074: Scaling Without the Stress

Hi, this is Charles Michael Davis. Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

I realized that I got to a point of running the business where I wouldn't be the best coach because I was doing too much and I would be more distracted than I would want to be from my one on one clients. So I knew that my clients would be better served with someone else. And I think we can all get to that point where you realize actually I'm in the way and I'm going to do people a disservice by trying to do too much.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the FreeTime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

How can we scale revenue without the stress, without the busyness? When free time readers and website visitors go to access the toolkit, there's a line that says, what's the biggest challenge in your business? Or if I could wave a magic wand and solve one thing in your business, what would it be? And this is one of the most common replies people asking yes, I want to scale and I want to create systems to have more free time, but I don't want to scale the stress and the busyness. That's what we're going to get into today. First, I want to thank two new reviews and reviewers that came in. Guitargal46 said, Love your idea for this book and podcast materialized. Can't wait to read it. Thank you so so much and WindyCity Walkabout said, Brilliant advice for creative business owners. You said, I love Jenny's style. Her content is so thoughtful and helpful for self employed small business owners. Loved the Made By Monday episode. I'm using it asap. That's so awesome. Report back. I can't wait to hear how it's going. You can always follow up. This goes for any of you. I would love to hear that, especially as the book starts shipping out. What do you do? What strategies do you try? What do you put in place? Or listening to the podcast and I'm collecting anonymously on the book website. It's freetime.com book I actually have a little rotating slideshow of as a result of reading the book or listening to the podcast. Free Timers have already.

And there's all kinds of fun things like set up Founder Fridays or hired a second virtual assistant or hired a personal assistant to help with errands about town. I love sharing these ideas because we can all learn so much from each other and get so inspired by each other, right? In the introduction to FreeTime, I talk about how the early days of any business are inherently scrappy. The owner you are doing whatever it takes to create products and services that are what people are looking for. To launch them at all is a big deal, let alone to start generating consistent cash flow. So for a lot of people, just imagining success can bring added stress. There are three common themes that I notice, or three common friction points among small business owners who are a little afraid to grow because the current setup isn't quite sustainable. The first one is pressure to take on new clients to meet escalating overhead. So as you do start hiring and wanting to go pro on software, you can start to feel a sense of pressure. Do I need to take clients that I'm not crazy about just to meet my expenses? And that's that tough chicken and the egg juggle of when do you invest, even when it's stretchy to help you earn more income versus when do you save money so that you can build up your coffers? The second one are prices, specifically prices that are too low, that don't reflect the value you're delivering and the increasing complexity of running your business. So we're going to talk more about that in a little bit. The third one is porous boundaries with your team and clients that consumes crucial recharging time. If you have porous boundaries, it's kind of a sense that it's as if you don't have a bedroom door. You know, everybody's just barging in. Nobody knocks. They're like peppering you with questions or asking to reschedule things, maybe even at the last minute, paying invoices late, you know, all these little things that they add up to a sense of frustration. I know that I'm starting to get burnt out when I get really cranky and the smallest little transgressions make me angry. That's how I know that I'm not Honoring my own boundaries. So if you're currently experiencing any of these three Ps pressure, prices or porous boundaries, you can move from friction to flow. And today I'm going to share three ways to scale your revenue without the stress and the busyness that are a work in progress. I don't think that any of us hits these overnight. It just takes time and it takes refinement. But I understand this hesitation to earn more. Because if you don't redesign your systems without a certain kind of paradigm shift, you're not just pouring gasoline on the good, you're pouring it on the bad too. So if you do try to scale while you have certain cracks in the foundation, to switch metaphors, something I do all the time inadvertently, then you're scaling your income. And yes, you are scaling the stress. Here's another example. A cluttered home doesn't get any neater. Just because you move into a bigger house, you take your habits with you. For example, Michael and I used to live in my studio apartment in Nolita when we not when we first started dating, but when he moved in, it was the two of us in a 400 square foot studio. We didn't even have a bedroom door and I always tried to find a way to live together. There was barely room for his stuff. We cleared out one of our Ikea bookshelves where he would start putting his clothes because I had filled the thing A to Z mostly with the books. Just because we moved, now we're in a three bedroom doesn't mean that we live in this pristine magazine looking home. We still have all our habits where things pile up on the countertops and we have way too many dog toys all over the floor and neither one of us is obsessively neat. So the clutter just piles and piles and piles. And now it's at the point where we're in total crisis. And my friend Ann, who runs estate sales as a side hustle, is going to come help us do a mega makeover to the house. But it just reminds me that it's the same thing with a business. If you have sort of cluttered business and a cluttered mind when it's small. Just because your income grows doesn't mean that it's all fixed. Because again, you take your habits with you.

