Wendy McCallum (02:06)
Hello, coach. Welcome back to The Coaching Edge. I'm your host, Wendy McCallum. We're gonna talk today about a topic that I think is gonna be universally applicable. So this is for any of you who are currently in the process of building or running your coaching business. So this is going to be applicable for people who only have eight hours to spend in their coaching business or who are currently spending all of their time in their coaching business.
but feeling like they're actually not taking very much action and getting very much done, sort of spinning their wheels. So the whole point of this episode is to show you how you can actually be far more productive, take far more action and end up creating far more profit in a business by spending less time in it as opposed to spending more time in it.
So this is for coaches who are currently working every single spare hour in their business, constantly on social media, tweaking their website, doing all the things and feeling like their life has disappeared. So for those of you who are listening or like putting your hand up, that's me. I am always thinking about I'm working in my business and it is exhausting and overwhelming and I'm starting to feel burnt out. Or for coaches who have a full-time job or a part-time gig still outside of their coaching business or maybe family commitments.
and they're thinking to themselves, I'm never gonna have enough time to actually make this coaching thing work. Doesn't matter which category you're in or even if you're somewhere in between, this podcast is gonna be helpful to you. One of the most common objections that I hear from people who are thinking about joining my BBB, which is my, obviously it's my focused business building program for coaches who are like ready to commit to building their business, is that they don't have enough hours.
I just don't have enough time to do this. And I'm afraid that if I joined the BBB, I won't have time to get to office hours every week and actually like apply myself and watch the videos and learn the things and come to master classes and all the rest of it. But also just to actually do that in my business, to actually apply what I learned from the BBB and from you in my business. And I can tell you that I have seen coaches build a solid business.
in just eight to 10 hours a week. I have been running the BBB now for over three years and I have supported so many coaches through the first few years of building their business. And I have seen people do this, many people do this as a part-time thing in the beginning. So I wanna tell you that is absolutely possible.
Many of those people were working full time in another career or were raising young children or were taking care of an aging parent. They had some other big responsibility or priority that made it impossible for them to spend like 40 hours a week in their business. They have made a go of it. So this episode is for everyone. Please keep listening. I think you're going to learn some really good.
both like mindset shifts and perspectives on your business and also just really specific, actionable tools that you can take to get more done in your business without spending more time in your business. let's first talk about like the, what I call like the time trap, which is again, like one of the most common objections that I hear from coaches when they're thinking about joining.
the BBB. They're just really worried that they're not going to have enough time for both the BBB itself, which by the way is very, you can spend as much or as little time in the BBB a week as you want. Most of my coaches come to one office hours call a week, which is just an hour of your time. Many of them watch the replay from the second call that happens every week. And, you know, some of them spend weeks going through material and learning things through the course library and others of them just do it.
when they're actually needing some support in a particular area so it's very flexible program that way but i always hear people worried about am i gonna have the time to commit to this program and mostly am i gonna have the time to actually take action using the tools that i learn and the strategy support that you give me in the bb and the answer is yes this is a trap so there's this first myth out there.
that more hours means faster growth. So the more time you spend in your business, the faster you're gonna grow. And I actually don't think that that's true at all. I have seen, you know, on the flip side of things, lots of coaches who have spent, you know, before they come into the BBB have spent years trying to build their business, have spent, you know, 40, 50 hours a week on their business, but they're not actually focused on the right things and they're not actually taking action. So there's a lot of busy work happening and not a lot of actual.
action that is, you I like to say close to the money. So they're not taking the right steps to actually get them more clients and make them more profit. So, you know, for example, I see people all the time, we're spending like hours and hours and hours every week on their website, they're honing their copy, they're, you know, tweaking things, they're learning how to, you know, switch out images and update images on their website. All of that time is not that important.
when you don't even have clients. It's just not, it's not the thing to be focusing on. I've also heard from many coaches that they feel very underconfident in building a coaching business while they're still working nine to five. So they feel like I can't make progress in this coaching business as a secondary gig while I am still working 40 hours in my full-time job. I have coaches in the BBB right now.
