Put Your Clients Second

If you wake up every single day, Monday through Friday in your business as the owner of your agency or your freelancing business, and you are working in your client's business, meaning that every single day, you're sort of waiting ... for your client to tell you what to do. You're pretty much spending nine to five in client fulfillment. If that's you, I want to share how actually putting your client second is going to help you get ahead. Let's get it going.

What's going on guys, Greg here with all agency at all, agency.com and I wanted to share something. A principle from a book that I'm writing is really geared towards building a company that can run without you a key principle in there. That's really geared towards doubling your income that can actually help you escape fulfillment. So the book I'm reading right now is called the self managing company by Dan Sullivan self managing company. That sounds like something that we should all want, right? In that book. He made this comment to double your income. You have to double your free time. As counterintuitive as that may seem to double your income. You have to double your free time. And in this book, they talk about different types of days as the owner in your business, free days, focus days and buffer days, focus days are the things that you're working on that will move your business forward.

Buffer days are the days that will be you spending time preparing for the focus days. And then free days are kind of obvious you don't work at all. And it's geared towards reenergizing and freshening up to come back to do the buffer and the focus days in this kind of chapter that I'm reading. He's talking about the difference between, you know, free days, focus days and buffer days. And he says, when it comes to organizing your week as an owner that wants to double their income, and maybe that's not your goal, maybe you want to triple it. Whatever that goal is, if you want to grow in your business, we need to start building a business that can run without us. And so he talks about how you need to organize your week. And he basically recommends that you should book your vacation time first and with whatever time is left over, that's the amount of time you get to dedicate to getting your work done.

So whatever is left over is the amount of time you have to get your work done. Now that seems probably counterintuitive, right? The key principle here is that if we look at, you know, all of the time that we have allotted and we say, okay, well in any given week, this is the time that I have. And I book my vacation or my free time first, right? This area over here is the space that we have now left to get work done. This is called a constraint. The, how we now spend that leftover time is going to be different if we're just trying to fill all of our time with client work. Right? So what it really ultimately does is this you to be productive during the time that you have left over, how does this translate to you? How does this translate to you, your business?

Well, here's the thing. Most agency owners that I talk to freelancers consultants when they look at their time, uh, let's come back and look at our time as a whole. Okay. They just show up Monday through Friday and wait for a client to tell them what to do, or they know that they have certain things that the client is waiting on and they fill up all of their time with client fulfillment. Well, if they do that, there really isn't much time left for them to focus on growing their business. Because like I said, at the beginning, you're spending too much time in your client's business. You're helping their business grow, not yours. So just like Dan talks about booking vacation time. First we help our clients do. And what I encourage you to do is book your time to work on your business and look in the beginning. That might be 25% of the pie. If we look at all the time as a whole, this is you working on your book, okay? And then this is your clients.

If you do that, obviously limited capacity left to work on your client's business. Am I right? So that means the type of client that we take is going to change the amount we charge per client is going to have to be reconsidered, because if I'm trying to hit a certain revenue goal, and I have less time dedicated to fulfillment, because I'm doing things like sales, marketing, and fulfillment over here, right? Like that's what we would focus on. We'd focus on sales. We'd focus on marketing. We'd focus on creating content that brings our ideal prospects to us. Then we have less time in the fulfillment bucket to work on clients, right? So each client that we work with needs to kind of elevate in the value that they bring to our business and probably need to Uplevel the type of client you work with. So maybe those $2,000 contracts, $2,000, a monthly installments, aren't, isn't going to cut it anymore.

We need to raise that lifetime value of a client from maybe three to five K to, you know, 15 K and up so that we can feel confident in. We have a limited amount of time and that's where we're going to spend. But that means we're going to spend it on better, higher pain clients that need specific things that we can help them with. When this comes back to you, what does, what does that look like? Right? What is your pie look like right now? Maybe you don't spend any time on, on sales and marketing, right? And then that's why you're living feast or famine waiting for, you know, or referral. And I have a lot of up and down in your business. So the first step for you might be just a little liver each and every week, it might be a half a day.

It might be one day or two days. Uh, something interesting that Jerry Seinfeld said is that, you know, if you want to be a, you just don't write every day, you know, Shakespeare, didn't write all day. You have to have a beginning and an end to the writing session. So you have to write for 90 minutes. And at the end of the 90 minutes, you're done, you move on to the next thing and fulfillment for your clients needs to become the same. We need to look at our week. And if we say, Hey, we have, you know, five days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we might start to say, Hey, I know I'm drawing on my head right now. We might start to say, Hey, I'm going to dedicate Tuesdays and Thursdays to me working on my business, I'm going to create content. I'm going to outbound prospect.

I'm going to have sales calls. I'm going to do things that are going to help move the needle forward in my business. And then on these off days, you know, Monday and Wednesday and Friday, we work on our client's stuff. Maybe that's version one for you. I know a few of our clients actually have dedicated specific weeks of the month to fulfillment all of week two and all of week four are dedicated to fulfillment. So the off weeks to work on their own business, whatever it means for you, we need to start creating the boundaries of when you'll work on your client's side. Because if this whole pie is filled from your clients, you're never going to have the opportunity to grow your own business. So the piece might start here, but over time, maybe it gets to here and that'll create some constraints for who you need to hire next, the type of client, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

If you want to double your income, you need to double your free time. If you want to double your agency, you need to double the time that you're spending on working on your business and up level, the type of client that you're working with, how much each client is worth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I hope you find this valuable. I thought really interesting principle instead of living a reactionary week operating day in and day out, waiting for clients that already paid you to give you more work, because they will keep doing that. You need to have time dedicated to growing your business. So get out there, block some time each and every week for you to work on your business. Maybe it's a half day to start, but we got to start increasing that from where it is right now, each and every month, moving forward. If we want to grow, see in the next one, [inaudible].