026: How to Get More Done in Less Time, Effortlessly!

Hey, have you heard There's a new style of CEO on the block. The modern CEO. And she is changing the way businesses are run. She's setting her own hours and her own salary. She's creating a business around what matters most to her. Freedom, family, and impact. And her corner office looks nothing like what you'd see on Wall Street. It's a kitchen t your grandma's lake house, a spacious home office, the living room floor maybe surrounded by kids and crayons or the local coffee shop. Your business, your way. This modern CEO is here to stay. Because when you embrace your role as modern CEO, you will have more freedom, more profit, and more fun. Most importantly, you'll fall in love with your life and a business in a way you've only dreamed. Trust me, this isn't a pipe dream reserved for only a select few. You are the modern CEO. You are creating a business and life you love because a better business means a better life. The to do list never gets shorter. Your days never get longer. And you're never actually done. You're constantly in motion, spinning your wheels and hoping for the day when it gets easier. Or at least less taxing, less exhausting, less draining. Except it's been, what now? Months? Years? And yet you're more buried in work than ever. The solution. You, my friend, need a clone. Most people have, at some point, wondered, if I could only clone myself. Yes, I too have asked myself this question. I am Amber McHugh, your for the podcast and the series we are now beginning, which is called, of course, how to Clone Yourself. How to Clone Yourself. And the idea of how to clone yourself was born when I was Facebook messaging with a friend years ago, and she said to me, in this entrepreneurial role you are in, we are busy. She asked, don't you ever just wish you could clone yourself? And in that moment, I had a light bulb go off. I can clone myself. In fact, I can show other people how to clone themselves as well. Because this is my background from corporate. I built systems. I was in consulting. I helped leaders get more efficient and get their jobs done well without them carrying the weight of the world. So we built the how to Clone Yourself methodology to help small business owners feel cloned, get more done in less time because we need more of you in the world. But that doesn't mean you have to actually do all of the things, which is exactly what we're going to talk about in this how to Clone Yourself series that we are kicking off today, right now. So come on, admit it. Let's Face it. Have you ever wished you had a clone? Well, there are 30 million entrepreneurs in the United States. 78% of them are a business of one. And more and more women are running those solopreneurships. Now, this how to Clone Yourself methodology not only applies to to small business owners, but it also applies to mothers, to NGO leaders, to CEOs and HR departments of larger organizations. This is a process and a methodology that you can leverage in a lot of different ways if you are feeling the need for a clone. In fact, my cloning days started my freshman year of college. In fact, my daughter Lily was born Christmas break my freshman year of college. So imagine the stress that I might have been feeling as we look back to that time and imagine how much there is to get done right when you're a student at university and studying and preparing for finals and just trying to make it through the day. But instead, instead of taking on that fear and instead of getting stuck in that fear because all of the odds were stacked against me. Look up any statistics for single parents, look up any statistics for kids of single parents and it does not look good. But instead of dropping out and taking a few years off before I went back to school, I brought Lily with me to university. Yeah, sure, everyone thought I was crazy. I had a full class load, a newborn baby, a family that lived three hours away so they could help when it was warranted or when they could get up there, I could get down. And I also had a boyfriend about to go off to the army. Remember how I told you I tried so hard to do it on my own? To say I needed a clone was an understatement. I moved out of my dorm and into an on campus apartment when Lily was born. And I quickly found that I had to prioritize every single detail of my life. There were so many hours in the day. And you know who came first, right? Lily. My sweet new baby girl. I quickly learned how to be efficient with my time. I learned to trust people and take care of her when I couldn't. I also learned how to find the right people for the right jobs. While one friend was great with helping me get housework done, another might have been better at watching Lily. Switching the true roles would have made everyone miserable and less efficient. I mean, this happens in our household. In fact, my husband went to get dinner tonight because if you're relying on me for dinner, if you listened to the last episode, you know planning for dinner is not my thing and will likely end up with a smoothie. So the Most important thing I had to learn was how to ask for help. Do you struggle with that, too? Women, especially, are told they can do it all. Run the house, raise the kids, stay in shape, and more recently, with all of that already on your plate, also have a fulfilling, lucrative career. I mean, these things are all great, right? We've grown, we've evolved. Society is moving forward, and it creates a tremendous weight for you and me. Asking for help is a sign of weakness. It could feel like you're saying you've given up. I had to fight this notion very hard. Only then was I able to get everything done well or well enough. Women are efficient. They can schedule and plan from the highest level to the most minute detail. But that doesn't mean we have to be the only ones doing the work. Deciding to delegate and letting the person you choose do their job well is an entirely different story. I learned quickly that if I micromanaged my friends and helpers, I was doubling