who are actually working full-time in other professions while they build their coaching business and they are making lots of progress. So that's actually not true. I've seen lots of businesses thrive that started when people were working full-time in another career. That's absolutely possible. The third thing is that this myth, and I think this is one of the biggest things that takes us down is that you have to be everywhere. If you wanna build a small business, you have to be like,
on all the platforms doing all of the things all of the time. This is where I always like almost always start with people like looking at where are you currently like where are you building an audience on social media? Are you on LinkedIn? Are you on Instagram? Are you on Facebook? Are you on TikTok? Are you on Substack? Are you on YouTube? Are you on all of those things? In which case you're probably not doing any of them very well. How can we narrow that down and focus you?
in the areas that are the best places for you. Now deciding where the right place for you is on social media, I think is a combination of a few factors. One, where are your people? So once you get clear on who your avatar is, so what your sort of dream client looks like, where do they hang out? Where are they most likely to hang out? And then the second question is, of those platforms where they're hanging out, which of those is most appealing to me?
and which of those is using a form of communication or medium that actually feels comfortable to me, right? So if you're somebody who is not comfortable with writing and you really struggle with writing, like Substack is not your space, right? If you're somebody who absolutely despises video, like going with video, then YouTube's not your space. So again, we use like a combination of factors to help you narrow down where the right place is for you to start.
So that's a myth that keeps people feeling really overwhelmed and like this is impossible and actually spending a lot of time on things that are not gonna pay off. The reality is being consistently present in one or two places where your clients actually are works a whole lot better than being scattered across like five different platforms. Again, the idea here is like, I want you to reframe how you're thinking about the time you spend in your business because it's not the number of hours, it's what you're doing with them.
Take it from somebody who's been working on this for a really long time. I don't spend a lot of time in what I call busy work in my business anymore. And that's not because I have fancy VAs and copywriters and social media people doing all of my stuff. That's not actually true. I have a copywriter who I use for some things, but most of what gets done in my business, I manage myself. I just don't engage in the busy work kind of.
Tasks that at one time I spent a lot of time in and that's because of everything I'm going to be talking about in this episode but largely because I think I've really nailed this Sort of motion versus action thing that we're going to talk about in a little bit and Really like dealt with that
false sense of safety that I have when I'm not actually doing the hard things in my business that actually require me to take action in a leap of faith and, you know, do the scary thing. So we're going to talk about that in a second. So the time trap is really that it's a time trap. It's a myth. You do not need to spend more hours in order to succeed. You just need to be really choosy and careful and get better at doing the right things with the time that you do have. So let's talk about what an eight hour coaching business
can look like because I titled this podcast, How to Build Your Coaching Business in Just Eight Hours a Week because I wanted you to listen to this episode and eight hours a week felt totally doable to me and I think it feels doable for people who are also working full-time or part-time in another gig or maybe have some other very, you know, big time-consuming responsibilities or priorities in their life, maybe around caregiving or that kind of thing. So I want to show you what is possible.
I'm going to give you a few different examples of how you might be able to create a schedule that allows you to really dedicate eight focused hours to your business every week. So let's look at the example of, which is going to be many of you listening, probably somebody who's feeling really overworked right now is working like 30, 40 hours in their week. And a lot of that time is being spent on like scattered tasks without a lot of focus and in
and just sort of like all over the place. What I'm going to suggest you do is start focusing eight hours a week on consult calls. So on actual discovery calls, sales calls, consultations, whatever you call them, client follow ups and outreach. So you're really focusing on the client part of it and not on the other things in your business for eight hours a week. And the result I guarantee you is going to be more clients and more free time. That's what's going to end up happening there.
How much time are you actually spending trying to get clients? We're gonna talk about what that might include in terms of action, but I'm thinking things like starting actual conversations, responding to people who send you email notes when you sent a newsletter out. I sent a newsletter out this morning and I had seven responses within the first five minutes of the newsletter sending from people who said, wow, that topic really resonates, or thanks for sharing that, or my gosh, I hope that.
