How To Make Time To Work On The Business When Client Work Takes All Your Energy

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If client work eats all your time and energy, your business will never grow past you. That's just called the facts because the business that would set you free is the one that you're just too busy to build. Listen, I get it. Client work feels like you're making money because it is, right? But that belief is exactly why you are trapped. Doing the work is the job of the self-employed. Growing the business is the job of an entrepreneur. You need to decide which one are you. Today, I'm going to show you how to decide, but more importantly, how to steal your time and your energy back starting this week. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons 3 times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Hey, if this show has helped you in any way, it would be amazing if you dropped us a quick review on whatever app you're using right now to listen to this podcast. It helps me and my team bring you new episodes every week, and more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover the podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. First, let's dissect why client work always wins. Why does client work always take priority and we don't have time to build Our business. Okay. And bring in more clients and build the mechanism to set us free. And I'm going to tell you right now, it's for one reason and it's not time. Okay. It's actually belief. Stay with me. Now you have a belief that client work is what's actually making you money. And that's what's keeping you from making more money, which is funny. As a person responsible for fulfilling the promises to the clients, It feels responsible to prioritize client work, to do the work. It feels urgent. It feels justified. I get it. But the honest truth is it's very shortsighted. Listen, client work has everything that the business building part doesn't.

Okay?

It has a deadline. It has a person waiting. It has money attached to it. And it feels urgent, right? It feels like you got to get this done. But guess what happens? You get it done and then another client comes in and you do the work for the client, and then you continue the cycle over and over again and you find yourself With like, oh, I have no time to build my business and get more clients. And I have found that the reason why this happens is because many of us, when we leave our jobs and we go into entrepreneurship, we don't leave the job mentality, right? We carry it with us. And in a job, being busy, being productive, doing the work is rewarded. It's seen as a good thing. Okay. But in entrepreneurship, it's actually not a good thing. You are not there to do the work. You are there to build an asset that does the work for you. And that's the whole difference between being a business owner and being an employee or working in a job, because it doesn't matter how hard you work, that doesn't correlate to making more money. What actually makes you money is building a system, is building a team, is building a company that actually does the work for you. The person that actually engineers that, the best engineer of a business is the one that wins. And that's really what you have to see. You're the planner. You're the person that puts the pieces together. You're kind of like the, you know, the, the team owner of a sports franchise, right? You're not actually dribbling the basketball and scoring the points. You're putting the pieces together so you can win a championship. You're not doing the work. You're not cracking a sweat. What you're doing is you are actually being the strategic person and doing this other type of work.

Mm-hmm.

