Greg Faxon explains how he avoids "creative avoidance" and decides a concrete schedule to build a side coaching business. He contrasts batching multi-hour blocks versus daily short sessions, chooses to block Mondays 8:30–12:30 and Fridays 9:00–12:00 for work and documentation (Five Minute Friday), and advises using your best-energy time for side-business tasks.
Alright guys, so I'm freaking out a little bit right now because, you know, it was all well and good to say that I was going to show you guys how to build a coaching business from scratch, but actually doing that is a whole other deal. You know, I have to spend all day figuring out what camera I needed, what lenses I needed. I have one I'm using now, but it's not ideal for a number of reasons and it reminded me how much you have to watch out for creative avoidance whenever you're starting something, especially a coaching business. And so if you haven't heard that term, creative avoidance before, what it means is basically you're focusing on peripheral tasks that feel safe, that feel comfortable instead of doing the things that are actually going to move the business forward. In the case of this project, it's literally turning on the camera, saying hi to you guys and getting started, shooting footage, not looking at lenses and looking at cameras. That would be creative avoidance, right? And now in the, in terms of building the coaching business itself, creative avoidance is what I've been doing all weekend, which is thinking about URL names, thinking about stuff like that, where that is important and the time will come for that. But it's not as important as, for example, figuring out when I'm going to work on this business. Now I have to build this second coaching business on the side of my current business, helping coaches get clients. So it's all very meta. But that's the first thing I have to figure out is when am I going to actually work on this coaching business. So I'm just going to pull my calendar up here and literally with you guys, figure out, you know, how much time am I able to spend on this side business. And then starting next week I can jump into it and we can actually, you know, get to work on some of this stuff. So Fridays is the Friday mornings from about 9am to 12pm is usually when I write my five minute Friday, which is the newsletter that goes out to my list each week. Typically I have some article about how to get coaching clients or some mindset email that I send. Now for the next probably two months or so, those five Minute Fridays are, are going to be these videos plus a write up documenting the process of building this new business. Because when I sent out an email to my list last week and asked if you guys wanted me to let you in on the process, you said yes, I got a ton of responses back. So we're going to focus on that. So that time is blocked off Friday 9 to 12 for putting all this together, editing it up, shooting any videos, just showing you guys what I did for the week. What I'm thinking is there's really two options, right? I can either block off part of a day, a big chunk to work on this other business alongside my current business, or I can block off about an hour each day. Usually I'm a fan of batching because the more that you jump around to things, the less efficient you really are, right? When you batch things, for example, when you spend a whole day just on sales or just on marketing or just on improving your coaching programs or just on working with clients, it's just calls all day. You get to stay in that mode and you get to really dig in and make some significant progress. So, you know, I'm tempted to just block off part of a, part of a day. And so maybe it's Mondays, maybe Monday is, is Monday and Friday mornings is the time that I work on this new coaching business. The other option is to do it probably like the first hour of my working day each day. And the reason that could be good is because you get your best energy. So for me, that first hour of work, like 8:30 to 9:30 is when I'm really chugging along. So, so what I'm going to say is that because I kind of did this today, today's Monday. I'm going to block off my Mondays for the first half of the day. This is when I have my best energy during the week and I'll get to just dive in. I'm going to block off Monday from, from 8:30 to lunchtime to work on this fitness coaching business, this new business. And then the rest of the time I'll have my current clients and I'll be managing my team, managing my programs and things like that. So there you go. Didn't have the answer to that. Just made the decision with you guys. I'm going to block off now Mondays from 8:30 to 9 or sorry, from 8:30 to lunchtime. So about 12:30. And that will be for working on the fitness coaching business. And I'm going to make that a repeating event every week. And there you go, it's blocked off. So I may change my mind. I may decide that actually I need to spend the first hour of my day on this instead of devoting, you know, a half day at the beginning of the week. Either way I'm going to need to get some time in. And if you're building your coaching business on the side, what I would recommend is that you use your best energy for your coaching business. Right. If you're working for someone else, you need to fulfill your obligations to them, but you don't need to give them your best energy. So when I was building my coaching business, my first one alongside a job, I woke up early before work and spend about an hour or an hour and a half writing my blog and building the business. And so that is what I would do if you have a job Monday through Friday, because I have a more flexible schedule, I can just block off the first half of Monday and that way it's batched. But you may choose to have a weekend day that you're working on. You're going to have to squeeze it in around there. But I've still made sure that I have my best energy, right. And it's at the beginning of the week, it's the first half of the day. But it doesn't interfere with any of my existing client commitments and things like that because I work with clients Tuesday through Thursday. Okay. So Monday and Friday mornings are going to be my day for doing and for documenting this program or this project. And that's all I got for you so far. We will talk soon. Hey, I hope you liked that video. If you want more content like it, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. There's a big red button and says subscribe on it and if you click that, then you'll get notified when I upload new videos. I'm going to be documenting my whole journey of building this coaching business and I'd love you to follow along.
