Ask Rezzz

I was speaking at an online conference called Weaver’s Space Online Conference and asked this question during the Q & A portion of my talk.

I love Q & A more than any scripted presentation for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason is because I know that someone walked in with something specific they wanted from the talk and walked away with an answer.

I’ve had my share of big brands and corporations in my career and it’s definitely a different beast to tackle. It’s hard to break in the door if you don’t already have an in.

Unlike small businesses, corporations usually have an agenda and roadmap of projects they need done. They fill the gaps by seeking out vendors, then vetting those vendors and hiring.

Once those vendors are approved, they most likely will continue to go back to that well time and time again, so I get the appeal of that as a target client for a lot of people.

However that outreach is a hard nut to crack. You essentially have to be in the right place at the right time.

Increase your chances by finding those right people

On LinkedIn you’ll likely have the most success in finding the appropriate person who handles hiring.

What you want to do is follow that person, make that person aware of your presence by potentially commenting on their shares, sharing their content to your audience, and maybe even just providing some resources to that person.

It’s a long haul effort, but you want to keep in mind being a “friend” here.

Congratulate them on milestones. Maybe their work anniversary or some launch they were a part of. Maybe even a new product or campaign that brand put out.

Be a good person to the brand and contribute to their success.

Follow the brand

Look for opportunities out there where that brand may be posting other things that could be relevant to the needs they have that you can fill.

Look even for those tangential opportunities as well. By this I mean if your solution is design, and you see a release of something that’s broken from a design perspective because it renders funky on the iPad, reach out and suggest connecting them to someone who you know may be able to fix it if they don’t have someone in house to do it. Even though it’s very likely they do.

But the idea here is that you are continuously adding tons of value to them.

Create targeted content via ads

If you have a budget, then you may want to even target them with ads specific to them.

It’s scary how precise you can get an ad in front of someone now a days. And by doing that, you can passively continue to provide value, only this time, it’s a free resource to your website that they see that would be of interest to them.

Like I said, it’s much different beast and a much longer lead time too. I have friends in that space that it’s months even a year long process to court big brands. But they land big money and long-term deals. So I can see how the effort can pay off.

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I’m a huge fan of weekly reviews and they are a pivotal part of my business each and every single week.

I was having a conversation with a Feast community member and this person had a bad week where things unexpectedly happened and through some plans off track.

They said “that they see the value in a weekly review but in practice they would see that plans got thrown off track and would then just work through the weekend to put things back on track.”

This is something I’ve done in the past myself. But what I’ve learned from several different people is that during a weekly review, a key point to do is evaluate the week and if something went bad, you need to ask yourself.


• “Why did this go bad?
• “What was the results of this happening?”
• “How can I prevent or at least minimize the effects of this when it happens again?”

Learning is key to your weekly review

During my weekly reviews it’s not just about Inbox Zero and planning the week, but it’s also planning out the future and learning from the experiences of the week.

Case in point, last week I felt a bit scattered and didn’t think that I accomplished all I set out to do.

Well I didn’t, however during my weekly review I found that the reason I felt scattered was that I had too many pans in the fire, between client projects and rezzz projects.

I had to pair back and reduce the number of things that I was focused on.

I sat down, wrote out all the tasks that are directly impacting the business right now and that’s my focus. Everything else is back-burnered for now to a point that I’m still moving the needle on those projects because they are important.

But until the immediate tasks impacting the business are addressed and completed, they aren’t going to take a front-and-center priority.

Don’t get down about your own self-imposed deadlines

We as entrepreneurs and often put hard deadlines on all the things we do because that’s what we feel is important.

When we miss these deadlines we tend to beat ourselves up about it.

Especially when we start exploring new opportunities and things that don’t have an immediate impact. Those are things that can wait often times by a week or 2 and there’s no loss.

When we have these self-imposed deadlines and we miss them it can derail us off all the other things that need their deadlines met.

