What Successful Business Owners Know About Reclaiming Their Days
Time is your most precious resource. Here's how to get it back from the admin chaos stealing it.
You started your business to have more freedom, more flexibility, more time. But somewhere along the way, time became your scarcest resource. It's 11pm. Your family's asleep. And you're processing payroll, chasing invoices, wrestling with disconnected systems—spending hours on tasks that don't grow your business.
Where did all your time go? And more importantly—how do you get it back?
In the latest episode of Handpicked Season 6, host Naomi Simson sits down with Slavic Teplitsky, a leader at Deel—a global people platform that's helping businesses replace up to 16 different vendors with one seamless solution. What unfolds is a masterclass in recognizing when your business has outgrown its systems and what to do about it.
The Time Audit: Where Are Your Hours Actually Going?
"I remember getting to five employees and it was chaos," Naomi reflects in the conversation. "Everybody was working on the same thing."
Sound familiar? There's a critical moment in every growing business where you realize you're spending time maintaining the business instead of building it. But how do you know when you've crossed that line?
Slavic offers a deceptively simple diagnostic: Audit your calendar.
"When you notice that you're not spending your time in front of your customers and really growing the business, that's one big sign that maybe something's not right here," he explains. "Maybe I need to reallocate my time and figure out how to deal with these back office problems."
The question isn't just about productivity—it's about where your most valuable resource (your time) is being spent.
The Love/Loath List: A Time Management Exercise
Naomi introduces a powerful exercise she's used throughout her entrepreneurial journey: creating a "love/loath list" to identify where your time is being wasted.
"What do I love doing? And what do I loath doing?" she asks. "If it was on the loath list, I'd say, is there a system or is this a people problem?"
She shares a compelling example: A colleague who was spending hours on debt collection found the solution wasn't better collection processes—it was switching to cash-on-delivery terms. One system change gave back all those hours instantly.
The insight? Tasks on your loath list aren't just draining your energy—they're stealing your time.
The Hidden Time Drain: Employee Financial Stress
Here's a statistic that should make every business owner sit up and pay attention: Financial stress is the number one reason employees waste time at work.
Think about it. Your team member might be physically at their desk for 8 hours, but mentally calculating whether they can afford an unexpected car repair. According to data from Deel's platform, Australian workers are drawing down on early wage access roughly one to three times between pay cycles—spending it on essentials like fuel, hospital visits, and car repairs.
"We never know what's going on in people's lives," Naomi observes. "They can show up to work, they're ready to go, yet they might not be really available to us or present and they're distracted."
Distracted employees = wasted time. For everyone.
The Anytime Pay Revolution
This is where innovation in HR technology is making a real difference. Slavic introduces Deel's Anytime Pay feature—a fee-free solution that allows employees to access their earned wages daily, up to a certain threshold, before the traditional payday.
"Historically, an employee working and earning their salary is really making an interest-free loan to their employer," Slavic points out. "As I work, I'm not paid out and that's working capital that my employer can deploy somewhere else."
Unlike predatory payday loans or even some fintech solutions that charge fees, Deel's approach is genuinely free for both employers and employees. The system tracks accrued wages in real-time and allows workers to draw down what they've already earned—eliminating the need for expensive short-term loans when emergencies strike.
From 16 Vendors to One Platform: Getting Hours Back Every Week
One of the most striking revelations in the conversation is how much time most businesses waste managing fragmented operations. Deel helps companies consolidate hiring, onboarding, training, payroll, equipment ordering, expense reimbursement, and more—replacing up to 16 different vendors.
Imagine how many hours that saves every single week.
"It's not just all these different systems, it's also the messiest of the problems," Slavic notes. "No one really wants to dive into those things when they're running a business. They want to focus on growing the business, meeting with their customers."
This consolidation isn't just about convenience. It's about reclaiming time. When HR and Finance can work together effortlessly during onboarding or expense processing, you're not spending hours coordinating between systems. Those hours go back into your day.
The Australian Context: Payday Super Changes
For Australian business owners, Slavic addresses the upcoming legislative changes around "payday super"—where superannuation contributions will need to be paid more frequently rather than quarterly.
The good news? Modern platforms like Deel are already built to handle these requirements automatically, with real-time calculations that account for all obligations before determining what employees can access through features like Anytime Pay.
The Philosophy: Systems Give You Time Back
Throughout the conversation, Naomi returns to a core principle that every scaling entrepreneur needs to embrace: "Systems and process sets you free."
Free to do what? Free to reclaim your time.
