Jade Boyd: So I want to start this episode by having like a little check base on where you’re at in your business and just encouraging you to take a second to reflect on this last year and think about all of the things that you’ve accomplished up until this point, all of the clients that you’ve worked with this year, how much your business has changed since even one year ago, and no matter what time of year you’re listening to this episode, just taking the time to reflect on what has been going on in your business and getting honest with yourself on how it’s really felt for you. It’s easy as a business owner to stay in seasons of business where you might be coasting or you might be accepting that this is just the way that things are without taking that step back to realize the potential in your own business because when you’re in it 24 seven it is.

It’s kind of hard to see the bigger picture and get that perspective. But in this episode, we’re talking about how to earn more while working less. And so in your business right now, if you are feeling overworked, like you literally can never get to the bottom of your to do list that 5 p. m. rolls around or School pickup time rolls around and you’re still rushing to get things done, urgent things done, things with deadlines done, or you’re dropping balls or feeling like you are constantly making up for work outside of what you have designated as work hours, or you’re just scrambling to find time to work in general.

And yet, despite all of that, time, all of that effort, all of that pressure, all of the work that you are getting done, you’re still not making enough money or hitting the revenue goals that you want to, or hitting that plateau in your business where you’ve kind of maxed out the amount of clients that you can take on.

And you know that there has to be a next level, but also you’re out of time. You don’t have any more time to spend on taking on more clients and that cannot be the solution. That’s what we’re talking about today. And I want to paint this picture because I just want you to know that wherever you’re at in your business or however busy or burnout you’re feeling, I want you to know that there is a different way to run your business. There is an easier and simpler way to build your business. That actually helps you to earn more money. It does require doing things differently and maybe flipping some of the notions you’ve had about your business on their head or getting outside of it or getting that outside perspective to help you see what’s really going on and the potential for things to change.

But owning a business and running a business that allows you time freedom where you’re not chained to your desk where you’re not feeling like you’re constantly torn between your family and your business or that you’re constantly figuring out how to get things done for your clients and how to get things done for your house and for your kids and just feel like your life is chaos and still not earning enough money for you to even feel like it’s worth it.

That should not be the status quo and that is not sustainable in the long run. So if your vision is really to build a business that is sustainable. If you are in this and you know that running this business is your plan A and that this is something you’re really dedicated to and passionate about and you want to make this work, today I want to give you three things that you can do to earn more and work less next year.

And again, no matter what time of year you’re listening to this, within the next year, three things that you can work on or move towards so that you are able to create more time and financial freedom in your business so that it does feel life giving, that it does feel like it’s sustainable, and it is something that contributes to your life and isn’t draining you and taking away from your time for your health or time for your family.

And like I said, this is not complicated. What it takes to scale a business, and when I say scale, I think of scaling in terms of earning more while working less. The two are just synonymous in my mind, because if you want to earn more and work less at some point, you’re going to have to scale.

But what it takes to scale your business is not complicated. It does take hard work. It does challenge you. It does push you to become the type of business owner and the type of CEO that you probably haven’t been before, but it’s not rocket science. It’s actually very simple. It’s just finding. the courage to make these shifts in your business and finding the strategy that it takes to make these shifts in your business.

That’s the part that takes some time, but it’s not complicated. So if you feel like it’s going to take a million years or it’s not even possible for you to move in this different direction, I want you to know that’s not true. And I talk to business owners who feel like that all the time, because again, when you’re in it, it just, does feel impossible, which is why I love doing discovery calls with people because it allows me to actually dig into their goals and what’s happening in their business and figure out where they want to go and give them like a quick roadmap on yes or no, is this going to be possible? And it’s one of my favorite things to do. So helping people scale businesses is what I do as a business coach. And if you’re in that place of struggling and want an outside opinion or an outside perspective to look into your business and you’re interested in business coaching, everyone who applies for my coaching program gets a free discovery call. And like I said, I love hopping on those calls and helping in whatever way I can, because I have such a heart for the people that I work with and business owners who were in that place.

I was that person. It’s a hard place to be in. It can feel really hopeless, especially if you’re in it alone and no one else really sees the behind the scenes of what’s really happening in your business. It’s easy to paint this picture of like, oh, I’m fully booked. I’m really busy. For other people, it looks like I’m doing really well, but when the behind the scenes doesn’t match and there’s that inconsistency and incongruency there, that can feel really lonely.