Give yourself a break once in a while and ease off the deadlines of new things so that you can finish what you need to and then move and grow the business in new ways.

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I’ve spoken about cold outreach emails in in episode 127 “How would you write a outreach email” but prior to that, you need a strategy to get to that email right?

You can’t convince anyone of everything

First thing to remember is cold outreach is a numbers game.

If you cast a wide net with no bait, the more likely it’ll be that you need to throw away most of the fish.

What I mean by that is, if you have a large list of emails or contacts of a particular industry, most of that list isn’t the right kind of client for you and you are just wasting time.

The segment that may listen to you will be small, but even most of them you won’t be able to convince them that what you do is valuable to them.

The segment that is the smallest are those that fit for your business, because they see the value in what you do. They are the contacts that you want to target for cold outreach and not waste time on everyone else.

Instead of picking an industry/trade/niche and then casting that net and praying for responses and then weeding through another round of bad leads to get to the good ones. Think about how you can throw away the biggest chunk of leads first.

You won’t be able to change the behavior of anyone if they aren’t ready to listen and accept value in what you do.

Meet them where they are

In episode 56 - Do you get any leads from your content? you will hear about the buyer’s journey and the different stages of a potential client.

If you take this idea and apply it to your cold outreach strategy, if only for a small amount of time, you’ll greatly increase the chance of success.

Cold outreach metrics say that a 1% response rate is good. That response doesn’t even need to be a positive response either.

Let me explain a bit about my business as an example of this in practice.

I do email automation and behavioral marketing for clients. This entails lots of ecommerce and membership clients who need this for their business to grow and retain customers organically over time.

Business owners often try these things for themselves and get frustrated with all the nuances that goes into it. The development on site to link up data points to specific events within the sales process, etc. They simply don’t want to know how to do it and get frustrated with it.

But they see the value in it and know what it can do for them and so the seek out help. Those are my ideal cold outreach candidates. Businesses using platforms and products that I can work with, but they seem to struggle with the setup.

Conversely, any ecommerce business or any membership website could benefit from my services. Any website that sells anything could in fact. But if they are more focused on paid advertising campaigns and other means of generating business that isn’t on-site personalizations or automation, they are more likely to not want to wait for results and fully understand their customers and just want that next sale to come through.

I’m not going to be able to change their behavior them otherwise that by learning a tiny bit more about what makes their customer tick, they’ll be able to shorten the time to first purchase, retain customers longer and increase customer lifetime value, and finally be able to reduce the ad spend because the on-site personalization in tandem with the email automation is evergreen and continues to bring in sales organically.

Sure I may be able to convince a small portion of those, but I want to play that numbers game more to my favor and if I can put a little more focus into who I reach out to with some specifics in that strategy, I will increase my chances to close that deal. But also save time and resources in the next step of that sales process and conversations with this leads that are not my ideal clients.

Learn more about your client objections

This isn’t easy and requires you to carefully listen to sales conversations and pay attention in ways that you may not be doing so during your conversations with clients now.

But if you start paying a bit more attention to the details of your existing clients and the good leads coming into your business, you’ll start to be able to further segment your cold outreach in ways that you hadn’t before.

This segmentation really will fall inline with whatever objections you are getting that aren’t budget related with the leads you have now.

When you start to see and hear those objections, you can address  them further up the chain and earlier in the process to increase your cold outreach campaign success rates.

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Before jumping into today's show, I want to thank you specifically for allowing me into your earbuds every day for the last 150 days. I don’t take it for granted at all! 🙏

I want to share with you an important story and lesson that will illustrate the best lead generation strategy.

I had an eye-opening, reality check of sorts recently. See as you know I do client service work, but also help folks like you through coaching and other products such as Feast to help specialize their business and build recurring revenue.

As this part of my business becomes much bigger, which is much different than my services, I’ve learned a lot from other folks who run similar programs and businesses.