My sister is on your email list still because this is perfect for her. I'm gonna let her know that you're doing this kind of work. So I responded to every single one of those because that is actually very helpful action. Creating relationships and connections with people in real time is very, very important. And I'm always gonna spend the time on that. And actually it doesn't take very much time at all. But how many conversations are you having? Are you spending time in your business where you're actually creating
connections, conversations, and getting face to face, even if that's virtual, which it probably is for most of you, with people. What if you spent eight hours a week doing that? What would change in your business? What about somebody who works all week? Here are some options for that person. So if you're somebody who's working either part-time or full-time in another job, or you have responsibilities that take up your days every day, maybe you're looking after small children.
You could be building your business on the weekends only if you reserved one day. And I have had coaches in the BBB do this, this exact schedule. So they reserve one day, one Saturday or one Sunday every week, nine to five, eight to four, seven to three, whatever works for you to work on client outreach, content creation and consults. Again, like focusing on some of the stuff that really matters. We're going to talk a little bit more about that and the less on the stuff I call busy work, which is just you doing
little admin tasks that really don't require you to step outside your comfort zone at all in your business. And if you were if you could get yourself to a place where you were spending eight hours, so one weekend day focused just on your business, and I'm going to encourage you to do what I did in the early days. I had young kids in the early days of building this business. I struggled to get long office days in Monday through Friday. I would get to my desk usually like be able to
be ready to start around like 9.30 or so when my kids were little after I got them to school, 9.30, 10. And I would need to be done by two o'clock when they got off the school bus. So my days were really short. What I did do is whenever I was working on a project, I would always schedule time on the weekends and I would go to my office, which was actually above my garage, was separate from my house. And if you have an office that is in your house and you have people running all around all the time and it's very distracting, think about borrowing a space from somebody.
to go work for a day. Maybe your mom's got a spare room that you can use and her place is really quiet. Maybe you've got a friend who owns a business that's closed on the weekend and you could use a boardroom there. But find a place where you can be undistracted and really focused that will make a huge difference on the weekends. And I used to do that. I would go up to my office. I would tell my then husband that he was responsible for the kids.
that day at all the activities and that I would be back at 4 p.m. and I would just go up there and just really dial in to whatever the things were that I needed to do in my business. The other thing you can do is a couple evenings a week. So for example, if you did four hours twice a week and this might require a little digging with your partner or you know, other people to make this work for you with other responsibilities outside of work, but
That's eight hours that you're focused on building and marketing your business. So maybe it's like 6.30 to 10.30 or even like six to 10. I personally could not be working on my business at 10.30, but that's because I'm old. But two evenings a week, four hours is eight hours focused on building and marketing your business. The other thing you can do, and this works really well for a lot of people, especially, and I can say this because I have been there and done that.
perimenopausal and menopausal women who wake up super early. So if that's you, what if you were waking up an hour earlier or maybe you don't need to wake up earlier, maybe you just need to move directly from that first cup of coffee into your office five days a week and working like seven to eight or even like six to seven before the regular like nine to five job, the grind starts. That's five focused hours a week, which honestly is enough.
to start and you could do a couple extra hours on the weekends there are ways to do this it is all about. Creating a schedule and sticking to it and in order to succeed with it you need to make sure everybody else who is connected to you who might be impacted by the schedule knows about it is cool with it and is there to support you on it so I have a BBB coach who worked in healthcare and who built her business almost entirely on Saturdays for like the first six or eight months.
and signed paying clients in that time and started working with those clients, but only saw those clients on Saturdays and worked on all of the business building stuff on Saturdays as well. And then eventually transitioned out of the full-time job. So I've seen this happen many, many times. It's absolutely possible. In fact, it's a model I think is super smart. I think it really manages risk well for new business owners. We talk on this podcast all the time about the risks of starting a small business. You really need to be in it. You need to be...
