The simple but overlooked process to achieve time freedom for marketing agencies.
“If you want to see someone’s priorities, look at their bank account and their calendar”. – Ramit Seth
%FIRSTNAME%, it wasn’t until I intentionally designed my week with the RIGHT priorities that I was finally able to grow my business.
While we’re being honest with each other – my days, weeks and unfortunately weekends we’re pretty much filled by my clients’ requests.
If it wasn’t working on their business it was basically waiting for the next thing they needed.
It was very reactionary.
When we onboard new clients we take them through an exercise called The Perfect Week™ where they re-imagine their calendar making time for the most important things in their businesses.
Themselves.
In today’s video, I break down how you can do this and why you should do it immediately if you’re just waiting around for the next thing your client needs.
Transcript / MP3
In this video, I want to share a few tips to give you back five to 10 hours a week to work on your bills. Yes, what’s good. Everyone. I’m Greg Hickman, founder of all agency@allagency.com. If you’re constantly finding yourself in a position where you’re working only on your client’s business during the week, leaving you the nights and weekends to work on yours, or you’re unable to surpass maybe a certain number of clients that you’re serving or a monthly revenue, or maybe you’re responding to client fire drills constantly day in and day out and generally operating your business by the way of reacting to the next client demand. That’s the case. You probably don’t have that much free time to do the work… needed to grow your own business. So I wanted to share a few tips to start turning things around. These are the exact same steps that we teach our clients within the first two weeks of working together. And they routinely get five to 10 hours per week back so they can dedicate those activities to grow. First one is build your week with intention in Michael Hyatt’s new book, when at work and succeed at life, he talks about how we need to add constraints. In fact, he says constraints, foster productivity, creativity, and freedom. But the power of constraints is that we only have a finite amount of time, money, energy, and really mental bandwidth each and every week, you can’t do everything. And by adding constraints, you’ll be forced to make some choices. So for our clients, the first step is actually opening up their calendar and blocking time for both family and personal wellness. First for me, these are things like time slots. I’m Going to work out, drop my kids off and pick them up from school, lunch breaks, stretch breaks, and even dinner time. I even go as far as blocking out weekends with my intentions to go mountain biking or just blocks that literally say fun in them. So I’m giving myself permission to do whatever I want. From there. I add blocks for production when it was just me and the business, these blocks were really used for doing things that related to sales and marketing that meant creating videos like this, reaching out to prospects, having sales conversations, doing the things that would lead me to having sales conversations. The next step is to actually click subscribe, because with where you’re at right now, if you don’t keep watching, you’re going to continue to be in the exact same spot. So each and every week we release a new video and I want to make sure you click that notification bell too, because then you’ll be notified every time we drop a new video, which is every Thursday. Now back to it, after we’ve blocked out time for our personal stuff and production then, and only then do I actually block out time for fulfillment? I’ll designate exactly how many hours per day or what days per week. I actually do client work. Here’s a hint. If your entire week is dedicated to client work right now, that’s probably your biggest problem. So maybe you determined that you’re only going to do delivery work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and use Monday and Friday to focus on your business. I actually know the colleague of mine that would bring on clients and communicate to them that he would only do fulfillment work on the second and fourth week of the month, because on the other weeks he’d actually be working on his business. No matter how you determined to slice it up for yourself. This is just an example of adding some constraints in your business that will put you in a position, actually grow. Now, if you’re sitting there saying Greg, there’s literally no way for me to make enough money working that way with the clients that I currently have. Well, for some of you, you’re probably right, but at least you’ll be making the first step to restructuring your business in a way that will allow you to grow and grow in a sustainable way. Because if you’re working 80 plus hours a week, and it’s all on your client’s business, you’re never going to break through the ceilings that you’re currently at. Whether that’s the revenue that you’re at and you want to grow revenue or the number of hours you’re working once you’ve actually start to restructure our week, we actually will reveal the real problems in our business. Like I said, for many of you, you’re probably not charging enough and, or you’re not profitable enough in the first place, which is why you’re ending up spending so much time each and every week. Maybe the scope of work is too broad and you’re spread too thin because you’re trying to deliver all of the things instead of a specific solution. I’ve plenty of videos on this channel, diving into how to specialize and package up your services into things like programs, products, consulting, and really sell transformation instead of just selling your time and your labor. So go ahead and check out some of those videos, whichever the problem is for you. At least you’ve now redesigned your business the way you work and operate to take care of yourself first. And that’s a business by design, not by default. Now I’ll tell you in the beginning, it’s probably gonna be hard and uncomfortable. It’s gonna probably take a few weeks to get transitioned into this new way of operating, but let me tell you this working 80 plus hours a week to stay in the exact same place or sacrificing other areas of your life, it’s going to hurt a lot more. So I hope you found this video helpful. And if you’re an agency owner or a freelancer, and you’re looking for more profit, more predictability and purpose inside of your business, I want to invite you to join us in our free Facebook group, where we share the latest strategies, tips, and tools to help you grow a more profitable agency. One that you actually probably fall in love with and, or at least back in love with it. If you fell out of love and hopefully get you a little bit more momentum and move a little bit faster, I hope you enjoyed the video. Leave a comment with your biggest takeaway and hope to see you in the group. Yeah.
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