10 | How To Work LESS & Earn MORE

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Episode Show Notes

Most entrepreneurs start their businesses because they want more time freedom. To enjoy their life and to not be tied down. So why do we get so caught up in hustle culture that we end up working 10-hour days and neglecting our personal lives?

I've built my business on 4-hour work days (working 20 hours a week or less). A business that allows me to travel, prioritise self-care, take long breaks whenever I need to - all while bringing in more than enough income to sustain my lifestyle... and in this episode, I'm letting you in on exactly how I did that!

In this episode, we’ll be talking about:

• The rise of hustle culture and how unhealthy this narrative is

• Why the amount of hours you work doesn’t have to equate to the amount of income you bring in

• 6 things you can do to free up more time in your business while bringing in more income 💸

Links & Resources Mentioned:

• Join the FREE 5 Day Instagram Stories for Business Challenge

• Grab the Revenue Generating Activities Dashboard

• Now Then & Toggl - Time Tracking Apps

• BLOG POST: 8 Ways to Systemise & Automate your Business

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Episode Blog Post

Being able to spend less time working is something most of us spend time dreaming about. Let’s be honest: We all want to spend less time working and more time enjoying life, but the thing that holds most of us back is that we don’t want to see a dip in our income - which is a completely reasonable fear.

But here’s the thing: As a business owner, the amount of hours you work does not have to equate to your income.

When we come from a corporate setting, we are conditioned to believe that time is money. The more time you spend working, the more money you’ll make. But as business owners, this could not be further from the truth.

Let’s talk about… hustle culture.

One of the main reasons I started my business is for time freedom. I want to be able to enjoy my life. I want to be able to spend time with my family and friends when I feel like it. I want to be able to travel without having to request time off, or have limited time to be away. I want to be able to rest when I feel like I need, or want, to. 

I want to be able to enjoy my life and live it on my own terms. I don’t want to be spending every single second either working, or feeling guilty that I’m not working.

We live in a society right now that glorifies hustle culture.

Hustle culture has convinced us that in order to be successful, we have to be working hard 24/7. This narrative essentially encourages business owners to work themselves into the ground and makes you feel guilty if you take time to rest rather than hustling to reach your business goals. 

This message is prevalent in the online space right now, you see it everywhere, and it’s not healthy in the slightest. But the truth is that you don’t have to hustle to build a successful business. 

I’ve built my business working less than 20 hours a week, often with 4-hour workdays or less. 

So in this episode, I’m going to share with you what I’ve learned and how I’ve been able to reduce my workload while boosting my income.

1. Determine the reason.

Before we get into the tangible tips, it’s important to first determine why you want to work less. What’s the actual reason behind it? What will it do for you?

Is it so that you can spend more time with your kids? Is it so that you can travel? Is it because you want to spend more time on a passion project? Is it simply because you want more time for yourself?

✍🏽 JOURNALING EXERCISE:

1. Why do I want to work less? (You can just list bullet points - don’t pressure yourself to write an entire essay on this!)

2. If I worked less, what would I do with the extra time?

3. What does my desired lifestyle look like?

4. How much do I need to earn to live this desired lifestyle?

5. If I could have any work schedule - no constraints - what would it look like?

Don’t limit yourself to being “realistic” here. Would you work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday so you could have a five-day weekend? Would you like to take Friday’s off? Would you work just in the mornings every weekday? 

You are the boss in your business, which means that you can make any schedule work with some determination and changes. So pick a schedule that feels good to you and what you want your life to look like.

2. Conduct a time audit

The first thing that I found really helped me to reduce the amount of time I spend working is by conducting a time audit.

Simply put, a time audit is a way to improve your time management and organise your time. It's a review of the tasks you do and the amount of time you spend doing them each day, which you'll track over a week or so to get a good idea of how you’re actually spending your time. 

Doing this allows you to examine and analyse how you’re actually spending your time versus how you might think you’re spending your time and allows you to create more time in your day simply by organising your schedule. 

By gaining an awareness of how you’re spending your time, you’re able to think logically about how you can be more intentional with your time so that we can create a plan to get more done.

So I use an app called Now Then to track my time, but you can also use Toggl. As I’m working each day, I track exactly what tasks I’m doing and how long they take me.

So if I spend an hour writing a blog post, I track that. If I spend 15 minutes answering emails, I track that. If I then go and spend 30 minutes scrolling through tiktok, I want track that.

I’m tracking both the good and the bad and being completely honest about where my time is going so that when I look back I can see how much of my day was spent actually being productive vs just doing the bust work vs procrastinating.

I would encourage you to start tracking your time so that you can get a clear idea of how you’re actually spending it and how it could be improved. 

My clients always say that they come out with so much more clarity and find themselves being much more productive because they’re able to see where their time is going and having to actually track the activities encourages them to work more efficiently than it would if they didn’t actually see that time being spent visually.

I would encourage you to track your time every day for at least a week so that you can get a clear picture of how you tend to spend your time and identify any patterns.

3. Automation & streamlining tasks

The next step will be a lot easier once you’ve conducted your time audit and you can see all the tasks you do in your business regularly. It’s time to identify what activities you could automate or streamline. 

For example, if every time you get a new client, you’re spending time emailing back and forth, manually onboarding them, answering the same questions and so on… you could save hours each month by automating that process

I have it set up so that when my clients make their first payment, they’ll be redirected to a welcome page with all the information they need. They’re automatically delivered my client intake form, my Voxer username, they receive all the info on my communication guidelines, their pre-work... everything they need to know ahead of our start date. They’ll also receive an email sent to them with the link to this page so it completely negates the need for a load of back-and-forth emails which takes up a lot of time.