Business building, team building, so that you can win. And I point this out because this is the exact difference between being self-employed and being an entrepreneur. The self-employed person owns a job, right? You are a designer. You do the designs, you implement the designs, you get paid. You are self-employed. But the entrepreneur owns a business. The goal of an entrepreneur— this is my goal personally, and every entrepreneur that I know— Is that I want to build a system. I want to build an asset that serves me. I want to create a machine that does the work for me so I can remove myself and reap the benefits. So you're sort of like an investor in your own business. So the decision to be made here, you can either be a doctor and serve your patients in your own clinic, and every day you show up, you help patients, you be the doctor, or You are the clinic owner, and then you hire other doctors to see the patients. They do the work. You open other clinics and get other doctors to do the work, and therefore you start expanding, you start scaling, and now you're a business owner. You're not a doctor anymore. You're just a doctor that knows how to run businesses. I want to share with you a story to just make sure this hits home. I lived this trap completely. Okay? I had a web design agency. It was the first business I had when I left my teaching job. And I built websites for bloggers, for entrepreneurs. That's what I did. I did it all myself. I did all the work. I actually went out to conferences. I went to meetups. I networked. I got the customer myself. I did all the marketing. I did all the sales. I then after that actually built the websites, then made sure I went back and forth with the customer, made sure that their reviews were implemented. They were happy with it. I delivered it. I collected the money. I did the accounting. I did everything. And most of my time was spent building websites. But what happened was, is that I didn't have time to actually expand the business. At some point you're going to cap out. I had zero time to actually work on my business. I was working in my business too much. I had no marketing funnel. I had no way to get new clients. I had no way to create content. I had no growth really. I could only serve a certain number of customers because I only have 24 hours in the day. So I really couldn't expand beyond that. Now, in that moment, I had to make a decision. Am I happy with this life? I could just continue to do the client work. I can continue to, you know, just cap myself and build the websites and maybe increase my prices here and there. Is this the life I wanted? No, I didn't want to design websites for the rest of my life. I enjoyed some of it, but not all of it. At some point, I wanted to get out of that exchanging time for money. And this is the key here. I only made money when I worked. Okay. If I went on holiday for, let's say, 6 months, you know, no one's doing the designs. No one's creating the websites. So I would not make money. So at the end of the day, I just bought myself a job. And in that moment, I kind of had a wake-up call. I was like, oh man, I'm not going to really grow out of this stage if I continue down this path. So what I started to do is I started to hire some freelancers to do some of the work for me, right? At the beginning, I was very nervous about this cuz like I felt I was super precious and I was like the best designer ever. And like my clients only love my work. You learn really quickly you're not that special. Okay. What happens is that I started to outsource smaller projects. Like for example, I was creating a whole branding and website for a client, so I would just get a freelancer to create the logo. And I realized, oh great, they did a great job and the client's happy. Maybe it's not the way I would've created the logo, but it doesn't matter. The client is happy. So I was able to do that. And of course I made sure the economics made sense where I was able to outsource that work and still make a profit. But that single shift of understanding, wait a minute, I don't have to do the work. I can just own the business and get other people to do the work. I can get involved as much as I want to. Maybe I want to step in and do one page of the website and feel like I'm a designer again and feel like I'm a worker again or not, or I cannot do that. Guess what? I can go on holiday if I wanted to go on holiday because other people were doing the work. Everything I built after that, past that business, really opened my eyes and I started building with that intention. Like, I can't be doing everything. I got to start making sure I'm taking things off my plate every day and finding other people to do the work while making sure the business is profitable. So what is step 1 in this process? It's very simple. You have to decide who Are you? Do you want to be self-employed or do you want to be an entrepreneur? Do you want to build an asset that serves you or do you want to just continue to do the work and exchange time for money? Both answers are valid. OK, if you want to be self-employed, that's great. Go ahead and do that. Some of my closest friends are like that and they love it. And that's great. That's good for them. But it wasn't good for me. I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. So you need to make the choice.

Quick question. Do people come to you for answers at work? Maybe you're managing projects, training new hires, or just the one everyone relies on. That's leadership. Through UVA Darden's Part-Time MBA in Rosslyn, we help professionals like you turn real-world experience into recognized leadership credentials without stepping away from your career. Whether you work in healthcare, education, government, or business, this is how you take the next step. Learn more at darden.virginia.edu/ptmba.