So the three things that I want to share with you in this episode that have been really helpful for me over the years are raising prices, price productizing your flagship services, and creating scalable delivery systems. Let's start with raising prices. As I Share in the Book Stop Trading time for money is one of the first maxims that business owners learn while scaling beyond service provider or freelancer. Trading time for money is not altogether bad, but it is risky when you need to take a break. This is a really common theme of my work. When you need to take a break because I so often do, you want to be able to step away without your income grinding to a halt. The other limitation, if you don't raise prices, you can't meet demand that goes beyond your available time and energy. So you can't just always cram more meetings in your calendar. This is really important. Although the book Free Time is about operational efficiency, I do say in the opening to the design stage that if you are charging too little, it will be difficult to ever feel truly free. This is so important that at some point as business owners we have to reconsider the relationship between time and money and design a fresh take on these two. So one of the best ways to free your time is raising your prices if it matches the value you provide. So we always want to do this in integrity. I do not subscribe to the advice that just says, yeah, charge these crazy through the roof prices if they're not aligned with the value that you're providing your clients. Ideally you provide 10x the value of whatever the investment is going to be. Now you can also increase your profit margin by cutting expenses and improving operational efficiency. That's what I'm always focusing on and talking about. But healthy, abundant pricing is really crucial because imagine if you never raised your prices to reflect the complexity of your business, the services you or your team members are offering. Then you're always kind of stuck in that hamster wheel. And again, it's hard to free your time if you need to cram more and more things into your calendar just to meet a monthly minimum nut or income for your business. So a lot of business owners that I speak to and work with are still charging too little for their services. They're sort of raising their prices very slowly, incrementally over time, but not necessarily in a way that actually honors their role as the owner, especially for services that they themselves are providing. I used to do this myself, but a lot of people are so preoccupied with their clients budgets. What can my clients pay? What do my clients want to invest? What's hard about that? It brings to mind this phrase from Byron Katie. So Byron Katie is the creator of the work and I've adapted this to business and thinking about pricing. But one thing she says if you're thinking about their business and they're thinking about their business, then nobody's home for yours. So if we think about this, she means it in like their life, you know, she's not talking about actual business the way we are here, but the way I phrase it. So if you are thinking about their business and budget and they are thinking about their business and budget, then there's nobody thinking about yours. And this is just so important. Byron, Katie says we're both over there. Being mentally in your business keeps me from being present in my own. So what I advise if you're a business owner and you are still serving as a service provider in some capacity, speaker, coach, consultant, design or anything like that, where you have the ER on the end of your role, even part time, multiply your rates by at least three. This accounts for three T's taxes, team overhead and time. The third T is so crucial, your time because you are incurring switching costs and opportunity costs when you're working in the business, not just on the business as CEO. So as Michael, my husband, said, there was this client that was going to sign him for this big commission project and then he realized that he needed to charge more because they need to pay for the way back. He calls it the where was I Tax that when a client hires him, it really takes him out of the flow of whatever projects he was working on. And it's hard, it's really hard to change direction again and try to find momentum when you'd left something midstream. So this is really true. As owners who are serving as service providers, you have to account. We often price as though we're still a sole proprietor, like the earliest days of side hustling. But you have to think about covering your taxes, covering the team overhead that supports you and the entire business and the where were you. Tax the time that it takes to dive in with clients and not just work on building the structure and systems in your business. For helpful resources on this, I recommend checking out any one of Alan Weiss's many books. He is very focused on value based pricing. So million dollar consultant, Million dollar speaker. All of his books are really good for driving this point home. And then there's a podcast called Pricing is Positioning. Just the title of this podcast alone sends a message and this is thanks to my friend Lindsay. Pricing is Positioning. Think about that for a moment. So if you're the owner and you price your services at double what it would be for a team member, you are positioning yourself as the most valuable asset in the business. And raising prices is not always bad. What I love about that podcast title pricing is positioning is sometimes we're afraid to raise prices, but actually it means that people perceive our value more. And it's counterintuitive and it's crazy to say that, but they do show up more if they're paying a little more. And I think that it's hereby time. As one of my coaches said to a group of us on a workshop, she said, I hereby give you all a raise. We said this in our BFF community earlier in the year. It's time. This is the year. Let's give all of ourselves a raise and trust that those higher prices will position us as the experts that we want to be. The second strategy for scaling without the stress is to productize your flagship services. There's nobody better at describing how to do this than John Warrilow. He wrote a book called Built to Sell and it is fantastic. He also has a podcast called Built to Sell. He says owning a process makes it easier to pitch and puts you in control.

