Christine Corcoran explains why entrepreneurs get stuck doing client work and admin instead of growing. She breaks down how to map your capacity, outsource the right tasks, and spend time on strategy and new offers that actually scale your business.
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Welcome to five Minutes of Momentum. These episodes are a short five minute burst of inspiration, motivation and massive action. If you need that little kick up the butt to get things moving and to inspire you to take massive action, then every single Thursday I'll be sending you through a five minute episode to download, digest and implement to finish your week off strong. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Welcome back to five Minutes of Momentum. Today I want to talk to you about the difference between working in your business versus on your business. Because I feel like a lot of people get very confused on what the actual tasks are and what it really truly means to work on your business. There is a big difference and I think the difference also impacts your ability to progress, your ability to hit your goals, your ability to achieve next level results. Right? So when you think about working in your business, I want you to detail out in order for you to deliver your services, what that actually looks like. So there's going to be a bunch of different things. It's when you're working with clients, it's when you're delivering the service that you offer. It's. It's where you're working on client stuff. It is also admin, the admin that keeps the business running, right? That's not working on the business, that's working in it. Because there's going to be certain things like invoicing and things like that that actually just need to happen in order for the business to keep running. When you think about working on the business, these are the activities that we need to be doing in order to move the needle in your business, in order for you to be able to hit those goals and hit those results. And I know how busy we can get and we can get so caught up in doing all the things. So, so sometimes people put on the list of when they're working on their business, things like social media posting. That's actually not a working on the business activity. It's yes, it's part of your marketing and yes, I guess it can feel like it's working on the business kind of task. But usually there's a difference between, well, actually working on the growth of the business versus just stuff that you need to keep the lights on, right? So if marketing is stuff that you need to keep the lights on, so there's going to be certain sales activities that you need to be doing on a regular basis that often get forgotten. We get caught up in client delivery and we're not focusing on sales which help move the needle forward in your business and then I want you to think about the long term goals that you have. So working on the business is growth focused activities. So this is thinking ahead of time, like planning out your next year and being like, what do I need to be working on right now in order for me to grow and hit the next milestone or to hit the next goals. So growth focused activities are usually things that aren't going to make you money right now. They're not going to make you money in your business this month. But, but you know that you need to develop those things, those assets, or develop a new client offering or develop a new avenue of personal branding. Like there's certain things that you'd be working on to grow the business that will get you to those outcomes, get you to those goals that you need to be prioritizing right now. Otherwise you will not make progress on them and the business won't change. So if you think about what you're currently doing to maintain that's working in and then you're thinking about, okay, for me to create next level results, for me to be able to have new offerings, for me to be able to have a new avenue of marketing or messaging in order for me to be able to attract the right clients, that next level, like it's changing and developing new elements of the business that will help you grow. So this could be prioritizing your visibility, it could be putting yourself forward for new opportunities, it could be developing your network, it could be working on that new signature offer that you want to create, it could be creating new content for your current offerings that needs to upgrade what you currently offer. Like all of those types of things that you know it's not gonna necessarily make you money right now, but you need to do it in order for you to grow. It's also working on yourself, it's working on yourself and it's working on developing a certain skillset in order for you to grow your business. So if there's certain elements that you know you need to get better at. So maybe it's your finances, maybe it's your leadership, maybe it is a new platform you need to learn. All of that is working on the business and it takes away from working in the business. And so sometimes people also don't see the value of doing that because they're too short term, focus focused. They're still trying to just keep the lights on. Right? And I was talking to a client about this recently and she's like doing all the things and I'm like, yes, we need to get to a point where the capacity is manageable. And then obviously, yes, you can outsource at whatever point, but sometimes you're not ready to outsource and you're going to have to manage the capacity and still prioritize working on the business. And that can be sometimes the hardest thing. So another client of mine, I was working with her recently around her capacity because she was like so overwhelmed with all the client work that she needed to do that she didn't know that one, she was at capacity, and two, how to acknowledge when she's at capacity and how to prioritize time to work on the business. And it's not one and then the next, it's actually at the same time. So when I was mapping out her capacity, like literally her amount of time that she has to work in her business and on her business, we mapped out her current offerings, the amount of hours that she needs to deliver those services, and then we looked at, okay, if you've got, if you've booked yourself for 40 hours of work that week and you don't have any time to work on the business, that is the first problem. So we need to go back and go, hang on a minute. You need to adjust the way that you're delivering your services so then you can allocate, even if it's half a day, like, it doesn't even need to be long, it can be two hours. And then you need to build up on that. Right? Because if you are always just working in it, you will always just be an employee and you will never really be able to step into your CEO shoes and create a long term sustainable business that can grow and expand. So I hope this has given you clarity on what the difference is. Because if you are spending way too much time working in it and you're not prioritizing because you, you cannot wait till you finish that in order to start working on the business. You need to allocate the time and prioritize it and adjust the expectations that you have with your clients so then you're able to do both. And if they find that's not even doable because it's going to be an impact on your financials, you're probably not charging enough, but that's a topic for another podcast. So I hope this has given you clarity on what to be working on when it comes to working on your business, and I hope that you start to prioritize it soon.