Today's episode is supported by Hostinger. I don't know about you, but I got way too many logins for all the tools I need to run my business. And here's the thing, the website is rarely the whole problem. The problem is everything around it, the domain, the email, the marketing, the SEO, the landing pages, and figuring out what to do next. That's where Hostinger comes in. You bring the idea, Hostinger's AI builder turns it into a business-ready website in minutes with your domain, email, and marketing tools all in one place. That's why 5 million customers around the world already trust Hostinger. Hostinger's AI agents help with those jobs too, acting like a built-in specialist for SEO, website copy, email marketing, sales outreach, and more. Hostinger is not just where a website gets built. It helps run the online side of your business. Plans start at just $2.99 a month and they come with a free domain and email. So instead of duct taping a dozen tools together, start building from one place. Go to hostinger.com/MBA, use promo code MBA for 10% off. That's hostinger.com/MBA, promo code MBA for 10% off. One of the big reasons why I decided to build businesses that didn't necessarily require me so much is because I wanted to have a little bit more time for myself. I wanted to be able to explore some of my hobbies. I wanted to be able to do other things, learn, grow. And I wouldn't be able to do that if I'm working 24/7, if everything was contingent on me. I also wanted to build that kind of business because I wanted to sell it one day, right? It's very hard to sell a business if you are the critical ingredient. So when I built my software company, Webinar Ninja, yes, I did some of the webinars and I was part of the marketing and I was the face of the business, but the product itself was able to be sold without me. And when we got acquired, it was an easy way to transition to a new company and I was able to have a successful exit and be able to benefit from that because, hey, I'm not integral to it. You can hire engineers to build the software. You can get a support team to support the software. I can get a sales team to sell the software. All that is done without me. But here's the truth, and the reason why you need to decide is because you can't do both at full capacity. You can't be the creator and the maker and the person doing the work and be great at it if you're also trying to just So on the side, build the business on the side, right? It's kind of hard to wear both hats. I tried to do that. I try to be like, hey, these days of the week, I'm the creator, I'm the maker, I'm the person that's building out the products and the services and all that kind of stuff and fulfilling my end of the bargain with the clients. And then on the other days, I'm going to start building the business. It's actually really hard to do that. And at some point, something's going to give. So it's better for you to decide and say which path I want to go on. And listen, this is a big decision. This is going to be your life for the rest of your life, right? This is going to be your business for the rest of the length or the life of the business. So be honest. Take time to think about what your life is going to be. Play it out. What is it going to look like? How is your typical day going to feel like? What your end goals are? What are you trying to achieve from this whole thing? So just take some time to decide. And this could be, you know, a few days. It could be a weekend. This could be a week. This could be even a month. But the point here is, is that you need to decide because it's gonna be very hard for you to succeed as a self-employed person or an entrepreneur if you don't. Step 2 is to change what you believe your job is. Let's move forward. Let's say you do choose to be an entrepreneur. You have to shift what you believe is your job as a founder. As a founder, your job is to grow the business, not do the work. One of the best pieces of advice I got from a business coach, Ayman Abdallah, was that as a founder, you have to start building the muscle of, I'm allergic to work. I am not allowed to work. If I work, something bad's going to happen. Why? Because it's going to train you to figure out who can do this for me. How can I automate this? How can I get a software to do this? How can I get a team of people to help me out? Even if it's just an agency to do this for me. The point here is, is that If you start understanding that I don't need to do the work, I need to get other people to do the work, you start thinking like a founder and not like a self-employed person. Because here's the truth, every hour you spend doing the work is an hour you're not spending growing the business. So you have to start shifting your priority. Your priority now is to grow the business, right? The client work can be done by somebody else. That's just the truth of the matter, right? You can find somebody, you can train them on your taste, you can train them on the way you want to do. Your work and how you want to implement, how you want to be able to deliver for your clients. By the end of the day, only you are the person that can know how to build a brand, build a business, grow your actual bottom line, how you're going to increase your revenue, make these tough decisions that you just can't outsource to other people. That is your job, right? Your job is the marketing, is creating the offer, is the hiring, is the strategic growth of your business. That is the job of an entrepreneur. And I'm pointing this out because if you don't like those things, then maybe entrepreneurship is not the path for you because you have to truly believe this. You got to protect your business building hours, right? You have to stop trying to fix the problems yourself and getting other people to do it. And one of the best ways to do this is to just resign to the fact you have to say, hey, you have to believe this to your core. Please believe me. And this has worked for me. Is you have to resign to the fact that things will never be exactly the way you want them to be. They're never going to be done the same way you would have done them. Just admit it. Just be like, that's how it's going to be. And what I like to do is that as long as it's done at 80%, at 80% what I believe is what it should be in terms of the quality, then that is great.

Why?

Because I can't do more than 24 hours a day. I can't work more than 8 or 9 or 10 or 16 hours a day. So if I hire 5 people to do 5 different things at 80%, I'm still winning. And the reason why I say that is because most of us, we just think that we know best. We think that our work is the best. Our decisions are the best. You got to empower other people to make decisions, to do their own version of the work. It may not be to your level, but as long as that 80%, it's a good investment. Hey, just a quick pause to ask you to subscribe to the podcast, not just because you'll be supporting the show, But because we have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. It's called How to Build a Personal Brand That Makes You Money. We're bringing in the expert, Dane Walker, who's going to be teaching us his 90-day branding plan. If you want to build a brand that's going to make you the money that you're looking for, a brand that's memorable, a brand that's hard to ignore, a brand that actually serves the business and the bottom line, then you don't want to miss that episode with Dane.

