOU to weigh in.

My goal is to get into the heads of business owners on all levels, from local mom and pop drycleaners to Fortune 500 companies and the best-of-the-best Web 2.0 executives to find out how they stay productive and what they do to stay on top of their game.

So far, I have interviewed 15 CEO’s such as Frank Gruber, Brad Feld and Seth Godin, and there is a common thread – Passion! These CEOs are all relentlessly passionate about getting things done and making things happen but often get bogged down in the minutia.

Over the next few weeks, I want to speak with 50 CEOs on every level about this very issue. Specifically, I would love to hear from guys like Kevin Rose, Pete Cashmore, Jason Fried, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Arrington, Marc Benioff and Steve Jobs.

The icing on the cake: I have been asked to present my findings to Shel Israel and Robert Scoble on their new Work Fast Show. So consider this a shout out to CEO’s everywhere!

If you are a CEO ~ Here’s how to weigh-in: Email me (matt@tsheets.com) or Click here for updates on Twitter.

Let’s get into the minds of the best of the best!

And finally, the winner of $500 and the opportunity to join the TSheets team! We’ve really enjoyed reviewing all of the entries that came in. The following entry stood out because it quickly engaged us, provided a laugh, and drove home the point of TSheets – to simplify the time tracking process for anyone and everyone.

Be sure to watch our blog for upcoming posts from Dan. Here’s his first (and winning) post – enjoy!

3000 BC: Fred Flintstone ends day by listening for high pitched squawking bird. Quarry Foreman spends hours pouring over timestones at the end of the week.

1634: Bells signal farmers to and fro the fields. Hungover bell maid causes hours of lost wages as farmers stand poised at edge of fields.

1868: Steam whistles pierce the industrial landscape. Drought results in days of lost productivity.

1913: IBM introduces the first ‘Punch Clock’. Band Aids become standard working apparel.

2008: TSheets simplifies your life and brings employee time tracking to a new millennium.

How many times has the wife/husband/significant other heard, “Babe…I’m so right there with you….just as soon as I get these time sheets calculated.”? How many times have you missed the game because, let’s be honest, assembling timesheets for payroll, while important, is as about as exciting as watching the grass grow?

TSheets was born from the best stuff on earth: necessity. Whether you’re tracking 5 employees or 5000, TSheets is a simple to use, LAMP based app that can keep track of all your employees.

Running a single office? Keep track of all your core employees, consultants, developers, freelancers, etc. all in one location. You can even monitor real time. Running multiple locations across the city, state, country, world? Man, you should own stock in Excedrin, as that has nightmare written all over it. Fear not young captain of industry… TSheets can take the tough sheet out of your time sheet.

Employees forget to clock in/clock out (when…when dear lord will they learn)? No problem, anyone you grant admin rights to can clock an employee in/out at any time. What about the subcontractors I’ve got running the electrical today? Bossman got a blackberry (and you KNOW he does) or other web-enabled device? No problem, give him the URL, and he can clock in/out from anywhere in the world. Better yet, your code ninjas strutting around with their new iPhone? TSheets has developed the TGadget that not only works as a Google widget, but functions flawlessly with an iPhone. What about that hacker we just hired to test our security features, I just have a feeling he’s going to change the clock time on his home machine, and cheat me outta 20 hours of ‘work’ while he’s off fragging somewhere. Consider that hacker PWND, ‘cause all times are stored in centrally in UTC time.

Whether you’re running a tiny (read self employed) business, or charting your way to the stars (read the guy in the armani), if you’re dealing with ye old adage, ‘time is money’, TSheets is a product you can’t afford to be without.

For more on TSheets, their products and services, check ‘em out at TSheets.com

*** Let us know what you think of our winner’s post by commenting below or email Matt Rissell – matt@tsheets.com ***

Coming in 2nd Place in our hunt for the best Copy Writer:

We love to elaborate about the money saving features of TSheets, but there is a human element that often gets overlooked. Transitioning to TSheets offers your employees a level of empowerment that a regular time clock cannot.

TSheets entrusts employees with a higher level of personal responsibility. In a company still using a time clock, a manager may not hear about an employee’s lack of attendance until a report is given to him / her on a daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis. In some cases, a habitually late employee can go without reprimand for weeks! Welcome to job indifference.

With the immediate link TSheets creates between the worker and their employer, timely employees are instantly awarded with a sense of accomplishment. More importantly, untimely employees will find immediate attention to their attendance to be refreshingly respectful of their importance to the company.

There’s also an element of privacy that employees will appreciate as time clocks are typically located in high traffic areas of the office. A late employee has no choice but to clock their card in public view of other workers. This can lead to personal embarrassment or detrimental office gossip. By removing the time clock and transitioning to TSheets, records become private between employee and boss. An employee can login from their authorized workstation and keep his / her arrival time out of the minds of curious co-workers.