The three questions to ask as you productize a service and I'll give you some examples in a minute. What's teachable, what's repeatable, what's valuable. Built to Sell is a parable about a business owner that was delivering all these custom services for every client that came through his business. I think the example in the book is about branding and design work and it wasn't until that business owner created one product that his business really took off and he thought that he was going to lose a bunch of clients. But in fact creating one product and the systems that surround it was what really helped him thrive. Him her them in the book it was he I'm pretty sure. So I'll give you two examples of this with coaching. I used to deliver one on one. Then I brought on a team of pivot coaches and in the beginning each coach could set their own pricing. But what really helped us was deciding to be more consistent. And one of the big shifts that I made individually as a coach was stopping my project based billing model of three months, six months, nine months because it was always so staggered. I never knew who was paying when or how many clients I needed. And going to a monthly retainer where I would invoice every client on the first of the month and we would have two coaching sessions at a recurring day and time. So scheduling was automatic, taken care of recurring day and time and invoicing was taken care of and that everybody was getting invoiced on the first of the month. So I knew, let's say at that time, if I was coaching for a thousand dollars per client per month, well, I knew, okay, I need five clients. This was maybe 10 years ago, but it's like, I need five clients. That's it. It was so clear. But when I was doing project based billing, I never knew. I never knew how many clients I needed or who was renewing when. And people would extend their plans and life stuff would happen. So with pivot coaching, we applied this as well. Pivot coaching, let's say it's $9.97 a month on retainer, good until canceled. And we're going to implement free time coaching as well in this same setup, because the systems are there, the systems are created. So let's say you want to work with a free time coach. It would be the same setup, recurring day and time invoiced monthly on the first of the month. And this helps us productize the coaching service. So not only am I not the coach because I realized that I got to a point of running the business where I wouldn't be the best coach because I was doing too much and I would be more distracted than I would want to be from my one on one clients. So I knew that my clients would be better served with someone else. And I think we can all get to that point where you realize, actually I'm in the way and I'm going to do people a disservice by trying to do too much. So by creating a pivot coaching team and a free time coaching team and then productizing that service. That is how we're able to build systems and scale something like coaching and meet the demand that if any of you finish reading one of the two books, Pivot or free Time, you can get the support that you need to put what you're learning into practice.

We'll be right back just after this. Cuando entras a Burlington encuentras precios increibles y regal los geniales Jeso es energia del protagonista porquen Burlington los ahoros festivos no son lo unico que llamal attention descubria jasgos de calidar y regalos perfectos paratodos and tulista des de jugetes. Hi nuevas marcas de belles.

Parade bajo del armol in serio conies.

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a sprite winter spiced cranberry and put your twist on Tradition A bold cranberry and winter spice flavor Fusion Sprite. Winter Spiced Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite, obey your thirst.