See what I tend to do is pay attention to how they do sales, marketing, run programs, etc and if it’s something I like and feels appropriate to me, I’ll try and reverse engineer it or ask them and have a conversation to learn it.

Sales and marketing in this type of space is very much something that seems a bit unnatural to me. Only because it’s a pay-to-play and a push type of game. Meaning, you use ads to drive signups to a webinar and then pitch. Which definitely works and does very well for lots of very smart people. Obviously, I’ve oversimplified this a bit as there’s a ton more that goes into it.

I spent a ton of time and resources and developed systems and campaigns that felt more like myself that allowed me to serve you better and help in ways that you would get value from.

Sure it worked to some extent, but I did feel that wasn’t as successful as it could be. Not just for me, but for you too.

As I started to reflect on what I was doing and how I could better serve you, while still being able to build a business, I came to the realization that all the time spent on building and learning what was working for other people and their massive audiences, I shouldn’t have paid any attention to.

What was working for me was what I’ve built out for my client services part of the business. Having conversations with leads and prospects to a point where they got value specific to their situations and projects and if it made sense, the next step would be to work together.

With that in mind, I went back to having conversations. More folks like yourself started getting value specific to themselves and what their situation is.

Going back to those conversations allowed people to evaluate if it made sense for them to take that next step and work together.

As a result, this process has worked out much better for everyone, my coaching clients, Feast and Sales Kit members, and my business.

I share this with you so you maybe see the value in not getting distracted by the “new”, “shiny”, strategy. Whether that’s Facebook Ads, blogging, speaking, podcasting, or something else that you see working for someone else.

If you have something working right now in your business, own that space, as it’s said in the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. As it's said in the book, often we'll find success and then right when we hit 80% of that particular channel, we'll move on to try the next thing.

Work on what you know

Since you’ve explored that channel and know working and what’s not working in it, that’s your best strategy.

Make sure you completely exhaust that channel to the point where you can start to see a decline in the performance of that channel.

Companies still use direct mailers because it works for them. Even though local businesses that you see in those mailers could probably leverage the power of FB Ads, they don’t, at least not yet anyway.

The idea of doing what’s working is the best strategy for you if you decide to target a new type of client or try out a different revenue stream for your business too.

Because it’s something you know and something you’ve already built into your business, you don’t need to spend money and time on learning a new strategy. You focus on trying to sell to leads in the way you know how, then you know if the thing you are selling is viable or not.

When you try and sell something new with a new strategy, if you aren’t closing those deals, you won’t know if it’s your thing or the strategy.

Do what’s natural to you

The best lead generation strategy is what’s going to be natural for you too.

One thing that any freelancer I’ve ever spoken with has said is that they don’t like sales.

So if writing posts is natural and it’s what works best for you, continue to write on your blog.

If video works, stay with that and make sure you leverage YouTube to it’s fullest.

If podcast works, pull up that mic and continue to talk.

If Facebook Ads are working, then stick with it and don’t bother with starting up a podcast.

All these marketing channels work for certain people because it’s what they are good at. Because they are good at them, they get results from them.

Don’t stop at the 80%, completely own the channel until the point where you know it’s declining. You are much better off putting complete focus on what’s working right now with anything new you want to introduce into your business.

I’m not saying to not try and explore other channels, you should. But the best strategy is the one you know works and fits natural for you.

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Today’s going to be very different because it’s my birthday today. And if you aren’t listening to this on Sept 20, that’s ok too.

It’s going to be a quick one for you and I hope that it’s going to be helpful for you as well.

When it gets close to your birthday, don’t you get asked this question? Especially from family members or close friends, right?

I always find this a little awkward because I don’t ask for things. Yes, I’m a gadget geek, love the Mets, and all types of toys from the 80s that I grew up with, but they are all things that aren’t necessary in my life.

To be honest, I’d much rather have folks if they must spend some money, either give to a charity they can get behind, or spend it on my son TJ.