You need to be investing in the business, investing in yourself in order to make a go of this thing, but you can absolutely do it. And I've got lots of examples of coaches who've done it in really, you know, kind of creative ways while still working part-time or full-time. Okay, now I want to spend a little time talking about motion versus action. This is a concept that was introduced to me in one of my certifications and it really stuck with me and I've kind of expanded on it. But this is really an explanation of why less time can be an advantage.
And I mean like an advantage. I don't know if there's anyone out there listening who's like me. I was always that person who I could have like two weeks before a paper was due in university and inevitably I would end up doing it in the five hours before it was due. And I would, you know, do a really good job on that paper in those five hours. More time is not actually helpful for me and I think that's the case for a lot of people.
And then we call it procrastination, you know, the two weeks before when I'm not working on the paper. But honestly, for me, what I've learned to do is like shift my lens on that. And now what I see myself as is like extremely efficient and productive. And I think I'm actually a really good time manager in that I now know that I get tasks done better sort of in the 11th hour. And therefore I don't waste a bunch of time, you know, messing around with them, but actually getting nothing done in the two weeks before they're due.
if that makes sense, like I've got a really good sense now of how I work and what works for me. And it is absolutely okay to accept if you are like me, that you're better off to not be starting projects way early. And that you could use that time to be productively doing other things instead of just spinning your wheels on something that is actually not going to get done well until there's a time crunch on it.
So motion versus action, why less time can be an advantage. Let's talk about this. So the distinction here is between motion and action. There's a big difference between those two words. Motion feels productive. Like you're working on your business, but it rarely moves the needle. So this is that busy work that I'm talking about. And you know what those things are. We all have them. You know, I love to go in and like work on seven different versions of my brand color palette or.
I love just spending time tweaking things on my website or going in and making 400 inspirational quote templates in Canva. Any of those things, cleaning my desk, organizing my office files. Not that that stuff doesn't have some value, but it really is busy work. It's motion. It's not action. Action is scarier and that's why we avoid it, but it's what actually creates results.
Some examples of motion, like I said, you know, the types of things like picking fonts for your website, for example, and just going down a rabbit hole on that. Action would be emailing or DMing five people to let them know that you are coaching and you have some open slots and you think they'd be a great fit and you'd love to chat. That's action.
So again, the direct connections, the conversations, the responses, the putting really good valuable content out there for people, offering people content, making the offer, which you hear me talk about a lot on this podcast, that is all action. Why do we default to motion? The simple answer is fear. And this is what I was sort of alluding to earlier. Motion feels safe because we can stay busy while we are avoiding the risk of putting ourselves out there and possibly failing, right?
Action on the other hand requires a leap and it opens us up to rejection and failure and things not going perfectly. But as small business owners, our job is not to avoid fear, it's to get good at taking small leaps of faith anyway. That's where the growth happens. Small leaps of faith, little moments of vulnerability. I get it.
I have had huge moments of vulnerability and small moments of vulnerability in my business. But all of those moments where I have taken a risk, where it has felt a little bit scary or uncomfortable are the moments that have led to really to true growth in my business and as a business owner. Sometimes they lead directly to revenue, which is awesome. And sometimes they lead to like tremendous learning and relationship building very often. Case in point, this morning, before I started recording this podcast,
I sent out an email that I've been sitting on for a while that basically explains to my main list. So if you know anything about me, you know that I am primarily a business coach now. I support coaches in the first five years of building their businesses and that's what I love to do. But I'm also still a personal coach and because I love one on one coaching, I still do it. And I do a variety of different things, but largely I support professional women who are in burnout or transition.