I’m really passionate about what I do and helping the people that I serve get out of that place. And in this episode, I want to share three things. These aren’t all of the things, but these are three main things that you can be looking at if you do want to scale your business within the next year.

So the first one that is absolutely crucial is packaging an offer that will scale. Not every offer will scale. There’s many offers that will cap out your capacity where there’s literally nothing that you can do to earn more money without putting in more hours. And so figuring out a way to package your expertise into a business model or an offer model that does allow you to earn more while working less is absolutely pivotal if you want this strategy to work. And I believe in less but better in basically every area of business and life. But that’s true with your offers too. You don’t need a million offers. You just need one offer that can scale because by nature and offer that scales creates this unlimited capacity for you to earn money by doing more of the same thing and not putting in extra time for every new client who comes in your door.

And especially if you’re just making the switch towards scaling, start out with one offer and put your focus and your energy towards scaling that offer before you move on to doing more than one thing. And there might be a time in your business where you do have the team and capacity in place to do more than one offer and to do them well.

But like I said, if you’re already in the place of being super burnout and overwhelmed, start with one offer and put your energy behind it, and that will absolutely change the direction of your business. If it’s a solid offer that is very clear, you know who your audience is, you can deliver that amazing transformation.

It positions you as the expert. It allows you to step into your zone of genius and do the things that you’re really good at that drive the needle that actually do light you up. It starts feeling exciting again.

And with a couple people that I’ve been talking to recently with all of my clients, I start out with an exercise to project their financials and figure out what their capacity is and what their earning capacity is based on what their offers currently are. And for a few people that I’ve talked to recently.

They’ve been really frustrated by this because, like, it feels like I should be able to make more money doing this thing. It feels like I should be able to be successful doing this thing. And I think if you don’t take the time to look at the numbers, it can be really disappointing at the end of the year when you realize you did work as hard as you could work.

And it just wasn’t possible for you to reach the financial goals that you really needed to reach. So step one is to make sure that your offers are aligned to your revenue goals and that they are setting your business up to scale so that you are able to make more money and uncap your earning potential while also working the same amount of hours or less.

The second thing is to productize and systemize your service. So even after you have that scalable offer, it’s still going to take you some work to systemize it because whenever you create a new offer, your version 1. 0 is not going to be the same as your version 10. 0, right? There’s going to be some tweaking and adjusting and perfecting that happens as you gain experience, packaging your expertise in that different way and building that client experience and getting client feedback and improving your service and adding the things that might be missing when you’re starting out and removing the things that aren’t actually helpful based on what you get from when you’re actually working with clients.

And so the next step is to move towards productizing your service. And this basically means systemizing it so that you’re not working really hard to deliver this. Even if it’s a scalable offer, it still needs to be systemized. And of course, custom offers don’t scale, but also. Non automated offers do not scale.

You should not be spending any amount of time onboarding people. It should be automatic with your processes.

You shouldn’t have to be consistently present in your business to give people information that they need as they’re moving through your offer. All of that should be automated or at least templated if it has to be custom, so that when you are offline and when you are working less, when you cut back to four day work weeks or when you take a maternity leave or when you take a vacation, any time sensitive information that goes out can be sent out without you having to be physically present.

And when you do have less offers and you’re focused on that one offer that scales, especially starting out, systemizing your offer gets 10 times easier because It’s really hard, it takes so much time if you have 30 different offers to try to systemize all of them. It’s a lot of moving parts and it can be really confusing and honestly really expensive if you’re paying for automation software and a bunch of different platforms and have a bunch of different offers that require different payment options and yeah, it just gets expensive both in terms of time and money to systemize that many offers.

But when you are really focused on one offer and making it as simple and streamlined and effective and consistent so that everybody who comes into your business gets the same quality experience. It gets that much easier.

And also when you are able to systemize your offers, and this is true, whether or not you’re doing one on one services or you have a more scalable offer. It creates a better experience for your clients because they are getting that consistent communication from you. They are getting the right information at the right time. They know what to expect. They know what the next steps are. It’s clear what you need from them or what information they need to get you for the project to move forward. You give them their deliverables faster because this is systemized. You’re not trying to figure out, oh, what do I need to do this week, every single week, or dropping the ball or forgetting parts of your workflow because it’s systemized.

Nothing slips through the cracks, right? And if you do want to earn more, while working less, having as much off your plate as possible and having as much systemized as possible so that when you bring in a team, it’s easy for them to get things done and know what their responsibilities are and know how things work, it’s going to get that much easier if your services are productized and systemized.