my work, right. The very thing that I wanted to get help with still became my responsibility when I was in that role of attachment and micromanagement. Back in college, Lily was my number one. My number one. All of my other tasks centered around keeping this sweet girl alive. Your business, if you're running a business today, is no different. Everything you do to keep your business healthy and growing, that's what it's all about. With Lily as an anchor, I learned how to manage my time, prioritize, and to accomplish my goals for the day, the week, the month, the year. Lily gave me structure. Thank you, girl. I learned how to focus on the things that I excelled at and that needed my specific skill set and energy. And I learned how to outsource the rest. And that time in college, especially when Lily's dad went off to the army, my now husband, I debunked so many myths that hold so many of us back from getting growth. Some of these myths, and you better tag me in somewhere in social media if you have ever thought any of these things about yourself or. Or for yourself. No one can do it as good as I can. Oh, I can't let strangers come into my home. Oh. I can't ask for help to do the mundane, simple things. I should be able to take care of things like laundry and dishes and grocery shopping. It's on me, right? It'll take less time if I just do it. I don't have the time to train someone else. Sacrificing my own time, happiness, life, and doing it myself is better, easier, faster than asking someone else to do it. Oh, oh, oh. I don't want to bother her with this. I can figure it out on my own. Can you relate to any of those myths? My first real job out of college was at a consulting firm in Maryland. Yes, Lily and I survived college and I would argue that we even thrived. We moved to Maryland where my husband was stationed. It was a larger company that I started working for which I had long admired. But as I took on more and more responsibility, I felt myself being drawn to small business entrepreneurs. People putting their heart and souls on the line for something that you believe in. Not quite sure where this pull to small business was taking me. I took that nudge to Johns Hopkins where I studied business management Organization development specifically. While studying at Hopkins, working a full time job raising the family. With my husband regularly being deployed and abroad, I was increasingly drawn to start my own business. I knew I wanted to have a creative outlet where I could bring business and creativity to together. In a surprise twist, some of you know, I co founded a photography business, three Boudoir with my girlfriend Joanna. Tiger three Boudoir was born totally unexpectedly. My husband was overseas working at the time and I wanted to send him boudoir photos as a gift. Naturally, I called in my girlfriends. One photographer and one former Playboy model who knew exactly, exactly how to pose you in a boudoir photo shoot right down to your fingertips and your facial expressions and your hip pop. Friends and family became interested in what we were doing and the business grew. You know this story, you've heard stories like this before. We grew the business successfully, all while working full time jobs. To be very specific, by successful us growing a successful business, I mean we created a legitimate second income for ourselves of more than 80,000 a year. 40k from a partner. 40k to me. All while we were still working 40 plus hours a week at our day jobs. Right? These are the stories that you hear about. So I want you to know this is possible for you too. And leveraging the how to clone yourself methodology is going to make it a whole lot easier. In all the conversations I had with my business partner, I got most excited about business strategy. I loved the way our photography business changes lives. Truly, women walk out of a photo shoot knowing this was something for them. Not a gift for someone else. But it becomes a gift for yourself. You're more empowered when you walk out of a photo shoot and I loved that. But I still lit up working on our business and wondered how can we do more with this message and serve more people through our Empowerment photography shoots. I wasn't going to be able to reach more people by myself with me and my business partner, right. So we sought to see if we could help other people do what we were doing, build a business by working a full time job and raising a family. So it's interesting because we leveraged the how to Clone Yourself methodology to not only grow our business into six cities around the world with a team of about 20 right now, but we also use this methodology to help other people clone themselves so they could scale and grow their businesses. I knew that if we could keep our business well organized, systematized and hire the right people to support us, we could leverage our time spend so our business didn't become another job. We didn't want to rush to leave our business at the end of the day. We wanted to continue to feel that passion and really we were forecasting that someday this might start to feel like a job. So if you are feeling in one area of your life that it's not going like you planned, if you've got overwhelm, if you've got stress, if you've got an endless to do list, or if you feel like your business business has taken over, or it feels like that job that I was just describing, or an endless chore that you have an emerging ulcer over, it's time to reset. It's time to step out of this mindset of overwhelm and take a step back. You stopped or are transitioning to running a business and you're changing your life in one way or another because you see a better way way. You know there's more opportunity for you out there, whether it's being a business owner or being growing in your career or stepping further into your role of mother or mother to be right or military spouse who's got so much weight on your shoulders as your spouses deploy and are hopping all around. But you know you don't want to be a cog in the wheel, especially because you