Unscripted Small Business Podcast

Energy Money Matrix SOP: Audit Your Time and Stop Working for Your Own Business

Energy Money Matrix SOP: Audit Your Time and Stop Working for Your Own Business

This is a Small Business SOP: a free, do-this-today standard operating procedure pulled from a real operator on the Unscripted Small Business podcast. This one comes from Kimberly Fischer, a restaurant owner, speaker and the author of The Motipulation Method. She was working twelve to sixteen hour days and crying on the couch when she learned how to be an owner instead of an employee of her own company.

Her one piece of advice to small business owners: “Audit your time and have a serious conversation with yourself about what you do with your time.” The tool she uses for that audit is her energy money matrix. It’s a four-box chart that shows you which of your tasks belong on your schedule. You can run it this week with a pen and a page.

Kimberly Fischer quote: I sacrificed time with my daughter for her birthday to go get hamburger buns.
The Play: One Line
Sort every task you do by whether it makes money and whether it gives you energy, protect what keeps you going, and automate, delegate or hire your way out of the rest.

Most owners give up the wrong things first

You probably started your business for some version of what Kimberly wanted: “I wanted to be in control of my schedule. I wanted to be able to have time with my family.” Then the business fills every hour. Her lowest moment was a birthday dinner with her daughter, when the restaurant called because it had run out of hamburger buns and she left to get them. “Anybody could have done that. It didn’t have to be me.”

At the time she “felt like I needed to do everything and that everything required me.” A chart fixes that feeling by replacing it with something you can read. She runs this one at every event she teaches, because when owners see their own page, they can see why they’re worn out.

The four boxes of the energy money matrix

Kimberly’s chart crosses two questions: does this make me money, and does this give me energy? The labels on the action lines are our shorthand for what she describes.

Stay here
Makes money, gives energy
Where she wants about 80% of her day. It also counts if the work has the potential to make money and moves you where you are trying to go.
Hand it off
Makes money, drains energy
The box owners talk themselves into. Find somebody who is good at it. For Kimberly that was bookkeeping.
Protect it
Gives energy, no money
The first thing owners give up, and the thing that lets you show up for the business. For Kimberly, the gym.
Question it
No money, no energy
Ask whether it belongs on your schedule at all. If it does, it should be the first task you automate.

The numbers behind the play

All four come from Kimberly Fischer on the episode. They’re her experience and one owner’s story as she told it, so treat them as examples and not as benchmarks.

12-16
hour days before she changed how she worked
80%
of the day she wants in the top box
~550
days of daily gym that can never be sacrificed
3 hours
one owner spent on a water heater while missing a call worth a hundred grand

The 8-step time audit

Each step is built from what Kimberly described on the episode. Set aside an hour to sort your list once you have it.

1
Audit
List everything you do
Kimberly’s starting question: “what am I doing with my time that is not necessarily being an effective use of my time.” Write down every task you touch, including the small ones you do without thinking. She describes the method as “lining up all the things that you do in your day.” The one-week window is our suggestion, so you catch the tasks that only show up on certain days.
2
Matrix
Sort each task into a box
Put each item in one of the four boxes above. Be honest about energy. Her gut check for the bad boxes is whether a task feels like “the soul is being sucked out of my body.” A task can count on the money side if it moves you forward even when it isn’t paying yet: “It doesn’t necessarily have to be that I am actually making money in it.”
3
Question
Read your chart and ask her questions
Look at the whole page and ask “how much of my day is in a box that doesn’t give me energy and isn’t making me money?” For every task outside the top box, ask “Does this belong on my schedule? Can I find somebody else that can help me do this?” She adds a useful thought: look for someone who is “actually really good at it, that probably loves to do this thing.”
4
Protect
Protect the energy box first
This is the box most owners raid. “The things that don’t make me money, but they give me energy, that was the first thing that I gave up.” Pick the one thing that keeps you healthy and put it on the calendar before the work. For Kimberly it is the gym, every day for about 550 days and counting: “It can never be sacrificed.”
5
Price
Price the hour before you do it yourself
Watch for the sentence “I’ll get it done in an hour.” Her warning: “we don’t realize what that hour is actually costing us.” She tells the story of a house flipper who spent three hours on a water heater and missed a call on a house worth a hundred grand to him. Before you pick up a task, write down what you would do with that hour instead. Louis Swart’s $100/hour rule gives you one way to set the number.
6
Hand off
Automate, delegate or hire
Her three ways to get a task off your plate: “You automate or you delegate, right? Or you hire somebody.” Her own first handoff was bookkeeping, which she did herself from 1999 until she hired someone five years ago. When you hand work to a person, check what they heard, because “just because you said it doesn’t mean they understand it.” The Simple Systems SOP helps you write the process down.
7
AI
Give AI the task, not the question
If a task goes to AI, change what you ask. “I don’t say, how do I do this? I say, how can you do this without me?” Asking how gets you a list, and “Now your AI is telling you what to do.” If you have a team, ask them her question: “what is one problem in our company that we could automate that would make life easier.” For the rollout, see the AI Adoption SOP and the AI Job Description SOP.
8
Repeat
Aim for 80% in the top box, then audit again
Her target for the box that makes money and gives energy: “I feel like 80% of my day should be on that.” You won’t get there in one pass. Move the worst task this week, then run the chart again. The payoff she describes is that “you actually really do love your job again.”

A time audit sheet you can fill in today

Copy this table or print the PDF. The first rows are examples drawn from Kimberly’s stories. Replace them with your own.

TaskMakes money?Gives energy?BoxKeep, automate, delegate or hire
Bookkeeping    
Supply runs    
Daily workout    
Your task    
Take the whole SOP with you

Two printable pages: the play, the matrix, the 8 steps, a fill-in time audit sheet and a checklist. No email required.

📥 Download the Energy Money Matrix SOP (PDF)

Listen & watch

This SOP is distilled from Kimberly Fischer’s episode on the Unscripted Small Business podcast:

The episode also covers her protein latte lesson in prompting, why she says communication is the number one skill, and where the word motipulation came from. That part is in the recap. If your team is the sticking point, read her post I Told You 10 Times, and if you want a longer program, she teaches The Freedom Blueprint. She also recommends Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time.

Energy money matrix: run your first time audit this week

You don’t need a new system to start. List the tasks, sort them, and move one off your plate before Friday. The next time you hear yourself say you’ll get it done in an hour, you’ll know which box it’s in.

More operator SOPs, every week.

Real operators, real playbooks: free SOPs you can run this week. Browse the rest at Small Business SOPs and subscribe to Unscripted Small Business so you never miss one.