Jade Boyd: So I remember when I did my very first masterclass and someone else’s group coaching program, talking about what it really meant to be a business minimalist and redefining productivity for your own business, and I started explaining how our traditional definition of productivity was antiquated rooted in the completely outdated 40 hour work week, which I have another podcast episode about the 40 hour work week. We’ll link that in the show notes if you want to hear me get up on my soapbox and talk about it and how it just wasn’t working for women today. The concept that you have to work a certain number of hours every day, every week.

But then during this training, I shared that a modern version of being productive is to get the results you want by putting in the least amount of time and effort possible and this was a presentation for a group of midwest women, and I could immediately feel the hesitation and skepticism from the group, and I grew up on a farm in the midwest, so I’m very familiar with the pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality, and I don’t shy away from doing work that’s hard. However, and this is a big however, we do not live in the time economy anymore. And in the time economy, the more hours you put in, the more money you make. Right? And this was really the time at the height of the industrial revolution and the time where we got the lovely 40 hour work week. But now we live in the knowledge economy where it doesn’t matter how many hours you work, you get paid for the value that you create, the value that you bring to the table.

And this is true for many nine to five jobs today, but also for freelancers. And also for service providers. And yet so many of us still fall into the trap of believing that in order to reach our goals, business or otherwise, we better work hard or else. And it seems almost sacrilegious to say that working hard isn’t something to be valued since our society puts so much emphasis on it, but there will come a point in your business or really any area of your life where working harder won’t help you get better results. Everything has a tipping point and the law of diminishing returns applies to this situation as well. And if you’re not familiar with the law of diminishing returns, it’s basically the bell curve for life. So think about anything that you expect to get your results, there comes a point where more of that thing is not going to get you better results. So, the standard example is of ice cream cones. The first ice cream cone has a lot of benefit to it. It tastes really great, right? The second one doesn’t taste as good, but it still tastes kind of okay. And then the third one basically just makes you sick to your stomach. The fourth one might make you seriously ill and so on and so forth. And that principle applies to basically everything in life. If you’re studying economics, it’s kind of like the law of diminishing returns and it applies to how many hours you’re putting into your business as well.

One of my absolute favorite authors in the productivity space and my favorite thought leaders in this industry is Greg McKeown. And a few years ago, I picked up his second book, Effortless, which really challenged my thinking on what it could look like or should look like to pursue my goals. And in this book, he writes, quote, what if the biggest thing keeping us from doing what matters is the false assumption that it has to take tremendous effort? What if, instead, we consider the possibility that the reason something feels hard is that we haven’t yet found the easier way to do it? And I don’t think we stop often enough to ask ourselves, how could this be easier? Because we just assume, again, prematurely, accept that it’s going to be hard. And today I want to share why I believe that working hard won’t help you make more money in your business as a service provider.

In fact, I strongly believe that the least effort your business requires of you to be successful, the more successful you’ll ultimately be. And it sounds so counterintuitive at first, but I hope to change your mind throughout this episode.

So I have three main parts in this episode for either why working harder won’t help you make more money or for how to make things easier in a way that also makes you more money as a service provider. So the first point is finding an easy, quote unquote, easy niche as a service provider. So on a discovery call recently, I had a conversation with a service provider who was leveling up and getting ready to serve a higher level of client at a higher price point. And the consulting work that she wanted to do at that level felt really easy to her, like almost too easy, right? But yet she was going to charge more money for it and was having all of the feelings about it. And she’s absolutely not alone. This is something I hear from service providers and clients all the time.

They think they can’t raise their prices because quote unquote, this feels so easy to me or quote unquote, it doesn’t take me that much time, et cetera. And when you start feeling guilty because your work doesn’t feel hard enough, you end up self sabotaging. This is why this is a problem. You will underprice your services and undercharge for the value that you’re providing for other people.

If it feels easy to you, it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth a lot of value for someone else, because it’s not easy for them, and we tend to forget that. And that’s why value based pricing is so important. I will link another episode where I talk about pricing your services to scale. But instead of focusing on how easy or how much time it takes for you to do what you do, focus on how difficult or how much time it takes for your client, your ideal client, to do the work and price your services accordingly.

And as a service provider, if you feel like what you do is too easy. You might even subconsciously just try to make your own work harder by adding extra things into your services that aren’t actually necessary or even valuable for your clients. And you might think that giving them everything and the kitchen sink will make you feel better about your service or about your prices, but in reality, you’re making your service less valuable when you add things that your client doesn’t need just to make you feel like justified in charging the prices that you’re charging or making sure it takes you enough time for you to feel good about how much time you’re giving each client. But as a service provider, the strategy here should be to find that sweet spot where you do have a niche that feels easy to you.