and sometimes using alcohol as a way to cope more often than they'd like to. So that's kind of my personal coaching niche that's completely separate from this business coaching that I do. I sent out an email to that list this morning that felt terrifying to me to send out. I went through it a couple of times yesterday. I read it to some people who are in my personal world who just do a bit of a check with them and make sure that it was, you
gonna land the way I hoped it was gonna land. Anyway, this was a very vulnerable email where I talked about the fact that over the last 18 months, I've been going through a very challenging time in my life as I navigate the end of a 23 year marriage with two children and dogs and lots of, you know, property and, you know, complicated things to deal with and just everything that went along with that and how that has now led to me, you know, becoming quite passionate about supporting women through that same transition. So women who are contemplating
or in the process of separation and divorce and who are looking for somebody to help them stay stays in the you know in the lane that they want to be in through this and feel good about how they went through this process and you know find their sort of North Star get really clear on what matters to them and and rediscover sort of who they are with a lot of the identity shifts that happened through that process anyway that's an aside but that was a very vulnerable email that I sent out and
But it was an example of taking action. I knew deep down intuitively, my gut having done this for so long, I knew that that email was going to land. And that is the email, you know, the newsletter that went out this morning that within five minutes I had, think seven people respond to immediately. And I'm sure that by the time I finished recording this podcast, there'll be a bunch more emails in my inbox where people have read that newsletter and responded. So it was it was scary to do it.
but it's leading to some really good conversations and connections. And it was an example of taking that action. You've got to do that more. You know what, worst case scenario, it doesn't land and nobody responds really. That was really the worst case on that or just nobody opens it and reads it. But I had a pretty good feeling that it was gonna be one of those emails that led to some conversations and I was correct about that.
I really want to repeat that reframe. As small business owners, our job is not to avoid fear, to avoid the risky things, avoid anything that causes us anxiety or to sweat. In fact, if we do that, we are not going to succeed. In order to be a successful business owner, you have got to start taking risks. Now, I don't mean like...
unmitigated, not well thought out risks, spontaneous risk. That's not what I'm about. I'm about managing risk always in your business. I'm about taking it step by step. I'm about beta testing things, all of that stuff. But you have to take risks to succeed as a business owner. And if you take nothing else away from this podcast episode, take that away. It has to become the thing. And I can, you know, encourage you now to go away and take a couple of little risks this week, just little things. You don't have to start big.
You don't have to send out the big State of the Union email that I sent out today. Start small. You're going to build confidence around it. You're going to learn that most of the time it works out really well and people have a lot of space for you if, you know, it's not quite the right thing. And you can always tweak and change things and learn from it.
Constraint is powerful. When you only have eight hours, you don't have the luxury of hiding in motion, right? So this is why I love the idea of just working like focused eight hours a week, because if you only have eight hours a week to spend in your business, you're not gonna spend it doing busy work. You can't, you will not succeed. You will focus on the things that are actually action, and that's a really good thing. So.
A coach that has just those two evenings a week available is much more likely to use those hours for consult calls or for discovery calls and that type of thing than they are with tinkering around with Canva graphics because they know that every hour matters. It's also a really good time to remind you of the beta mindset. And you've heard me talk about it on this podcast before. There's actually episodes that are dedicated to that. So if you haven't listened to those episodes, they're really...
They resonate with coaches. I encourage you to go and listen to them. Just search for beta, B-E-T-A, in the archives of the podcast and you'll find that episode. But the beta mindset is really helpful here because the idea behind the beta mindset is that instead of waiting until things are perfect, you treat everything in your business like an experiment. And this is perfect when you're really struggling to take action and you're stuck in motion. So for example,
Test a freebie with a small audience, right? Send a newsletter out with an offer to a subset of your list that feels like a really friendly subset. Run a workshop without worrying if it's like the workshop that you're gonna run for the rest of your life. Just try it. Just come up with a topic that seems to fill a gap with your audience and just give it a go. Reach out to potential clients knowing that most of them will not respond or if they do respond,
they might not say, yes, I'm in to whatever it is you're offering or to continuing a conversation. That's totally OK. I generally look at like the connections that I try to make on a weekly basis, whether that's through Instagram, DMs, I love to leave voice notes there. might be responses to emails like I got this morning or it might be me reaching out directly to people who haven't talked to for a long time or getting on Zoom calls or discovery calls. I usually look at those things as like, look, it's probably going to be like three out of 10 people.