Also, one last note on that is that you can charge more when you create a better experience too. So that’s part of the earn more part of productizing and systemizing your services. People think that if you make something templated or if I systemize it, it’s not going to be as great of an experience or there’s not going to be that personal touch.

But there are so many ways that you can add personal touches into your services, especially if you’re still seeing your clients face to face with a lot of the behind the scenes being automated and it only creates. A more valuable experience because it’s more convenient. Again, none of the balls get dropped because everything is set up to run smoothly.

Whether or not you’re having a sick day or a vacation day, or it’s your birthday and you took time off, things run smoothly no matter where you’re at in your life, in your headspace. And when you can deliver faster deliverables to your clients, better deliverables to your clients, more consistent deliverables to your clients, your reputation for being good at what you do only gets better, your referrals increase because you’re known for doing good work, right?

There’s only good things that happen when you systemize your business. And of course, add your personality to it. Add your gifts to your intake forms. Do discovery calls if you need that face to face interaction, but you shouldn’t be recreating the wheel from scratch every single time.

Okay, the third one and most uncomfortable one is letting go of control and getting work off your plate by either, we talked about automating in your client workflow, but also in other parts of your business, but automating. hiring, outsourcing, and delegating. Because the more you work, the less you make.

And I think in our culture, we have this notion of, oh, the harder I work, the more I work, the more time I put in, the more money I’m going to make. But that’s just not true when it comes to scaling a business. If your business is dependent on you working more to earn more, it’s not set up to scale. And when you do have to work more in order to make more money, you cap your capacity.

So the more you work, the less you make, the less your business is dependent on you. And the more your business is set up to run without you or with you only doing those pivotal functions in your business, the more potential you have to make money. So I want to flip the script. Let’s stop thinking about business as the more I work, the more I make, because the more you believe that.

the less likely you are to actually achieve it because you need to separate the time that you’re working from the amount of money that you’re making. So let’s say it again. The more you work, the less you’re going to make. You have to let go of control and start getting things off your plate if you want to grow.

And of course, it’s easy to outsource and delegate things that you don’t like doing. Or that you’re not the expert at you’re not good at doing. I think bookkeeping is the number 1 example of this. It’s definitely the 1st thing that I outsourced in my business and I went to business school. Like, I understand all the financials around doing it, but I’m not a software expert.

And when it comes to accounting and bookkeeping, it really is being. A software expert and knowing how to categorize things and make sure things are reconciled in the correct way. It doesn’t even matter if you understand finances, but if you also don’t understand finances, it becomes this really stressful, hard thing to do.

And so like I’m saying, it’s easy to outsource or delegate things that you don’t like doing. There might be stuff like that’s on your plate that you dread doing every single month that you’re not good at, that you’re not the expert in, that you hate doing, that would be easy. Like if anyone else could do this for me, I would let them do it.

But what it’s harder to do is to delegate things that you do like doing, that you are the expert in. And when it comes to scaling, you’re going to have to do a little bit of both.

So the first step to outsourcing would be to ask yourself, is this a $100 task or a $20 task? And the amounts are going to differ. I know everyone has a different billing rate or however you might do it or however you might set up your financial goals and how much time you want to work. But. In general, just thinking about your to do list and the things that you’re responsible for and all the things that need to happen in your business and asking yourself, what are the $100 tasks?

The things that are actually driving financial results in my business that people are paying me well to do. And then what are the $20 tasks? Again, like bookkeeping, sending emails, all the admin work. scheduling social media posts. What are the $20 tasks in your business that somebody else could take on for you?

And the less $20 tasks you’re doing, the more $100 tasks you can do, right? In the same amount of time, making more money while working less. And then at some point, If you are growing your business to the point where you’re growing a team, you might have to delegate some of those $50 tasks, $70 tasks, even $100 tasks, and bring people into your business that can serve your clients just as well as you can.

Especially if you’re going the agency model, or if you want to take extended time off, you’re going to need people in your business who are just as good or better than you are. That’s not a bad thing. You don’t have to be the smartest person in your business. You should be hiring people that are smarter than you, either in the area that they’re assigned to, or people coming into your business who are standing in for you while you’re away.

Getting to that point where you’re outsourcing $100 tasks is the point where you create real. Time freedom, because you are truly separating you being present and your ability to make money, right? Not every business owner wants to build an agency or build a team or give up any one on one time with their clients, and that’s not a bad thing either.

