Growing your business with limited time. Five key focus areas for success.

Now, I deliberately didn’t do a little chatter at the beginning because I’m like, you’ve got limited time, right? Hence why you’ve come to this podcast. So let’s just crack into it.

I’m really excited about this one because I have some beautiful clients who are just come out of having beautiful babies and they had left their established businesses to go on maternity leave and now they’re coming back in and they’ve got limited time.

But I’m like, actually you guys aren’t the only ones of limited time. In fact, many business owners, particularly women, should only have limited time to work in their businesses.

Because I’ve seen plenty of women overwork their businesses and actually break it. Because I attract and I am still a very much a recovering workaholic. So even if you don’t have kids and you don’t have little ones, this is still going to apply to you. So stay with me.

So. So I like to think of building business a little bit like building your dream home. So you have a dream home, so you have a dream blueprint. Like this is what I want it to look like, this is what I want it to be. But sometimes you have to build in phases.

So what it does is if we think of it like with a business is we can have our end result, our desired dream business blueprint, but we have to build in phases. Cause that’s actually how business happens.

So when we do this, it actually allows for your growth while accommodating the stage of life that you’re in. And I think that’s really important that we actually really think about the stage of life we’re in and what are we actually trying to build. And are we building that right phase or are we over building something? Are we renovating too hard?

Because what can happen is we want to build sustainable business. We don’t want to keep being in overwhelm while we’re trying to grow and facing those challenges of balance influencing family and business. Right?

So the house analogy, keep that in your head. Like the business, like when you’re building your business, there’s a blueprint. Just sometimes we have to build in phases and allow for that growth.

Right. So with this client in particular, we looked at breaking those phases down for her.

So we looked at her current business structure that she was doing before her situation changed, right. And it was quite fast paced, there was lots of moving parts and she was trying to.

The biggest problem with this model is now she doesn’t have time to work it like that. But even if she did, there was a big problem is that she was trying to do everything herself without proper systems or support.

So she was actually always in overwhelm and she wasn’t getting anything properly finished. And that’s an issue, right? That doesn’t create solid foundations. And you’ll hear me talk about this quite a lot about we want to build really deep foundations first.

So her phase one was coming back to build the foundation again. So for her she had to organise support. So for her that was child care support. And even if it was just one day, she did have to have a dedicated window of working on the business.

So she also then needed to generate money to be able to bring it into the household, not get overwhelmed. So we were like, okay, have a look at taking on a very select few of existing clients. So focus on easy, familiar work to generate immediate income.

So sometimes it’s not the most ideal, it’s not the dream house full blueprint. You know, you might be having to, instead of having your home office, you’re sitting at your kitchen bench. Do you know what I mean?

So I just was saying to her, I know this isn’t the work you want to be doing forever, but this is where we want to start back with. So finding that easy, familiar work.

And then we got her to hire some administrative support so someone to actually help her finish.

So she is an expert in a certain area of a certain industry and her expertise shouldn’t be in content scheduling and finishing technical things. So getting her some help is really, really important for her to build really strong foundations.

Now can she do a lot of the work? Yes. Should she be doing it? Not really. So she did come to that realisation through some gentle prodding of she can’t work the same way she always has. She actually needs some support and, and some of that support looks like administrative help. So unless she gets that support, the rest of that build won’t happen.

So the fourth thing we did in that phase one is I got her to set some very, very clear boundaries, so dedicate specific days to specific tasks because she didn’t have much time.

So it was getting her to guardly fierce her days. When she did have support with childcare or just support in general, what was she going to go do with that time and being really strategic about it as opposed to trying to do everything.

So then we moved into phase two, which is monetizing her existing assets. So really thinking about what was she, what was she doing in the Established business that was working really well, but she hadn’t kind of completed.

So I was getting her to go back and finish some resources that would actually help that next renovation piece, if that makes sense. And then making sure that she was taking a lot of the administration work out of.

She had some low hanging products that people were paying for, but it wasn’t an easy purchase. So getting her to kind of set up proper payment gateways and then really getting her in phase two to think about creating a clear path from free content to paid offerings, like where do they go?

Like what’s the kind of movement through that customer journey? And then for her to think about if the subscription model is somewhere where she wanted to go.

Because she does have this great history with the, with the existing assets already been monetized.

So where could she monetize existing assets? So she had a little bit more time back, right.

And when we moved into phase three, which is when phase one and two are established, then she can look at expanding the offerings.

So sometimes people will want to jump into offering programmes and group offerings, but actually not have their payment gateway set up, not actually have the audience, not have everything kind of ready.

Which is funny because you guys know that I say a lot, you won’t be ready. You gotta take imperfect action. There’s some things when you have limited time that you don’t want to be doing too much imperfect about, because you’ve done a lot of imperfect action to get to where you’re at.

Now is actually the time to get it done properly. So if she’s got the support and she’s got the systems and she’s got the clear strategy of how she’s going to take the free content to these expanded offerings, then she can go work on that.

Whereas her old way of operating would have completely overwhelmed her because it would have just been like a freaking pinata and trying to catch all those bloody, catch all those bloody lollies all at once. It’s too much.

So the key insights that I want you to take away from these five ones is be intentional with your time.

When you only have three days a week, every hour counts. And actually I’d prefer you only have three days a week to work on your business, even less if possible.

Because if you have less time, you’ll actually go do the things that move the needle in your business.

Don’t create orphaned offers. So ensure all your products or services actually have that natural progression to the other offerings.

Which is what I was getting her to work on in phase two. Like where does everything lead? Where’s a natural menu or sales that are happening as opposed to just this random thing that doesn’t connect anywhere and you’re doing all this work and we can’t monetize it properly.

Maintain your unique style. This is an interesting insight for you is I do attract beautiful over deliverers. So their natural gift is over delivering.

And sometimes what can happen is we can try and is it square peg, round hole, we can try and change who we are and what happens is we end up diluting our uniqueness.

So whatever you’re building, so phase two in that strategic build, really make sure you’re building with how you roll.

So if you’re someone who does like to over deliver, think about how that gets delivered to your clients, but also the value in which you’re giving. So just another check in on monetizing properly.

And the fourth insight is or the four key focuses is focus on completion.

Finish one phase before moving to the next and you can imagine yourself if you’re a build if someone’s building your house and they hadn’t finished gib stopping or plastering or painting and just moved on, then you know that’s not cool, is it?

So don’t do that in your own business. Make sure you try and finish the phases before you move through.

And you know how I spoke to you, I was telling you about and one of the phases move to phase one, like create that foundation and give people what they want. That is an area for you to focus on.

So monetize what people are already asking you for. So your audience is telling you what they want to buy. So actually creating that in phase three is when we do that because then you’ll better set up to do that.

So this was very fast paced but I’m hoping that it is going to help you to understand that you can grow your business with limited time.

It’s actually really good to have limited time. Not limited time for client delivery, but limited time to grow the business and what you should focus on.

And an analogy, that housing analogy to help you understand where you should focus. So as I say all the time share this around if you think a Biz buddy needs to hear it. Otherwise, let me know what you got out of today’s podcast and I’ll catch you later.