But that's actually pretty good conversion. And it's worth it to me. Like if a conversation starts with three of the 10 people that I reach out to, that's three more conversations than I was going to have if I hadn't reached out. And it takes the pressure off on all of it. It feels less scary to be sending out conversation starters, leaving voice notes, all of that. If I know that, you know, the expectation isn't that every one, single one of those turns into a conversation. When you approach your business as a series of low stakes tests,
Action becomes less intimidating. Failure becomes feedback. I love to think of failure that way. Failure is feedback. Remember that. Every time something doesn't quite go right, you learn something that is valuable information. And if you're in that experiment mindset, you can see it as that. You're collecting data. What worked, what didn't work. What am I gonna change in this experiment next time I run it? And you start to move forward a lot faster in your business.
So again, the takeaway here is you don't need more hours, you need better actions. Motion keeps you safe, but stuck. And it's what will, I'm sure is responsible for 82 % of coaching businesses failing, is that people are just, they get into their business and they start doing a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't matter. And it doesn't lead to any paying clients, which means that they don't have a sustainable revenue stream, which means eventually they have to shut their coaching business down.
That's exactly why I started the BBB to keep people out of motion and in action. That's what the BBB is all about. Again, if you don't know anything about the BBB, you can go and check it out on my website at wendymcallum.com forward slash BBB and join us at the next open house. Whenever that is, I would love to meet you. Or if there isn't an open house for another few weeks and you want to chat with me, send me a DM, send me an email. I'm always happy to get on a call with new coaches and learn more about your business. Okay, so.
Action when paired with a beta mindset is what builds your business. Action plus beta equals business growth. Remember that little equation. Okay, I do want to talk about this little focus formula that I came up with, which is four sort of steps that you can take in those eight hours a week to stay focused and actually make progress in your business. The first step is to get really clear. So we call it clarify. So that is where you're getting really clear on one 90 day business goal. So think about it right now.
What do I want to accomplish in the next 90 days? One goal, not a list of goals, one goal. I want to sign four more clients, or I want to sign my first client, or I want to create and share my first freebie, or I want to run my first beta group. So I want to try to get at least four people in a group and run my first beta of a group coaching model. Don't try to do all three at once, just one. Okay, so that's the first step. Clarify, what's the goal? I'm going to spend eight focused hours on my business every week.
And that can be a minimum. Obviously, you can spend more focused hours in your business, but let's just work on this idea that you can actually do this in eight hours a week. So I'm going to spend eight hours in my business and I'm going to have one goal for the next 90 days. And this is it. And it's crystal clear to me what it is. Number two, you're going to simplify. This is something I've talked about before. I talk about this vault that I have and I'm actually looking at it right now. It's always on a whiteboard behind my laptop so I can see it right now. And in my vault, I have three different things written right now.
The vault is really what some people might refer to as like the someday list. know, we talk about like must haves, nice to haves and someday. Well, the someday list is the stuff they're really great ideas. You don't want to lose them. You know that eventually you're probably going to take action on them. But right now that's not your focus, but you don't want to lose them. So I call that the vault. And I have, like I said, a vault list that's always on my desk and I can
add things to it anytime I think of a great idea, but I also know I gotta park that in the vault. I'm gonna lock it up there so it doesn't get lost, but I can go back and access it at any time. So you're gonna create that vault area list for yourself for everything that's not aligned with that 90 day goal. So anything that's outside of that, you're not doing right now.