Another example of productizing a service. I talk about licensing a lot. So a big part of my business model is licensing my IP to companies who want to scale these programs internally without me, Jenny, being the bottleneck. So instead of me flying around the world delivering Pivot or free time workshops, let's say to a company like Google. Google is able to license the material so that they can roll it out globally and it doesn't depend on me or my time at all. And it's also not as expensive as hiring me to deliver every single time they want to run an instance of the training. So the mistake I made with my first two licensing clients, you can't say it's a mistake because it helped me get those clients. It helped me go from zero to one, it helped me figure out what I needed to build. But I had done them as these custom bespoke solutions where I had weekly collaboration calls and everything we designed was together and proprietary to that company. And I hit this wall where I realized the exact question that I started this podcast with, I realized, oh no, this means that every time I get a licensing client, even though the checks are big, often six figures, I am going to have to show up for so many calls and meetings and customization and I'm going to be customizing the same thing for every next company. It just seemed so inefficient for my time, my energy and also the materials. Because now there was going to be all these different but similar versions living. Imagine if I had 10 licensing clients. So I spent an entire year where during that year I did not land a new client, but if I did, I was going to do it differently. I was going to create licensing off the shelf and that unless you wanted to pay a super premium, it would not be co branded, it would not be customizable. I realized this was a better service to my clients because I realized they wouldn't have to do all this work as well. It would be ready for them off the shelf. And I hired a PowerPoint. I call it like PowerPoint Zhu Xing. You know, I had already done the brand strategy that was a big investment, but I hired someone to really spruce up the PowerPoint to help me really spruce up on brand, the Pivot workbook, the handouts. So all of a sudden I had this bundle of materials, the train, the Trainer Facilitator guide, the participant workbook, participant handout, the slides. Everything that I needed to create in this licensing bundle was branded. It was beautiful and it was done. So now if a client wants Pivot licensing or soon free time, they're going to buy it one click. And if they want to customize it with a really heavy lift, they that's going to be a big, big, big price tag. So it will reflect the extra investment that will go into it. And by having a Common Core set of materials again, it means that they can meet the highest brand standard. It means that nobody has to do a lot of heavy lifting to roll it out. And it also means that when I roll out updates, it's to the Common Core instead of having to go back to every next client. So this is an example of starting bespoke, learning more about what I need to create, but then ultimately productizing so that it's bundled, packaged, one click ready, even the freetime Operations Dashboard. This is a product I'm super duper excited about. So this is a product. It's almost one click, but I'm creating the mirror of what I use in notion and what I have refined over two years that you need if you want to implement the FreeTime operating system. It's just a few clicks to duplicate all these templates I've created and refined and customized over the last several years. And I've done my own learning and training and my own like exactly what I need to create to earn twice as much in half the time. And how do we track this as a company and onboard people more easily and communicate with team members. So this is now a work in progress in terms of it's just about ready if you want to learn more. It's freetime.com dashboard and although we will build in certain group Q and A calls and if you do want to purchase the dashboard, there's a version that could come with two one on one sessions with a Notion Pro. His name is Alex. So it's a mix. Yes, there are group and one on one services that go with it, but the product itself is ready for you, it's ready to go. And that's something that was really important to me when I thought about when any of you, if you finish reading Free Time, how could I most quickly and easily help you implement everything that you learn in the book? Creating a flagship product to help you do that. So that's the dashboard that brings us to the third and final part of this conversation on scaling without the stress creating Scalable delivery systems. What do I mean by this? Think about for anything in your business, the level of clients you currently have, let's just say you have 10. Okay, what if you had 100? What if you had 1,000? I did this with licensing. I started with two, but I thought to myself, what if I had 10? Would I need to change how I was delivering things? What if I had 100? If I had 100 licensing clients, there's no way I could go customize materials for every single one. I would need to host them in my own, let's say Dropbox and provide access to those companies. I'm not going to create a hundred LMS learning management systems within those companies. It just wouldn't make sense. So this thought exercise is really important. What if you had 10x the volume, 100x the volume. Part one of creating scalable delivery systems. Design the onboarding experience. So what is this going to look like when you get a new client? Is there a way that you can automate some of the email? For example, an onboarding email sequence. If any of you pre ordered freetime, then you got an email that said thank you for pre ordering. Keep an eye out for a message from Freetime Audio. And then we realized that not everyone got that message. Sometimes it went to spam. So we put in the onboarding email sequence. Three days later you'll get a follow up email. Did you get access to the audiobook yet? If not, search for FreeTime audio. Just as a way to support something that we were seeing happening in real time. You could also create videos for onboarding if you've been listening for a while. You know, I'm kind of a curmudgeon about video because, oh, just the effort to figure out hair and makeup and clothes and lighting and then I feel like videos, you can put all this effort and pay a tremendous amount of money to do it professionally and then if things get out of date, you gotta do it all over again. It's not even like a podcast where you could just quickly rerecord or insert new audio. So I'm not such a fan of videos, but of course maybe a one or two welcome onboarding videos that are a little bit low key, like not the highest production value I think can be a really nice touch. Of course make sure for scalable delivery you have strong documentation. So does everyone on your team know what to do? How do you just avoid repeating yourself? I mean this is something that's always on my mind. In the book there's a chapter that's called Every question lives three lives. Every single time a prospective or current client or a team member asks you a question, it should not live and die in that email or Slack channel or wherever you're answering that question should get documented. So the three lives the first time someone asks it, documenting the answer internally for your team and ideally posting an FAQ externally somewhere to make it even easier for the next person. Another thing that works really well for creating scalable delivery systems is training someone on your team to deliver and support clients. So I am very lucky to have Deborah on my team. Thanks to a connection from my friend Lindsay Deborah. My life has gotten so much easier ever since I did this. I used to think that for keynote speaking and things like licensing these big ticket items that I needed to be the one to give this red carpet white glove service to my clients.