Employee empowerment may be an ancillary aspect of the TSheets experience, but using TSheets to establish a closer personal relationship with employees will definitely lead to a more productive workplace.

***Let us know what you think of our second choice by commenting below or emailing Matt Rissell at matt@tsheets.com***

Starting out the count down to #1, below is the entry that took 3rd place!

Voice your opinion by posting a comment or emailing the CEO, Matt Rissell <matt@tsheets.com>.

The freedom of running a business can be one of the most satisfying and rewarding ways to live your professional life, oftentimes offering personal and financial profits that far exceed working for others. Yet, with these rewards come the obligatory headaches that are inherent to operating any business—such as human resource management, billing issues, and sales stagnation to name a few. Getting caught up in these problems can drastically affect organizational efficiency that in turn cuts deeply into profitability.

However, nothing cuts into profitability more than the cost of labor—it is the greatest expense of every business, and the effective management of this resource can dramatically improve profit margins. It is with this all-too-common headache in mind that the Tsheets program was developed, for there clearly had to be a better way to control labor costs that didn’t require a great deal of expense and energy in and of itself.

Tsheets is an extremely cost-effective system that allows managers and business owners to control labor costs in a wide variety of ways. Whether you are trying to get a “big-picture” snapshot, keep tabs on a particular employee, or detect seasonal patterns, Tsheets offers you a simple and easy way to get a much tighter grip on your biggest expense.

In addition, Tsheets also offers the ability to greatly reduce payroll expense—automatically tracking, tabulating, and reporting individual hours worked to take most of the headaches out of processing your monthly payroll. Many of our customers have found that our product is more than worth the expense just for the benefit of this feature alone.

Finally, perhaps the greatest thing about Tsheets is that it can be accessed via computer or cell phone through any Internet connection, allowing mobile business owners the ability to track their operations from just about anywhere. This can prove to be an invaluable tool, for many of our customers find themselves getting real worth out of being able to study their labor costs and patterns at anytime as the navigate the hectic world of business.

So, whether you are running a small little shop or a multi-million dollar international corporation, Tsheets prides itself on offering customized solutions to your particular set of labor cost problems. Please take advantage of our free 30-day trial now and see what we can do for you.

In April, TSheets realized it’s need for a copywriter… As most businesses do, we posted the job opportunity and got a stack of resumes. However, that hiring process is daunting and usually isn’t very effective. Then, we got the brilliant idea – Let’s have a contest! Thus, we created the Rock Star Copywriter Contest and presented it to the world, which gave candidates the opportunity to show us their best “stuff”. They had to write a blog post about timesheets or TSheets and the winner gets $500, plus an opportunity to join the TSheets team!

Now – The time has come to unveil the results! Over the next 3 days, we will be releasing the winners starting with 3rd Place counting down to # 1.

Thank you to all for sending in your submissions… Choosing the winners was by no means an easy task. The TSheets team cast their votes and the deliberation went on for several days. However, we believe that the selected pieces best capture the essence of TSheets and we are pleased to announce the winners!

Without further ado let’s get to the results…

Matt Rissell

P.S. Feel free to post your thoughts on the contestants’ posts either through the comment box or by email to matt@tsheets.com.

Are you in sales? This one is for you!

Finally, an effective way to forecast and measure the effectiveness of your sales efforts!

We all know that managing results is NOT what helps build successful sales people but rather, managing the actions that lead to results. An unexpected benefit of a time tracking tool has been discovered.

Building on the notion that an effective sales manager manages activities vs. results, normally managers accomplish this by consistently reviewing each sales persons pipeline. At least this is the way they USED to do it! Now there is a much more effective way to manage their activities – tracking their time!

We have done case studies of sales managers that have more effectively managed their sales team’s performance through tracking their time.

Here’s how:

1. You need a time tracking device that can be used from the field (hhhmmm… let’s see, where could I get one of those? TSheets, maybe? Although a shameless plug, this can truly make the difference between big commissions and the unemployment line.)

2. Set up job codes such as “Pay Time”, “No-Pay Time”, “Cold Calls”, “Drive Time”, “Meetings”, “Emails”, etc…

3. Then as you or your sales people go throughout your day, track time by changing job codes.

At the end of the month you have a very clear picture of why you are successful and/or effective in one area of your life but not the other. For instance, an unsuccessful sales person might get in trouble for having a small pipeline and thus missing quota for a month. However, that same sales person could have been spending 60% of their time cold calling and just need training on how to cold call more effectively.

Bottom line – if you want a clear picture of the effectiveness of your sales team – track their time!