Things like redesigning your website, launching a podcast or setting up some kind of complicated email sequence that comes after somebody downloads something that like, it'd be nice to have, but it's not urgent right now because you actually need to get some clients, right? By putting those things on your someday list or in your vault, you're gonna stop them from stealing your focus and you're just gonna be able to focus on the 90 day task at hand. The next step, step three is to prioritize. So every week you're gonna pick
two to three, what I call needle movers. So these are tasks that actually get you closer to the goal. So examples of needle movers might be reaching out, like we've talked about doing direct reach outs to five people in your network. This is on a weekly basis. It might be getting a couple people on one to two people onto discovery calls or sales calls or just conversations, but like on a Zoom call, for example.
It might be creating a simple freebie that the solution to a problem that you know your people have. So I'm talking about creating a mini course freebie here. I'm talking about a very simple freebie, something you can send out that actually provides very valuable information.
but in a simple, concise way that you can use as a freebie right now. You can always replace it, but I'm telling you, as much as I love like complicated freebies and I've done lots of episodes on why we need to really juice up our freebies now and make them super valuable in terms of what people get, some of my most effective freebies are the ones that solve a problem and are one-page PDFs. So for example, I have a launch checklist, all the things that you need to make sure you have checked off before you get out there and start accepting paying clients as a coach. That is a free download that
gets downloaded all the time. If you haven't got it yet, go to my website and go to the coaching resources section and you'll see it there. I also have a 90 powerful questions document where I've organized powerful coaching questions that you can use in coaching sessions by common life coaching topics. It's pretty simple. It's a bigger PDF, but it is just a download. So what can you create that's like relatively simple, that solves a specific problem that you can get done quickly and take action on?
That's a needle mover. Recording a two-minute Instagram reel that answers the most common question that you get from clients that you work with in your niche, right? So paying attention. What are the things that clients ask me over and over again? Or where are the topics that I end up focusing on over and over again with the clients that I work with? How can I create an Instagram reel on one of those, right? Or two of those things. Follow up with somebody who showed interest in working with you who hasn't booked. Follow-ups are always action.
Hey, I remember chatting with you. We had such a good chat, but I haven't heard back from you. And I just wondered if there was a reason for that. No pressure, but I wanna make sure that there isn't anything outstanding that I can answer that might be helpful to you in making your decision. Do that, do those follow-ups. It takes two minutes, but incredibly effective action. Sometimes that will lead to the person saying, my gosh, I totally forgot to respond to you.
My daughter ended up in the hospital, but she's out now and I would love to talk to you about this, right? Sometimes it ends up in a paying client. Nice to have, so these are not needle movers, are things like, if we've talked about Canva over and over again, I love to use the logo example because people spend countless hours on logos. And as far as I'm concerned, logos are irrelevant in coaching. They are so unimportant. You know, spending time perfecting like this.
come up with some kind of a resource or asset that you're gonna give your coaching clients once you actually get one, stop doing that. Reorganizing your Instagram grid, know, taking another course or certification when you already know what to do. Building a really complicated funnel when you don't even have an audience yet, right? Like those are all examples of things that are nice to haves, but definitely not needle movers when people get stuck in that in the early.
years of building business. Once you have clarified your 90 day business goal, simplified it by letting go of everything that's not in alignment or connected to reaching that goal, prioritize two to three needle mover tasks for this week, maybe even for next week, but you're gonna do that on a weekly basis going forward.
The next thing is to really systemize. And this is where you're gonna do the time blocking. You're gonna figure out where are these eight hours fitting in my calendar? How am I gonna do this? And you're gonna treat those like appointments. I want you to sharpie them in. Don't pencil them in. Put those in your calendar, block off that time. Do everything you need to do to set yourself up for success, including telling everybody in your household that you're not gonna be available during those time blocks because you're going to be working on your business. Asking for the help that you need to make that easier.
maybe finding a space that's quiet where there aren't any distractions that you can use, those types of things. Set yourself up for success, but time block that. And if you can incorporate some accountability with this focus formula, with this time blocking exercise, that is gonna be even more helpful. So it could be a colleague, another coach.