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So you don't miss it. Step 3, this is something that you need to start doing, and that is to follow your calendar. If you are not using a calendar like Google Calendar, for example, or whatever calendar you wanna use, even a physical calendar, right? Then you're asking for trouble because your calendar is your energy. What you do in the day is how you're allocating your energy and attention. It's not just time, it's just where you are actually giving yourself to, right? Your energy's limited, right? I notice that I do my best work in the morning. So I try to do the most important stuff, like recording this podcast episode in the morning, the first thing I do, so that I can be able to have the best version of me show up. How do I know this and how do I make sure this happens? Well, it's in my calendar. Otherwise it won't happen. But you need to follow the calendar. You can't just block 2 hours in the morning to work on your business or work on marketing. And then during those 2 hours, you're working on client work and you just kind of disobey your calendar. No, your calendar is your energy. So make sure that you follow the calendar. This is why it's so important for you to be strategic. And I like to do this at the end of the week. I look at my next week and I look at the calendar and I look what is out there and the appointments, and I move things around to plan my week. I do all the strategy in advance, right? I say, okay, I'm gonna be recording this day, I'm gonna be scripting here, I have a meeting here, I'm going into a conference on this day. This is what— how I'm spending Guess what happens next week on Monday? I don't question the calendar. I just obey the calendar and I just do it because I already did the strategy and the deciding and all that stuff at the end of last week. Stop second-guessing yourself and stop going against the decisions you made to grow your business. So the first step is really to audit your calendar. How are you spending your time? Now, most people, they don't actually have what they do on the calendar. So you might want to do a retroactive calendar, meaning like, look at this week. What did you do on Monday? Sit down, force yourself, think, oh, what did I do at 9 o'clock? What did I do at 10 o'clock? What did I do at 11 o'clock? Write it down and pop it into your calendar, even though it's in the past. Okay. But it's going to allow you to understand, okay, this is how I spent my time. Are any of those activities helping me grow my business? Is it bringing in more business? Is it marketing? Is it sales? Is it hiring? Is it recruitment? Is any of that stuff? You're going to start questioning, are you actually an entrepreneur or self-employed? So you got to start shifting. This is not to like, you know, beat yourself down. It's so that you could really look at the truth and say, okay, next week it's got to look different. Let me plan next week so that those blocks of time are filled with business building activity, things that actually bring in money. Not only do I want you to audit your calendar and audit what you do every day, I want you to ask yourself an honest question. When do you perform your best? Okay, like I mentioned before, my peak energy hours are in the morning. So like, I try to get as much done that's important to me, that is a priority, before 1 PM. I could deal with other admin stuff, meetings, replying to emails, whatever, later in the day where I don't need to really be at my best. But that's my peak hours. Some people, their peak hours are at 3 PM. Some people are like night owls. They work really, really late. Well, you know, in the evening. Be honest with yourself, find out when those peak energy hours are and do the business building then. You want your best hours to be dedicated in the most important tasks. Client work, again, is going to be outsourced to somebody else. If you're in that transition, that's okay. Do the client work until you transition and get somebody else to do it. But you have to remember, you want your best mind, your best energy, your best thoughts, Your best spirit, your best mood to back all the ideas that you want to have to grow the business. Step 4, which is the last step, is the ultimate step, which is to buy yourself out. This is your escape sequence. Okay? When client work genuinely can't be reduced yet, like you're still doing the client work yourself, here's how to buy your way over time. So it's staggered approach. The first step is to hire freelancers to lighten up the load. With freelancers, it's hourly or project-based. You're not paying benefits, you're not paying, you know, pension or superannuation or whatever it might be. It's low risk, but pretty good reward as you transition out. Start small, just like I did. I started with just getting somebody to create logos, and then from logos they created the whole branding. And from the branding, I got them to, hey, do you know anybody that can implement this branding into Photoshop files? And then from Photoshop files, somebody then coded it on the website. So as you can see, I piecemealed it until I got to the point where everybody else other than me was doing the work. Now, another reason why I recommend getting freelancers, whether you get them from Upwork or you get them from the classifieds or whatever it might be, is that you're going to learn a lot before you make a full-time hire. You're going to learn what works, what doesn't. You're really not used to managing people yet, how to motivate people, how to get people to stay on track, how to hit deadlines, how to have like a project management system, all that kind of stuff. You have like an ignorance debt you got to pay. It's good to do it with freelancers because it's not really high risk right now. At some point, if they don't work out, you can let them go, get another person to help you out. It's just easy to get to test the waters. And the way I saw it when I did this transition is that every hour I got somebody to do client work was another hour I gained so I can grow the business, so I can be able to market, so I could sell, so I can get more clients. That's not an expense. It's actually an investment because that work I'm doing Is high-value work. What do I mean by that? Let's say, for example, you are creating websites like I did, and it takes, let's say, 40 hours to create a website, and you charge $4,000 for a website. So you could do the math and figure out like how much each hour costs or the value of each hour, 'cause you're gonna make $4,000, right? But if I spent 40 hours marketing, selling, getting new clients, it's gonna be worth a whole lot more than $4,000. I'm gonna get more than one client. I'm gonna get like 10 clients. So like my 40 hours of doing high leverage work is worth a lot more. This is why when you do that exchange, when you give 1 hour to a freelancer and get an hour back, you're getting 10 hours back really, because those hours are worth so much more 'cause you can bring in so much more money than what a freelancer can get you. If you wanna read a book on this concept, there's a book by Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time, and he has this concept that I learned from him. He was my coach back when I was building Webinar Ninja. And this idea of like, there are different values to tasks in your business. There are $10 tasks, there are $100 tasks, there are $1,000 tasks, there's $10,000 tasks, there's even $100,000 tasks. You should not be doing $10 and $100 tasks. These are tasks that you need to get other people to do. Freelancers, hires, teammates, virtual assistants. You need to spend your time as much as possible on the other side of that spectrum of doing $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 tasks. Tasks that bring in that kind of money into your business. And listen, this doesn't stop. You continue to do this as your business grows. I'm doing this right now, right? I have an interview on Monday because we're trying to outsource some of the things I'm doing, whether it's ideation or scriptwriting, whatever it might be. I'm trying to make sure I'm removing myself from the process as much as possible for a few reasons. I'm doing many things, so I can't just logically be great at everything. So if I get somebody to be dedicated at one thing, to just make sure that they do that really well, The output's going to be way better than if I just do that along with some other things on my plate. The second thing is, is that it's not a good use of my time. Like I just mentioned, right? It's not a good investment of my time. I'm not being a good business owner if I'm just doing all the work. Right? So slowly, slowly, I'm trying to take things off my plate. Eventually, my whole goal with this company, the $100 MBA Show and the podcast and our media company, is that all I do is step in front of the camera and get to deliver My experiences, my value, my stories to you. This is the thing I enjoy the most. This is all I should be doing. That's the end goal. So to wrap up, client work is winning your time because you believe it's what's making you money. It's making you money in the short term, but it's not going to last forever. You need to think bigger than that. You need to think, okay, how would I bring in money for next year? How do I bring money for the next 6 months? How do I make sure I have a steady stream, a pipeline of customers 'Cause I'm building a great marketing funnel, 'cause I'm creating great content, I'm getting exposure. You gotta think a little bit bigger. And this is why I really believe in most of what I teach here on this podcast, it all happens with changing things in here. Okay, you have to change what you believe, 'cause when we believe something differently, we do something differently. I always say that why do people eat pizza?