That’s only one route to scaling your business, but no matter what your route to scaling is, you’re gonna have to delegate and let go of control of some things that you hate doing and probably some things that you do like doing too.

And every business owner, including me, has to overcome this belief that no one can do it like I can. And I think that this is a dangerous phrase. I can see why people say it, especially when it comes to personal branding. Nobody is exactly like you, and I think that’s true. But it doesn’t mean that nobody else is capable of doing your job and serving your clients and getting them a transformation, right?

We all have competition, and I know people say competition doesn’t exist. That’s another thing that I have a little bit of beef with because we all do have competition. It’s a fact of life. Yes, you’re unique. Yes, you have unique relationships. You’ve built trust and credibility. You’ve established yourself and proven you’re worth in different areas and in different ways than other people have. In that sense, people may not consider hiring anyone else besides you, but there are people who can get people the same results that you’re getting them.

I’m a business coach. There are a lot of different business coaches out there who promise the same thing. That’s just the fact of life. People who hire me resonate with my messaging and my content, but it doesn’t mean that I’m the only person who’s capable of getting somebody a specific result in their business, right?

Nobody talks or acts or has the same values that I do, but other people can do it like I can when it comes to delivering results. And we all have to overcome that belief that I’m irreplaceable and no one can do it like I can do it. Because as long as we believe that, the longer we keep ourselves in that box of, the more work I do, the more money I’m going to make, right? Because no one can do it like I do it. And it’s easier to let go of that in the small tasks because bookkeeping, yeah, someone else can do it a lot better than I can do it. That’s an easy thing to let go of. But coaching, that’s harder to bring in support in that area of my business.

And that’s true for everybody, no matter what industry that you’re in.

And other than delegating and outsourcing, I also just want to say that no one scales a successful business alone. Like I said, it is not complicated, but it does take work and it does require you to become a person and a business owner that you’ve never become before. And that is a really, really uncomfortable journey and it’s not a straight and narrow journey and there are many roadblocks and challenges along the way and nobody does it alone.

It can be extremely lonely if you try to go that path thinking I can do this by myself. We all need support. I was just talking to a business owner on Instagram this week who is saying that business just feels really lonely and, she’s just struggling with where she’s at right now. And I reminded her like, business is hard for me too. I think a lot of people look at business coaches and just think, oh, they’ve gotten past that point, they know the things and everything is like all easy. And there’s probably people in your life that you think of. Where you’re thinking, oh, they made it or they got to point A, B and C. Now it’s easy. But whenever you reach a certain level, there’s always going to be a next level for you to get to a next challenge for you to overcome something that you’ve never encountered before.

And we all need support no matter what level in business we’re at. So asking for help and outsourcing in your business does not mean that you’re lazy or you’re incompetent or you’re not a good enough business owner to be doing this. And it doesn’t mean that you’re incapable of doing this either. All it means is that you’re human and you’re asking for the help that you need to hit the goals and to grow your business in a way that you need it to grow in order for it to become sustainable.

It means you’re savvy. It means you’re smart. Smart people ask for help. It also means you’re serious about your goals and you’re serious about working less. You’re serious about building a sustainable business that can run while you’re on vacation or on maternity leave or taking the month of December off for the holidays because that’s the way that you want to live your life.

When you get serious about your goals, and again, if you’re committed to making this business, something that’s sustainable, that is viable over the long run, that does allow you to live the life that you need to live in order for this business to be worth it for you to make this business more satisfying and more productive than going back to your nine to five, then asking for help means that you’re getting serious about your goals and you’re on the path to making it work. It’s a good thing.

So, to recap this episode, three things that I want you to be thinking about if you do want to earn more and work less in 2024 if you’re Goal on the horizon is to find a way to scale your business. Start with packaging and offer that will scale. Productize and systemize that offer so that it’s automated. And then third, learn to let go of control and ask for help.

And if you’re serious about scaling your business, you’re committed to that goal for the next year so you can increase your profit and pay yourself more and work less, take real vacations. Make room for the time off that you want to have or summer with your kids or non work holidays.

Consider applying for the business edit coaching program today. Again, like I said, everyone who applies gets a free discovery call and I’m happy to chat with you through your goals and coach you on next steps. And I’ll be honest with you, if you’re ready for the coaching program or not, my only goal for these calls is to help you make the right decision for you and your business.

So until next time, business minimalists, I hope you take what you learned today and get 1 percent better this week.