are the CEO. You are the CEO of your business. You are the CEO of your life. But if you keep going the way you are now in your role of chief everything Officer, this won't end. It certainly won't end well together. In the next series, as we talk about how to clone yourself, we're going to design and remodel how you approach your business, your clients, your workflows. The end result will be that you have more free time, more joy, more time to spend on the people and adventures you love. This is exactly the reason that I was able to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia while my businesses are still fully functioning. We're thinking ahead here for your future short term and long term. Yes, we need more of you in the world and this process is gonna help us get it. But again, this doesn't mean you have to do more. You truly need to clone yourself. Said another way more of you in the world comes as you leverage yourself better so you can give wholly There are four parts to this how to clone yourself process that are of course broken down into a bunch of different steps. We're only going to be able to go so deep in this podcast, but I'm going to take us as deep as we possibly can in this series so that you can start to get results immediately. If you want to skip ahead, you can totally jump over to howtocloneyourself.com we have training, we have candidates for you to check out and take a look at if you are looking to hire someone specifically. And we also have done for you hiring services because there is a method to the madness if you want to have success in bringing on your candidates. But before we get there, let me tell you what those steps are and what we're going to walk through in this podcast series. First up, we need to get clear on what it is that you are doing. We need to get the lay of the land in the business. So we're going to take a look at your time and where it all goes. We're going to take a look at what's going on and what you might want to think about systematizing or outsourcing or doing something else all together with we are going to break it down and we're going to personalize the next steps in this series to you and your specific situation. The first step is really getting to know you and your business again at a deeper level. The second steps is all about preparing to clone. That means we're going to think and talk systems. There are a few different kinds of systems. There are technology systems, right? Software that you purchase to automate things. There's automation. There's also process that human beings take and they walk through step by step by step. This is what we need to do to execute on a given process on a specific project. So we're going to take a look at both types of systems and start to get a handle on what systems could really benefit you in your business, in your life, in your home, right? All of the places. Like I said, we use these things in my business and in my life to make things operate more efficiently for my family. Now, when we're talking about systems, this is a form of cloning in and of itself. Because if we can build out systems that get you more efficient and you can get more done. Stop right there. And we've already multiplied your efforts without you doing a ton more work. Right. You're able to get more done, more efficiently with less effort simply because you've applied and put some systems in place. Okay, so we're already starting and moving down the cloning process, but there may be some of you out there through this process that identify either who your next hire is or you identify that I actually need to make my first hire. So in the third step in this process, we're going to break down, how do you actually find your clones? And yes, I am talking about cloning because it is fun, it is cheeky, and we need to multiply you and your efforts and what you are creating in your business and in your life. But it doesn't always necessarily mean you want someone who does exactly what you can do. You want someone who will offset your skill sets. And you can do those things you don't want to do, you don't like to do, you don't actually get to or do, like me and laundry. You want someone, in many instances, who can do those things better than you can actually do them. And then the final step in the how to clone yourself process is to transfer ownership. Transfer ownership to the people that you've hired. Transfer ownership to the systems, put those systems to work for you, leverage those systems so you can get your mind back to the thing that matters. And we do that through a number of things. Through communication, through leading, not managing. Yes, leading in your business and in your life. Again, I'm gonna keep underscoring this life piece. It's not just about business, but all of these things apply to our life as well. So after we break down how to transfer ownership, it's up to you. We're gonna take you through those four steps as we move through this series so that you can multiply your efforts, because we need more of you in the world. And you, my friend, are right on time. Because if you felt a nudge to do something different, if you're feeling a calling to be someone different, listen up. Because that calling, that nudge, that push, that voice in the back of your head, it's right on time. So with that, I'm going to end this particular episode because we have set ourselves up for what is to come. If you are excited to clone yourself if you are ready to have more of you in the world and to multiply your efforts without you actually having to do more. I totally want to hear from you. Please leave a review or tag me out in social media somewhere. I'm Amber McHugh on Instagram. You can find me at Amber McCue and Co on Facebook. And of course I'm hanging out. Actually, I'm not really hanging out that often over on Twitter as well, but I am in all the places and you can find me if you search Amber McHugh. I can't wait to hear from you, and I especially can't wait to have more of you in the world. I'll catch you in the next episode.