Right.

Why do you eat pizza? Because you believe pizza's tasty. You love it. But if you believed, you know, I don't know, a leather belt was tasty, would you eat it? Yes, you would. Right. But you don't because you don't think it's tasty. Right. You don't believe that's something good to eat. And that's a weird example. But the point here is, is that what you believe is what you do, right? If you believe you're a healthy person, if you believe you are fit, guess what happens? You exercise, right? Because that's part of your identity. You believe that. So changing what's upstairs is going to affect everything. And this is where it all happens. So you have to really ask yourself and decide, Do I want to be self-employed or do I want to be an entrepreneur? Thanks so much for being part of today's episode. By being here, by listening, by watching, you are a doer. You are a completionist. You made it to the end of the episode. You're my kind of person. If you want to continue learning, we have a great episode we recently published called How to Run Your Business in 4 Hours a Day. This is a strategy that I've built over time. There are days I work more than 4 hours, but basically in terms of my intense work, that's all I do really, 4 hours a day. And if you want to start moving towards that, this episode's for you. Thanks again for being a part of the $100 MBA Show. Every time you tune in, we're going to try to give as much value as possible. My job is to make sure I support you in your journey because, hey, I've been there. I've been in this business thing for 20 years. I know how hard it could be. I know it's a challenge, but at the end of the day, if I can help you just even save a day or two or a week or a year of pain, then I've done my job. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help start, grow, and scale your business, subscribe to the podcast. All you gotta do is hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. I'll check you in the next episode.

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