It's not the sexiest part of business growth. There are no viral marketing campaigns in implementing better payroll systems. But this unsexy back-office work is precisely what gives you back the hours you've been losing.
When you're not spending your evenings reconciling timesheets or troubleshooting payment issues, you can spend that time:
- Developing new products
- Building customer relationships
- Creating strategic partnerships
- Actually enjoying the life you built your business to support
Time is the real metric. Everything else is just a means to get more of it.
Practical Steps: Getting Started
If this conversation has you realizing it's time to upgrade your systems, Slavic offers reassuring news about implementation: "At Deel you can literally have someone hold your hand through any process if you want, because we are so customer obsessed, but it's also super easy and intuitive to do it on the platform yourself."
The setup for features like Anytime Pay is as simple as clicking an enroll button and selecting which employees are eligible—everything else happens in the background.
Beyond Payroll: Financial Wellbeing as a Competitive Advantage
The conversation reveals a deeper truth about modern employment: salary alone isn't enough anymore. Employees need financial literacy support, tools to save automatically, and benefits that help them manage their financial lives.
Slavic shares how Deel offers salary distribution features that allow employees to "set and forget" automatic savings—directing a percentage of each paycheck to savings accounts without having to think about it.
"When they do show up to work and they want to show up to work, they can give it 110%," he explains. "That's what everyone ultimately wants. They don't want to be sitting in front of their desk worried about what's going on in the background."
The Bottom Line: How to Get Your Time Back
This episode of Handpicked isn't about flashy growth hacks or marketing tricks. It's about something more fundamental: getting back the time that back-office chaos is stealing from you.
If you're finding yourself:
- Losing evenings and weekends to admin work
- Spending more time managing systems than customers
- Juggling multiple vendors and wasting hours coordinating between them
- Watching your team distracted by financial stress
Then this conversation reveals exactly how to reclaim those lost hours.
Listen to the full episode now to discover:
- The specific calendar test that reveals where your time is really going
- How to evaluate which time investments will give you the biggest returns
- Real data on how giving employees early wage access saves everyone time
- Why post-COVID remote work makes time-saving platforms more critical than ever
Stop spending time you don't have. Start getting time back.
Thank you to Deel.com for supporting Australian business owners through it's sponsorship of Handpicked Season 6 for more information about Anytime Pay click here
Frequently Asked Questions on How to Get More Time
1. What is the fundamental challenge a successful entrepreneur faces regarding time management?
The fundamental challenge is that a successful entrepreneur’s time becomes the scarcest and most expensive resource as the business scales. The initial growth phase often requires the founder to spend time on low-leverage tasks (admin, troubleshooting). The challenge is recognizing when this manual effort starts to steal time that should be spent on high-leverage activities like strategy, innovation, and customer relationships, thereby stalling growth.
2. What is the most effective way for a time-poor business owner to conduct a 'time audit'?
The most effective way is to conduct a "Love/Loath List" audit. The owner identifies tasks they enjoy (high-leverage, core value creation) and tasks they dislike (often admin, compliance, or troubleshooting). The 'loath list' reveals the strategic priority: these tasks are the prime candidates for immediate automation, systemization, or delegation, as they represent the most significant drain on the owner's valuable time.
3. How does investing in automated systems and processes directly create more time for the business owner?
Investing in automated systems (like consolidated HR or payroll platforms) directly creates more time by eliminating complexity and automating repeatable tasks. This shift moves the business from manual, reactive firefighting to proactive, system-driven stability. By automating low-leverage, non-core activities, the owner reclaims hours that can be reallocated to strategic efforts like developing new products, nurturing customer relationships, or simply enjoying the life they built the business to support.
4. What is the strategic risk of having employees who are constantly distracted by administrative or financial stress?
The strategic risk is a direct and severe erosion of productivity and team alignment. Distracted employees are not fully present for the core work, which leads to reduced quality and wasted effort. A smart leader recognizes that time lost to employee stress is time lost by the business, and proactively implements solutions (like technology-driven financial wellness tools) to mitigate these personal distractions, ensuring the entire team is focused on the shared purpose.
5. As a founder who values time, what is your key advice for making the decision to purchase new time-saving technology?
My key advice is to treat the purchase as a quantifiable investment in return on time (RoT). Don't buy a feature; buy back hours. The decision must be rooted in clear data: Will this system reliably replace hours currently spent on the 'loath list'? Is it simple enough to install without creating new 'chaos'? The technology must act as the ultimate lever, freeing up the owner's most expensive and finite resource.