So you are probably wondering where’s this going, Jason?

Well, since it’s my birthday today and I am always in your corner to help you any way that I can, I want to share a gift with you. The gift of vision.

This is going to sound pretty basic and crude, but I tell you, it works.

Grab yourself a post-it note and write down a reward for yourself for all the hard work you do.

This could be a nice dinner out, a gadget you want to get, a vacation even. Whatever it is, make it something that means something to you is a treat.

Take that post-it and stick it to your monitor. Put it front and center so that throughout your workday, or during client calls, or when the day seems to be throwing everything in your way, you have that within your vision.

It’ll keep you motivated to push through and treat yourself at the end of the week, month, or whatever fits best for you.

I’ve been doing this for years and when I reward myself, I pull it off and then put up a new one. It really does help keep me focused on what I need to do and stay on track.

When you do it, I’d love to see what you do. Take a photo of it and tag me on Twitter (@rezzz) or on Instagram (@rezzz20). That could be your birthday gift to me.

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Not everyone is meant to be a freelancer. It’s not easy. There was a time in my career that I questioned if it was something I was meant to do. Multiple times in fact.

It’s something that many wrestle with especially in the bad times, myself included. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that either.

People with a full-time job and a classic 9-to-5 wrestle with what they are doing every day as well. It’s a natural feeling people have.

Being a creative person and going against the grain is something that comes naturally. Having a regular 9-to-5 job seems just that, “regular” and you may think the grass is greener.

Becoming a freelancer is a career choice that has to be made based on you and a soul-searching exercise that is true to you.

Here is an article I wrote on the 13 reasons [Why Freelancing Isn’t For You](https://rezzz.com/freelancing-not-for-everyone/).

- Don’t have a good support system
- You need benefits
- You don’t have patience
- Can’t say “no”
- Aren’t objective
- Don’t like to continuously learn
- Don’t like change
- You don’t like being alone
- You don’t want to deal with people
- Have pipe dreams
- You don’t love what you do
- You can’t handle rejection well
- Not organized or easily distracted

Only want to work on fun things

Freelancing gives you the freedom to pick and choose what projects to work on and what client to work with. That’s for sure one of the biggest benefits freelancing has and one of the biggest reasons many creative entrepreneurs choose to go freelance.

Just because you choose the project though, doesn’t mean that there are not many tasks that aren’t boring.

Every single project has mundane tasks.

There are parts of your business that have mundane tasks.

You will have to do them, there’s no doubt about that. They will suck and be boring.

But you have to do them and potentially do them for a long time.

It’s not sexy but it’s necessary.

Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse, has been waking up at 4:30 am for well over a year to simply outwork his competition by doing the mundane.

Can he offload these tasks, probably, but he says that by doing some of these mundane tasks that aren’t the sexy parts of the business, he learns more and understands what it takes.

Which then allows him to grow himself and his business.

Aren’t in it for the long haul

Freelancing is not a get rich quick scheme. 

I’ve been in this game a long time and I’ve seen plenty of people come and go with these false perceptions that freelancing is all about living on the beach, rolling around on cash, and even sailing around in yachts.

If you are doing any of those things off the back of freelancing, you are faking.

Don’t believe the hype. To be successful as a freelancer, you need to build a business that’s sustainable.

A sustainable business isn’t built overnight.

If you are thinking that you are going to go freelance and in a month make enough money for you to live off of the entire year, I’ve got some bad news for you.

Freelancing is hard work and it takes time to be successful at it. Give yourself some space and allow for time to grow and make mistakes.

If you can make it past 3 years freelancing, then consider yourself over that hump and on your way.

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Creating goals can be overwhelming for some. But it doesn't have to be if you make it fun, exciting and don't forget that it's all about growth.

Today I’m going to share with you the structure of creating a goal that will put you ahead of the game of most people.

If you haven’t yet listened to A142 How do I set a goal? go do so. It’s a quick 6 minutes where you will learn what a SMART goal is and the important 3 pieces about SMART goals to pay close attention to.