It took me a few hours to set this up, but now this works for me in the background so that when I sign a new client, I'm not feeling stressed out or in a rush to get to my laptop and manually onboard them because I have this system already set up in the backend and I know that they're being taken care of.

Streamlining is similar to automation, but it doesn’t run completely independently once you’ve set it up.

Streamlining is the act of making a task you do regularly more efficient and effective by employing faster or simpler working methods.

For example, if you find yourself receiving similar questions and typing out the same responses all the time, why not create a template that you can send when you receive these questions?

Doing this will eliminate you having to think up a response and spend time writing that message. When you have a template already there, you can simply copy and paste it, tweak it to be personalised to the person it’s going to and hit send. Having that template in place has taken what could potentially be a 10 minute task and turned it into a 2 minute task.

So what on your task list can you either automate or streamline to be more effective?

RELATED BLOG POST: 8 Ways to Systemise & Automate your Business

4. Delegating tasks.

The next thing you can do is identify which tasks could either be delegated or eliminated. What tasks are you doing that are necessities within your business but don’t necessarily have to be done by you?

For example, could someone else create your graphics? Could someone else manage your Pinterest account or repurpose your content or answer emails or take over any other menial admin tasks?

All these little things are essential for your business to run, but the little things add up and take time so if you have the means, outsource!

Outsourcing doesn't have to be expensive - it could simply look like hiring a part-time VA for a couple of hours a week to take over those tasks and save you that time

Now the title of this episode is How To Work LESS and Earn MORE, so spending money to outsource tasks may seem counterintuitive on the surface, but by outsourcing the things that are sucking your time and don’t necessarily lead to direct profit allows you to spend more time on the revenue generating activities in your business.

5. Re-evaluate your prices.

On the topic of increasing income within your business without increasing your workload, you may want to consider re-evaluating your prices.

Now, I hate the generic advice that a lot of business coaches give encouraging everyone to raise their prices without actual consideration to their current pricing, the value, the people they’re serving etc.

Raising your prices may not be the right move for you in your specific business, but I do encourage you to take a look at your current pricing, the transformation your clients receive and identify whether the pricing is an accurate representation of the results you get for your clients.

When I first started my business, I was charging around $500, maybe even less than that, for 3 months of 1:1 coaching. *grimace emoji face here*.

The value I was providing was worth wayyy more than $500, and so was the amount of work I was putting in for each client. I should have been charging A LOT more because the service I was providing was worth a lot more.

It can feel daunting if you’re used to charging a certain rate and the thought of raising that rate may feel like you're going to scare clients off and struggle to attract new clients but, trust me, this is all in your head.

Back when I was charging $500 for 3 months of coaching, I found it a lot harder to attract clients than I did after I raised my prices. And that’s because by raising my prices to accurately reflect the transformation I was providing, my offer had a higher perceived value. 

A lot of people would tell me they couldn’t afford to work with me, but I’d then see them investing in a $2000 dollar programme with someone else. And that is because the higher price point #1 gives them more skin in the game and #2 makes them think they’re going to get more value from it, and therefore better results.

I could sell the exact same programme at $500 vs $2000 and I guarantee that I will make more sales on the $2000 programme because of that perceived value.

But one thing I will say is that if you’re raising your rates, you have to make sure that you have the value to match. Go above and beyond. There is nothing worse than having expectations for an offer or a service and not having those expectations met or being disappointed 

So think about what you’re doing for your clients. How much work are you putting in? How many hours are you working? And then, what is the transformation you facilitate and what is that transformation worth? And then re-evaluate your prices to reflect that.

6. Restructure your business to reflect the business & life you desire

And my final tip for you today is to restructure your business to reflect the business and life you desire.

Now, this probably won’t be possible to do right away, but you can do little things now that supports and will eventually lead to you creating the business and life you desire.

For example, I didn’t want all of my time to be taken up by client calls and I noticed that my clients were experiencing the most value through the support we had in between calls when they would have access to me inside Voxer

So after a lot of thought, I completely scrapped calls from my business and now, my mentorship packages take place entirely through voice & text messaging and I know that this is what works best for me, and also for the clients I work with.

Is there something you’re doing within your business that you don’t enjoy that you could get rid of or restructure to support the life you desire?

I want you to think… What is the long-term goal? What do you want your business to look like? Do you want to be working with clients? Do you want to sell digital products and courses? Do you want to do both? 

If you dream of creating passive income and having a course or digital products within your business then what can you do right now to make that a reality?

Perhaps it isn’t feasible for you to create an entire course right now, but you could start off with a low-ticket offer such as a masterclass or workshop that you can sell to your audience and put on evergreen to test the waters and start bringing in that passive income.

I have multiple low-ticket offers that work for me on the back end that I took some time to set up once and through the use of automations and funnels, I am now waking up to sale notifications and I don’t have to do anything… that’s just passive income that’s coming into my business without me having to do anything.

So is this something you could do for your business right now?

Let’s recap.

So there are my 6 tips for how you can start working less and earning more! 

To recap, they are to…

1. Determine the reason you want to work less

2. Conduct a time audit to identify how your time is actually being spent

3. Identify the tasks that could be automated or streamlined to free up more time

4. Identify any tasks that could be delegated to someone else so that you can spend more time on the revenue-generating activities

5. Re-evaluate your prices and make sure you’re not undercharging

6. Start restructuring your business to reflect the business and life you desire

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Hey! I’m Tish!

I'm a marketing mentor for ambitious entrepreneurs who want to create more time, freedom & profit in their online business, in a way that feels good to them!

If you’re ready to build your business on your own terms, so that you can live the life you desire… grab a cuppa, get comfy & stay for a while ☕️ ✨

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