maybe a community, like a program like the BBB, for example, where you have a community of coaches and you have weekly accountability with me on office hours, calls, anything that's gonna help you actually stick to it, that's what you want to do with this. So hopefully that was a helpful episode for you. Hopefully that's shifted the way you're thinking about like how much time you need to be spending in your business. I am telling you, you don't need to spend as much as you think. And if you knew how little time I actually spend actively in my business right now,
it'd probably blow your mind. But I have gotten very, very good at doing all of the things I talked about today. Very good at focusing on like what, and this is the question I ask myself all the time. What's closest to the money and the joy? Those are my two questions. I've talked about that in other episodes. The money and the joy. So what is closest to me actually getting another client, signing somebody else up for something, growing my business, and what actually is gonna bring me the most joy? When those two things align,
or I've got like a high score in both of those categories on a particular task, it's the task for me to focus on. So think about that and start applying that to your business. You do not need to countless hours every week in a coaching business to build it, but you do need to be in action and you need to get out of motion. Think about a duck, its legs are going crazy under the water. That's motion, but it's not going anywhere, right? I want you to be...
flying and the way that you fly is by taking mitigated well thought out risks in your business which are still going to involve little leaps of faith. Every single day I take a little leap of faith with my business and I want to encourage you to do the same thing. So if you're looking for some more tools around this, if you're looking for some support, if this resonated and you're thinking I am ready to actually start doing this, getting focused and really re-prioritizing the
how I'm spending my time in my business. There are a couple different things that I have for you that might be helpful. One is the Clarity Compass Audit. I love doing these. These are 90 minute focus sessions where you and I get together first before you come in, you fill out a little assessment tool that gives me a pretty good snapshot of where you are in your business right now. And then we get together for 90 minutes and we figure out exactly what I'm talking about. Where are you in motion and where do you need to be in action? And what would action in that area look like for you? And all of that is really
geared around like a 90 day goal. So we're usually looking at the next three months. Sometimes we go forward into six months in terms of the action plan, but we're really focused on the next 90 days and what you need to focus on now versus things that need to go into that vault for you. And then I give you a personalized plan that you can follow over the next three months to actually take that action. The other thing that you might want to think about if you are
absolutely committed to being a coach and to having a robust client base and to making the revenue that you need from your business. And you recognize this takes work, this takes focus. And I'm not getting where I want to get too fast enough here, or I'm feeling like maybe I'm getting close to throwing in the towel on this, which would just break my heart. Please, please, please come out to the next open house for the BBB or send me a note and let's get on a call because
The BBB is there for you in that situation. It provides weekly structure, tons of needle moving strategies. That's basically all we talk about in office hours is how people in my community can move the needle in their own businesses. I get to know your business very, very well. I know all my coaches businesses. I know what works well for them, where their strengths are, their challenges are so that I can help guide them and support them and encourage them in the direction of a sustainable, reliable
profitable coaching business. So that's what I would really encourage you to think about if you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking, I really want to start. I want to get into action, like consistent action. I want to figure out how to take those tiny little leaps every day in my business. That's exactly why I have the programming that I have. And I would love to just meet you. So reach out or come to the next open house. So.
You don't need to sacrifice your health, your family or your sanity to build your business. You don't need 40 hours a week. Hopefully that's become clear in this episode. If you're overworked, this focus approach, this action over motion is how you're going to cut back your hours so that you have a better balance and keep growing. If you're limited on time, this is how you're going to actually make progress with whatever hours you do have.
Okay, that's it for me today. Hope you enjoyed this episode and I will see you next week on The Coaching Edge. Again, I always forget to do this. If you're liking this podcast, please go on and leave a review for me wherever you listen to the podcast. It's so, so helpful. And please share it with other coaches because that's the very best way for me to get this information and these resources that I'm trying to provide here out to other new coaches so that we can actually help coaches thrive and help coaches stay out of that.
really depressing statistic that I am here to start shifting for coaches. I want more of you to succeed. So I appreciate all your support. If you've got ideas for podcast episodes, you can always send them my way and I'll see you next week on The Coaching Edge.