This structure can certainly be used for any goal of any type, but for the sake of this example, let’s assume that this will be a goal for your business.

Example of a SMART Goal

This first thing you’ll want to do is give your goal a name. Give the goal a name that’s positive and specific.

Don’t just name your goal “Make $100k” Instead name it “$100k in a year to help others and my own business grow”

Brings that element of feeling into the goal that creates a sense of attachment.

The second part is the type of goal. What kind of goal is it, let’s assume it’s a business goal, but could easily be fitness, spiritual, etc.

Why is this goal important, especially now! You’ve heard me talk about the 5 Whys Technique in A63 How do you price your work as a freelance web developer (Part 2) when unpacking your clients’ root cause, in this case, I want you to use the phrase “so that.”

When you are writing down the "why", follow that up with “so that” to allow yourself to dive deeper.

In our example here about making $100k, it could look like. “This is important because it’ll grow my business so that I have a proven set of results to put in my portfolio. So that I can stop taking on sub-contract work. So that I can pick which clients and projects to work with.”

Go 3 levels deep on this to really unpack the goal. This will help you build clarity in the goal.

Set a deadline for the goal. Unfortunately, when it comes to things that are hard or things that we are supposed to do, humans won’t do it.

Putting a timeframe around your goal is needed to put us into gear.

How to accomplish your goal

Since you have the deadline defined, it’s time to work backward. When working backward, it’s a matter of defining some key leading indicators or milestones to hit, so you can create that momentum of wanting to continue on.

In this process, you’ll start figuring out what it is that you need to do in order to accomplish this goal on a daily or weekly basis.

I had a great conversation with Ryan Carson, founder of Treehouse, where he said that in order to accomplish the great things, you need to be ok with doing the mundane things every day.

Reflect and Celebrate the win!

In A119 Do you have any tip to increase productivity and motivation? I share how to go about celebrating wins.

Don’t be afraid of giving yourself a reward here. Once you finish the goal, whether you’ve accomplished it or not, there was a ton of hard work involved and you grew from the journey.

Take time and recognize the goal and give yourself a nice reward.

Document the result too. Like I said, whether you ultimately reach the goal or not, you put in the work to get there.

You grew from going through it.

Inside Feast we run a “Moving the needle” Challenge. While we do set SMART goals at the beginning and people do reach them, it isn’t about actually reaching the goals, it’s about the journey and setting better business habits in place. 

Setting the wheels in motion to creating better habits, making progress and becoming better at what you do, that’s what matters.

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Today I’m going to put an end to this conversation once and for all. I’ll be the first to admit I spent to much time on this question myself, and so I don’t want you to.

For a very long time, I’ve wrestled with the idea of what should I call myself. Should I ever use the term “freelancer.” Should I call myself a “consultant” or “web developer.”

In Episode 61 What is freelance?, I dove into the negative perception of the word what you can do to change that perception.

A lot of my friends online have said in some shape or form to never call yourself a freelancer. For a very long time I would jump on this to train as well.

Does calling yourself a ‘freelancer’ matter?

But to be honest, I don’t think it really matters all that much, and I’ll explain why that is here in a minute.

But before I do, I just want to say that I’ve had some amazing conversations about this with so many smart people that I absolutely respect. Because of these conversations and what resulted from them, is the basis of this episode.

The funny and ironic part of this is that when I’ve had conversations about this we always end up in the exact same place with the same exact point of view.

Showing up, acting professional and doing great work is what’s needed in order to be successful. And ultimately how you’ll earn more in the process.

Also, that we all wind up calling ourselves ‘freelancers’ at some point to someone.

What you call yourself is a matter of context

I’m a realistic person and I’m not going to say that it completely does not matter what you call yourself in business. Because it does, to some degree.