It should feel like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe people are paying me to do this because this is so simple and easy for me. It’s great to be in that spot. It can take a long time to get to that spot because you have to learn a lot and have a lot of experience along the way in order for you to get to a place where it does feel easy, but finding that niche, either, you know, the industry that feels easy to you or the type of service that feels easy to you, where you can do something that you can charge a lot of money for, because it provides a huge amount of value for other people. It’s hard for other people, but again, it doesn’t have to be hard for you in order for you to charge high prices. It just has to be hard for your client and provide great value for them. So finding that sweet spot where it’s easy for you and hard for them, that is how you work smarter, not harder. That’s tip number one. It’s okay to be in that place where you feel amazed that people are willing to pay you for what you’re doing because it just feels that good to you.

And again, I’ve told this story before. So you’ve been here a while, I feel like I mentioned this in almost every episode. So I know that season in my business is not a waste, but I did start out in my business as a brand photographer. And even though I was decent at it, it always felt really hard to me. Every time a client inquiry came in, I physically cringed and I self sabotaged myself in every way possible. But now as a business coach, I get excited every time a client application comes in because I know that taking on another client is going to be fun and exciting. And at this point, it does feel kind of easy.

And I know that even though what I do comes easy to me, it does not come easy to other people. And so it is still incredibly valuable, even if it feels easy to me, and if you want to learn more about aligning your business to your strengths, I’m going to link another episode of the podcast in the show notes with my friend, Erica Olaf, because we deep dive into what it looks like to recognize what you’re good at, those things that do naturally come easy to you and how to leverage them in your business, regardless of your industry. It’s a great episode. So I’ll link that for you to go back and listen to as well.

Okay. The second strategy for putting the least amount of time and effort into your business in order to reach the results you want to make. If that sounds lazy to you, that’s okay, but that’s what we’re talking about today. Working smarter doesn’t always make you more money. And so the second point here is to spend more time in your zone of genius.

And as a service provider, the more you’re able to focus on your zone of genius, doing the things that truly only you can do, the more money you’re going to make. So you shouldn’t be focused on things in your business that feel hard to you. The harder it feels, the more likely you’re going to procrastinate and not take the actions that you need to take in order to drive results in your business.

And of course you can relate this back to your niche, whether that’s graphic design or photography or coaching. But I’ve also found so much freedom in applying this principle to other parts of my business, especially in my marketing. I love strategy and planning and writing, but I don’t love the actual content creation piece itself, like actually sitting down to record the podcast after I think of the idea and like bringing up my notes or actually creating the Instagram graphics after I write the caption or.

Designing the the thumbnail, whatever that might be, I’m constantly looking for ways to tweak my systems and processes so that I’m able to gradually spend more time focusing on the things that I do best and that I love to do that do feel a little bit easy to me and do less of the things that feel like work. Like they’re really hard because those are the things I procrastinate on anyway. And so if I can get those off my plate or find automations or systems or processes or delegate them, I’m able to get more done and not work is hard, but also be equally or more honestly, because the work is actually getting done and not relying on me to do it more successful as a service provider.

And right now I’m playing with my podcasting workflow and experimenting with writing the blog post first, because writing blog posts is something that I was procrastinating on if I was hitting record on an episode with just an outline and then trying to write the blog post afterwards. It was just falling through the cracks because I didn’t want to do it, but, I actually do really love writing, and I think the hard thing about writing a blog post after the podcast episode was that I was trying to fit it to what I talked about in the episode, and when you’re talking off the cuff, it doesn’t necessarily flow very well. So I’ve instead been experimenting with outlining the blog posts and writing like the short summary of what I want to talk about first. And then when I record, sometimes I go off script right now. I’m definitely riffing and there’s things in the podcast episode and stories and stuff that I add in along the way that are not going to be in the blog post, but it’s definitely held me accountable to actually writing the blog post.

They’re more written than what my VA was doing. If I was not to write the blog post, she would just write the summary with like the bullet points what’s in this episode, which is not as great of a blog post, right? You can only get the value if you tune into the podcast, but so far it’s a change that I think I’m going to keep because again, my blog posts are more intentional and SEO optimized.

It’s easier for me or my VA to repurpose the content into social media captions and emails because it’s written in my voice still. And I’m not delaying recording podcasts until the very last minute. So yes, I’m finding ways to offload work that allows me to spend more time coaching, which is like the true zone of genius, right?

But there are other smaller tweaks that you can make in your business to spend more time doing things that feel easy to you in different areas too. So think outside the box a little bit and what feels easy to you, what comes naturally to you and outside of like your niche, focusing on graphic design or photography, whatever that might be, how can you make things easier in other areas so that you can show up more consistently?

You don’t get a gold star for working hard as a business owner. You just don’t. As long as the work gets done, that’s what matters. And so if it’s easier, that will make you more successful in the long run.

