Ed Gandia explains why self-employed writers need to stop doing only client work and start spending time on business strategy. He breaks down what working on the business means and how to actually make it happen.
Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.
Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries, this episode is much shorter than usual. Rather than my typical 45 minute format. Today I'm sharing a quick tip with you. This is part of the Audio Insights I publish for my private coaching clients every weekday and I thought you'd find it helpful. So here we go. Hope you enjoy it. One of the challenges of being self employed is that we're continually getting sucked into working in exclusively in the business at the expense of working on the business. Working in the business is mainly about doing client work and serving clients, but it also includes things like admin work, email management, invoicing, and so on. Working on the business is about anything related to improving the business. It includes everything from thinking about the vision and direction of your business to brainstorming, strategizing professional development, implementing new strategies, working on new initiatives that will improve the business. So, for example, creating an info product, a new productized service, a new offer, and even marketing can be considered working on the business. And by the way, just a quick aside, all these examples I just gave you about working on the business have elements that other people can do for you. Better, faster, cheaper. So you want to be smart about this stuff and not lie to yourself that you're working on the business. If you know in your heart that someone else could be doing that prospect research for you, for example, or helping you build that new website for your info product, or rework your entire website from a design standpoint, that's a topic for another day, but I did want to mention it briefly anyway. I found that when you're not sure how to split and budget these two functions in your weekly schedule, the working on the business part gets left out. Our brains work in a very interesting way. When our brain is confused about a choice, and making that choice requires a high degree of cognitive energy, it will put off that decision, which in most cases leads to no decision. That probably sounds very familiar. I'm very, very familiar with that feeling. And because nature hates a vacuum, when you don't purposely decide on and schedule time to work on your business, that time will automatically be taken up by working in the business kind of stuff. So what's the right mix? It's very simple actually. I found that 10% is a very effective and realistic ratio. 10% of your work week should be spent working on your business. So quite simply, if you work 40 hours a week, that means you should carve out about four of those hours for tasks that will help move your business forward and get you to a better place. You know, not serving clients, not doing client work. Rather, tasks that will improve your mindset, enable you to land better clients, allow you to diversify your income, help you in more and less time, have greater freedom about what clients and projects you take on, and of course, enjoy your work more. So it's really that simple, just to allocate 10% every week? And just as important, schedule those time blocks as appointments with yourself in your calendar. Now look, not every week is going to be perfect. Some weeks will be more, some weeks will be less. That's okay. Be easy on yourself. It's not about perfection. It's about having the right and strong intention and having systems in place that will enable you to make that work. In terms of scheduling and just ensuring that when things are happening and you get alerts and so forth. And of course consistency is important. Things happen, life happens, and it's not uncommon to get off track for a while. I should know. In fact, I have a confession to make. I've been slacking on this. Over the past 60 days. My percentage of time working on the business has been more along the lines of, and I hate to even admit this, about 2 to 3%. That's bad. Especially because we're not talking about a missed week here, we're talking about at least the past 60 days. So just in case you think these daily insights are all about me preaching to you, you should know that these little messages are often self reminded.