But I think that there is this over-emphasizing and over-analysis done in publications like Forbes and Fast Company that put a sense of fear into people who are starting out and distracting them from what truly matters.

That is how you conduct yourself, how you deliver on what you say you can deliver on, and ultimately start figuring out what your business is and how to build sustainability into it.

I’ll be the first to admit it that I spent way too much time worrying about what I should call myself. Especially early in my career. So much so that I looked up the origin of the word.

Being a generalist is why you are having this conversation

I was very much a generalist and looking to try and make myself stand out from among the crowd. Which is the wrong way to specialize your business and stand out from the crowd.

That time spent could’ve been better served had I spent it learning about sales, building out processes in my business to make myself more effective, or simply having some conversations with my clients learning why they hired me and what is it about me that I do for them better than others.

The thing is what you call yourself really comes by way of the corporate world. Junior Developer, Senior Analyst, Director of Marketing, etc all stem from the corporate world.

It’s something to say when introducing yourself.

As your business grows and evolves, you’ll no doubt call yourself many things to many different people. This is especially the case as you start to specialize your business.

The object of niching down is so that you are recognized and known for that one thing.

You become the expert in what it is that you do and your clients and your results define what it is that you call yourself.

In this circle of a conversation, because I don’t even see this as a debate, it really comes down to this.

The definitive answer to calling yourself a ‘freelancer’

We are business owners and we will call ourselves many things in many different contexts:

- Our friends and family
- Our friends and colleagues
- Our prospects
- Our clients

All of which could be, and probably will be, different.

Stop spending time trying to differentiate yourself with semantics, and focus your energy on allowing your results and clients to differentiate you.

If you want a definitive answer to this question, here it is.

Call yourself a ‘freelancer’ if you are talking among friends and colleagues or looking for answers to business-related questions online.

Call yourself a ‘consultant’ if you are talking to prospects and clients when you are helping them with some level of strategy.

Call yourself a ‘designer’ or ‘developer’ or whatever if you are talking to prospects and clients when what you do is more implementation.

Combine the last 2 if you are talking to prospects and clients while you are evolving the business and niching down. Since during this process you are working through what you do for your clients and how it relates to their big business problems.

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I posted a question in our FB Group, Sustainable Freelancer. Which is free by the way, get in there if you haven’t done so already.

The question was "What do you see as your biggest hurdle in growing your business?" and someone PM’d me instead of replying to the post itself saying “My biggest hurdle is me, I’m an introvert and I always seem to have a problem with my confidence. Self-doubt always creeps in and I’m not sure how to get away from that.”

Out of respect, I’ll just refer to this person as “he”. But I did get approval to share the conversation on the show because this is something that I talk about and write and share my own battles with it pretty frequently.

My initial response to him was that he does outstanding work and from my point of view, you have nothing to lack confidence in.

But we all can get into our own heads a bit from time to time regardless of how well everything else sees us?

It’s easy to say get over yourself and stop complaining, isn’t it? But getting that voice out of your head is much harder.

Where does the self-doubt come from?

My friend Mark Asquith, amazing guy, podcast host of the 7 Minute Mentor, and an inspiration for me and this podcast,  broke this topic down recently where he highlighted where does “self-doubt come from first?”

It can come from:
- a lack of skill
- belief
- others saying things to you
- your experience
- fear and worry
- paying attention to others
- your family
- a lack of knowledge

I like Mark’s approach to the topic because he shared “Ultimately, what is it that matters? What is going to go wrong if I fail?”

And yes, this is a better way of saying “get on with it”. But it did spark a thought and tactic that I’ve used for years outside of business and maybe in the past couple of years, closed that loop with the business as well.

Plan out the results

Anticipate what may happen. Both good and bad. What are the roadblocks may occur that you can address now, or at least think about know and plan how you are going to respond to them.

See, when I played baseball as a kid, my coaches would tell me “Before the pitch is thrown, know what you are going to do with the ball before it gets to you.”