The last tip I have for putting less effort in to reach your goals is that it is okay to take shortcuts in business. And in case nobody has given you the permission yet in certain areas of your business, it is absolutely okay to take the shortcut, and I’m not suggesting take every single shortcut you can because that can lead down a slippery slope, but working hard to learn everything yourself takes up way too much time and energy and will only slow you down in your business growth.

The faster that you can implement and get things done, the quicker you’ll gain experience and build expertise, and the more money you’re going to make in the long run. And even in the short run, because you’ll be making advancements faster, right?

One of my past clients recently sent me a really interesting article that talked about the weight on creatives that comes with self promotion. And the article put a heavy emphasis on the fact that writers, artists, creators, they can’t just create anymore they have to market and promote themselves, which is something that many of them hate doing and it takes time away from creating the things that they can actually sell. And the article framed the problem as a cultural problem and like a mental health crisis. And to some extent, I agree that our culture creates unneeded obstacles for business owners.

However, I think that this is also just a personal problem. I truly believe that any business owner can market their business in a way that feels good and aligned and easy and natural to them regardless of their budget and the problem is that they don’t know what they don’t know. And the default for someone who’s new to marketing is to just show up on all the platforms, right? I got to be on Twitter. I got to be on Instagram. If I’m going to launch a book, then I have to do X, Y, and Z. And yes, I can see why that would be draining and lead to burnout. One, it doesn’t actually work, and two, it does feel really, really hard. And this doesn’t just apply to marketing. Many business owners are trying to recreate the wheel, so to speak, in multiple areas of their business instead of taking some of those shortcuts and learning from someone who can give them the proven step by step plan, and personally, I hesitated to step into coaching because I didn’t initially have that signature framework to lead people through, and I put a lot of pressure on myself to create this amazing framework from scratch before I even got started. Instead of using someone else’s marketing framework or business framework, like Story Brand, for example, I could have made it a lot easier on myself in the beginning to get started. If I would have borrowed or licensed from people who were 10 steps ahead of me.

And I think many business owners avoid taking the easy path because they think that being easy on themselves is going to lead to apathy or not doing enough to get the results that they want, but I found that there are many things, both in life and business, that you can be incredibly lazy in and still get the same results, and don’t get me wrong you probably won’t want to take every shortcut. Again, it can be a slippery slope and it can also be expensive to take the shortcuts if you’re trying to like pay somebody to teach you everything instead of doing, the hustle a little bit and figuring things out for your business, but the more shortcuts you’re able to take and decide to take, the faster you’re going to see growth. So again, in Effortless, which I will link in the show notes by Greg McKeown, Greg McKeown writes, what if rather than fighting our pre programmed instinct to seek the easiest path, we could embrace it, even use it to our advantage. What if instead of asking, how can I tackle this really hard, but essential project we simply inverted the question and asked, what if this essential project could be made easy? So in closing, I want you to think about that and consider your goals for your business this year and ask yourself. What if this could be easy?

What would that even look like? And don’t fall into the trap of believing that working more hours or working harder or hustling is going to help you grow your business because it’s not true. It’s, in fact, only going to slow you down. Focus on what matters, align your business to what feels easy to you and take the shortcuts when you can.

So again, one of those shortcuts I mentioned is learning from someone who can give you the step by step plan, and that is exactly what The Business Edit is. The Business Edit is my signature group coaching program for service providers who are two plus years into their business, who are already great at their niche and what they do, it’s okay if you’re still learning, but in general, you’re a little bit more established, but you’re ready to do things differently and ready to simplify and declutter your business so that you can focus on what matters and you can find smarter working, smarter, not harder strategies to grow your business as a service provider so that you can build a sustainable business that feels easy to you.

I have a step by step plan for you. It doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t have to spend years learning everything the hard way. And so if that’s something that you’re interested in, the application is always in the show notes and I would love to see your application and meet you for a free 30 minute discovery call.

I treat those like mini coaching calls and we can chat about where you’re at and whether or not you’re ready for The Business Edit. But if you are craving a simplified business, if you’re ready to stop trading time for money and build a business that does feel easy, but also gets really great results without sacrificing time with your family or your nights or weekends or anything that you find yourself sacrificing right now that feels unsustainable, please, please, please apply for the program. I would love to sit down with you for 30 minutes and walk you through either what you need to do to be ready for the program or invite you in the doors today, because this is kind of urgent, right? If you know that what you’re doing as a business owner is unsustainable, then the best time to change your course of path and direction is right now.

So visit the show notes and apply. I would love to meet you in real life or if something in this episode resonated with you, feel free to come talk to me on Instagram at jade boy. co. And I would love to chat through your takeaways from this episode as well. So until next time, business minimalists take what you learned today and get 1 percent better this week.