Again because I'm juggling so much at the overall business level, I'm just not the best person to do that. I'm not going to see and respond to email the fastest and get things on calendar and I realized that I conveyed a sense that I was a small one woman shop when I would do all the things. So as soon as Debra came on and started to handle incoming interest and she even jumps on the phone with certain potential clients just to understand what it is that they're looking for. She communicates, she helps with scheduling with these clients and I feel so confident knowing that she is helping support these clients along their journey with us and that it's not just me. So this was a huge part of scaling, whether it's to corporate clients on the licensing side and then there's someone in charge of the coaching side of the business too. That's not me. So interestingly, whether you work with a pivot or a free time coach, that's almost passive income for me, Jenny, because someone is managing that. There's someone on my team who manages working with the coaches, handling inbound interest questions from potential clients, checking in with current clients. When a client wraps up with a coach sending a post engagement survey, there is someone on the team handling all of that. So it takes very little oversight from me because we've gotten it to a well oiled system by now.

I know it's scary sometimes to replace yourself in these roles, but it will make your life so much easier, especially as you think about scaling without the stress and without the busyness. It's almost mandatory unless you scale your prices so high that you don't need to do any of this and you just have A handful of clients, which I do have some friends that prefer to go that route. I know people even. I think Joe Rogan said this in a podcast interview for his show with Bridget. I'm forgetting her last name. But halfway through the episode, he said, if I need an assistant, I'm doing something wrong. So he tried to keep his business so simple. I wonder if he has at least one assistant. But he basically said, by the time I start needing a whole team, I'm doing something wrong. Now we know he has his producer. Jesse, is it Jesse? You know, you get it. He has, like, producer that's there with the live shows. Also, I think it's interesting Joe Rogan has a wife. So this is one of my bones to pick. But again, I'm not trying to perpetuate gender roles or stereotypes here. I do think it's interesting sometimes when particularly male business owners who happen to have a wife who happens to work full time in the home, as in taking care of the kids and taking care of all the householding and personal tasks, it's a little bit like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, you don't need an assistant for your business, but yet you do have somebody handling a huge part of your life logistics for you. I rarely hear female business owners that would say, oh, yeah, I don't need any team members. And even if their husband or partner, wife, anyone, is working full time in the home, I just hear it less. So sometimes I get curious. I wish more business owners would talk about this is like, do they have someone at home who's taking care of everything? Because that's a huge role. A huge role is the person who might be taking care of kids and pets. And again, the householding logistics, that is a role in itself. So the reason I keep bringing this up is because solving for the home is as important as solving for the business, because they both affect you, the owner. So I don't care who does it, what roles, what people's partnerships look like. If you're in a throuple, that's amazing. But still, you got to divide and conquer and figure out where you want to delegate on the home front as well, to have scalable systems that support you even when you close your laptop and even when you're not working. Because that could just as quickly lead to burnout when you don't have good systems on the home front. So there's my little home rant. Maybe that should have been. The fourth part of this episode is making sure that householding is delegated and smooth and streamlined as well okay, so this is our conversation today. We talked about these three ways to scale without the stress. Raise your prices, productize your flagship services. One or two of them do not have five or ten different services. You're not doing yourself any favors. And then we talked about creating scalable delivery systems. So once those clients come in, can your current setup scale to 10x100x even a thousand x the number of clients? And so how can you streamline and systematize and automate some of the support scaffolding around the clients that you do have? Again, the books I mentioned are anything by Alan Weiss. I like Million Dollar Consulting. Pretty good one to start with. Built to Sell and then you could check out the Pricing is Positioning podcast and John Warlow also has a Built to Sell podcast related free time episodes. You might want to go back to the conversation with Lee LeFever. He also talked about licensing and Greg Alexander. I'll be sure to put all of these in the show notes. I would love to hear what you have to share what you've tried in these areas, what you're going to try again. You can always leave a voice memo@itsfreetime.com Ask and if you want to check out the free time resources that I mentioned, visit itsfreetime.com coaching for one on one support to help implement all of these principles and you can visit itsfreetime.com dashboard to get that just a few clicks entire operating system for your business to put all these principles into practice. Thank you so much for being here. Listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insight insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time, even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.

Hey Ryan Reynolds here wishing you a very happy half off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service. Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means half day. Yeah, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to 15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow 135 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.