We’ve all seen little kid play ball, they run around when they get it like they just found out the meaning of life and haven’t a clue as to what to do next. People are just screaming at them to throw the ball, right?

I became a much better fielder because I would take a look around, I would see the situation at play, figure out if it was a ground ball to me at second base and with a runner on first base, what am I going to do. If it’s to my right, throw to 2B. If it’s slow enough to my left, I may still be able to throw to 2B, but chances are it’s throwing to first.

If it’s a line drive to me, catch and throw immediately to first to catch that runner before he gets back to the bag.

Because I’ve played out all these various types of plays in my head, when it does happen, I’ve taken all the thinking out of my head and just react.

I’ve physically practiced them every day up until that game on the field. I’ve now practiced all the plays out in my head. And then the pitch is thrown.

This year, I’ve obviously doubled down on podcasting. As such I want to become a better interviewer for Live In The Feast, a better podcast host in general and understand the performance of speaking.

I’ve been learning a ton this year about story-telling, how to ask questions as an interviewer, how to craft a better show, etc.

Hopefully, if you listen back to Episode 1 of this or Live In The Feast, you can hear the difference and the competence I’ve gained throughout my learning and practice.

Mark said it best, “Confidence comes from competence.”

When you just start out doing anything, baseball, sales, development, you’ll suck. But break the thing down to the most basic steps. Practice them, then progress further and learn more of that thing.

It’s a progression. You aren’t going to be Babe Ruth the moment you say you want to play baseball. You aren’t going to be Zig Ziglar when you start your own business and have to sell for the first time.

You are going to be that little kid running around with the meaning of life.

Break it down, practice it, anticipate results, both good and bad and how you are going to react when either shows up.

As you progress and as you continue to get better, you’ll become more competent, and as you become more competent you’ll gain that confidence because you’ve been there before.

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If you don’t work take your business as serious as your clients’ well you won’t be in business for long.

Have to be disciplined on protecting that time.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s episode, when you are freelancing or consulting, you have to be extremely mindful of your time.

It can quickly get out of hand where you spend a tremendous amount of time on things that you shouldn’t be.

Now working “ON” your business really isn’t something that is a choice if you are running a business. But I get the idea here.

The question basically is asking about doing all the sales, marketing, support and administrative work that isn’t your client’s business.

It ultimately comes down to having discipline. Willpower if you must.

Carve out and schedule the time

What I did very early on in my career was block out time on my calendar and get up an hour earlier every day.

Just knowing that I wasn’t taking time away from clients but still moving the business forward allowed me to not feel guilty and build my business.

Now there are whole days on my calendar devoted to the business. Which means that I don’t take any client calls or do any client work during those days.

Google has the 80/20 rule that they put in place for their employees to explore their own passion projects.

I like this split because even doing 20% work on your business will make a tremendous impact in a very short amount of time.

Get support and accountability to make great strides

Having that schedule and committing to moving the needle of your business is critical to the growth and sustainability of your business.

Inside of Feast we hold a 90-Day Challenge called “Moving the needle” because it’s that important. Folks in challenge meet up every week and check-in on the progress of what they need to do. Sales processes, libraries of operating procedures, building a team, and even content marketing have all been made as tremendous strides from these challenges.

If you are more of a person looking for 1:1 support. Having someone holding you accountable has made the biggest impact on improving my business.

If you are disciplined enough to do it yourself, then just do it. If not and you need that support from someone to hold you accountable, then find that person or free community to do so.

Tools

Use a tool like Calendly and give links out to people.

This tool is great because it allows for you create blocks of time that you are available, sync it with your calendar and then people can go ahead and pick from the time available that works best for them and you to be able to schedule calls, etc with you.

Working “on” your business starts with the management of your time. Setting aside that time and making it as important as the time you give to your clients.

Let’s face it, if your clients value your service, they’ll value the time you put into your own business to stick around. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself out of business and your clients won’t have you anymore.

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