Today, I’d like to talk to you about the way you spend your time in your business, especially if you want your business to grow and change.
I’ll share my current business growth practices as inspiration for you to figure out what yours are.
I have 20 hours a week that I am available to spend being in business. I basically split that in half, so that I’m spending half my time on income generating activities and then I spend the other half of the time doing things that are going to grow my business. Today, I thought I would just talk about those briefly and maybe prompt you to consider what are your business growth activities.
The Short List
Every day:
- Email tidy up
- Invoicing
- 5-15 minutes of social media connection/creation
- Other business admin as it arises
Monday
Course creation
Tuesday
NetCaring
Wednesday
Ads and content creation
Thursday
Blog/book writing
Friday
Course setup
So just to be clear, in the 10 hours that I spend on income generating activities, I consider those to be things like seeing clients face to face, delivering group program calls, delivering course calls and doing work for my clients.
To make my business work, in those 10 hours I have to charge a rate so that I make enough money for my week, and then my year. So I have done the calculations to figure out how much I need to earn a year and then I’ve broken that down into how many working weeks I have, how many working hours I have per week, and then how much I need to charge per hour. All of my course prices, group program prices and one to one pricing is set to make sure that I spend my 10 hours a week, and that I make a certain amount of money in those 10 hours.
Depending on your business, those might be different but I’m talking about the activities where I am clear that I’m delivering a service to people, and I’m getting paid for that.
In the other 10 hours, there’s a few things I do every single week. These have changed a bit over time as I learn and figure out what it is that I need to do to grow my business and which activities are the most important. I’m going to talk to you about those now.
Monday
In my business growth activities, I have two hours each day. On Monday, I have one hour for admin, which is sorting out my inbox and doing my invoicing, and any other little admin things that might come up for my business.
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That tends to be just enough time for tidy ups.
In the other hour I spend time doing what I call course creation. In that hour, I am creating new course materials for whichever course or group program I’m delivering that week. That tends to be enough time for me to create the content and sometimes do some of the setup of the actual tech part of my course creation.
It also means that I can work really week to week, I don’t have to have planned out a whole course. If it was a six week course I don’t have to have all of that six weeks of material ready before I go live and sell because I know how long it takes to teach something and I know that I’m capable. I just trust that each week, I’ll be able to look at how much I got through the week before what my overall goals for the course are and just be agile and create the course content the week of the course. Sometimes I might be delivering a course that I’ve taught before, in which case I would review the content from the last time I ran the course and just see what I want to add to it or add new fun resources.
Tuesday
Is my day for what I call NetCaring, which I learned from my mentor, George Kao. That is the act of focusing on my referral network. My other hour is again, just email invoicing and admin stuff and then I have one hour for this thing, net care. I’m pretty sure George has some blogs on his website about net caring where you could read a bit more about it and he definitely has a course about it that I did.
NetCaring activities can be as simple as connecting with my referral partners on social media, cheer squatting them, sharing their posts on Instagram or sharing their content on my story. It can be reaching out to new referral partners. So, thinking about who are people who have referred to me in the past, can I connect with them and thank them? Also thinking about how I can deepen my relationship with that person? Is there something I can do or share of theirs with my audience, if that makes sense. NetCaring can also be interviewing my colleagues and publishing that as a podcast, or a video interview. Really just working really on relationships with colleagues is my Tuesday activities.
Wednesday
Is all about my own ads. I have an hour for admin, same again, just invoicing emails, and catching up on little things that just all add up. On Wednesday, I like to focus on checking out my ads and creating more content for my business. So each day in my little admin session, I always like to spend five minutes doing my Instagram posts. That way, when it comes time to do ads, I have something to promote. So Wednesday is ads, and then making a bit more content. I might make a longer video, I might polish a draft of a blog that I wrote another day, or any kind of content creation, making carousel posts for Instagram, all of that.
Thursday
I spend my usual hour doing email, invoicing and admin. And then my business building activity on Thursday is to do an hour of writing. I spent an hour either writing a blog post, editing a draft, publishing it on my blog, and I’m also writing blogs currently with a view to turn them into a book. Sometimes my writing or my creation is more like a how-to video and sometimes my blog is created more with a view towards a book. So this is a really nice easy way to write a book where I basically just write a chapter a week by writing a blog a week.
Friday
My business building activity is just working on my courses that already exist. So going back and turning any past course into an Evergreen course. Also just cleaning up any systems and processes that I have that aren’t feeling great. For instance, at the moment, when people buy my podcast course, they are meant to be immediately added to my email list but that’s not working, so I would go in, and troubleshoot and fix so that people can get automatically added into the email list and be delivered the information about the course. I often deliver my course live with live calls. And then afterwards, I like to set it up as an evergreen course. So that hour on Friday is all about setting up my courses with Evergreen, and perhaps doing other course focused activities. So similar to Monday was the course prep, then Friday is more of the tech side of the course setup.
The thing with these activities that is different from how I used to run my business is: I used to let my clients fill me up, and then maybe I would get to these business building activities.
What I’ve done now is flipped it on its head so that I put in my business building time first, and then I let clients fill up my calendar after my business has had its turn.
I’m interested in what kind of business building activities you do.
Have you thought about these?
Have you committed to them?
Are they in your calendar so that you do them every week, and if they’re not, I would highly encourage you to do that.
It’s really important to feed and nurture your business and help it to grow.
I hope this was helpful and I really look forward to connecting with you another time.
If you would like to get these healthy business growth habits going in your business, the Group Program might be for you. Learn more about the Group Program HERE
“I pay my respects and acknowledge the people of the Yuin Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work. I also pay respect to all Elders — past, present and future.”
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