Yes, business leaders like body shop operators have precious little free time. Still, award-winning author Jay Baer and fellow marketing expert Megan Williams have developed a few proven tips for carving out time to refine one's marketing efforts, mainly by reading helpful books. 

Here's a look at a few tips they suggested along those lines to FenderBender readers: 

As told to Kelly Beaton 

BAER: “I’ll tell you what’s interesting: the sales of audible books. Audio sales are up. So, what we’re seeing now is more and more readers are listening to books—on Spotify, or Audible, or on Amazon Alexa or a Google home device. And the nice thing about audio is it’s super time-efficient. So, if you’ve got a commute of some sort, you’re on the treadmill, or you’re using a snowblower or a lawnmower,  you can listen to the book while you’re doing that.” 

WILLIAMS: “What I’ll do is, I’ll have a 90-day goal. And, I’ll block out an hour of my week and just read. 

“Also, sometimes our executive leadership team members will all read the same book. We’ll meet two or three times throughout reading the book and we’ll get drinks and just talk about things we highlighted, or things we thought were interesting, or things we thought we could implement. It makes it fun. We’re able to talk about it amongst ourselves, and it’s like we’re already on the same page. 

“I understand that shop owners are busy, and they’re usually juggling a lot of hats. But, if you make the plan and schedule it out, then I think it’s a lot easier to hold yourself accountable to that.”