How to Optimize Your Solopreneur Business to Fund & Fit Your Ideal Lifestyle [PREVIEW]

All right. So welcome everyone to this month's live subscriber workshop. Today's topic is what are you optimizing for? If you go to the curriculum, what I've been doing for the past several months is if you click on that link that I just dropped in the chat, that's kind of the, the, the loose curriculum that I have assembled from all the workshops that we've done and, and some of the best content or what I consider to be some of the best content that I've created around the whole idea of creating a fulfilling solopreneur business that funds and fits your ideal lifestyle. And if you click on that link, you'll see that the What Are You Optimizing For is the only current, uh, uh, piece of the curriculum that doesn't have a workshop component. So today we will complete the circle and all of the All of the content in that curriculum will have both a written article and a workshop. And the way that these things run is that we are going to go probably, probably 30, 45 minutes for everyone that's gathered here. At the end of the public portion of this workshop, we're going to go into closed session, which is for the members of the Solopreneur Success Circle, which is just people that are paid subscribers to the Substack, which is only $9 a month, a bargain in my opinion, but your mileage may vary. I think those of you that are paid subscribers might actually support my assertion, but you know, I don't know. I'm not going to speak for anybody. If you at some point during the course of this conversation decide that you would like to join us for the exclusive Q&A and implementation session immediately following the public portion, you can just hit that button, subscribe and, and join us right away. So let's go through the Allegiance Capital stuff. Uh, for those of you that aren't familiar with Allegiance Capital, it's just a way of trying to earn trust, permission, and enrollment at the beginning of the process, as opposed to at the end of the process. It's a technique I learned from Nick Peterson, author of Bumpers, which most of you have already gathered your free copy of. And so the, in the Allegiance Capital format, what we try to do on every communication, every sales page, every website page, landing page, what have you, answer 4 questions: Why am I Why am I here? Am I in the right place? What do I do next? And what happens when I do that? You are here because you are subscribers to the Creative on Purpose Substack and you wanted to attend this free workshop for all subscribers about optimization. You are in the right place if you're ready to get clearer about and closer to what you actually want to achieve or to, um, get from your solopreneur business. What should you do next? Well, if you're, uh, if you're a free subscriber, you want to make sure that you have something to write on and take notes so that you have material to reference after this workshop is over. If you are a paid subscriber, you're going to have access to the replay and access to the Q&A and implementation session immediately following. And what happens next is, uh, I'm going to do my very best to give you everything I know about how to decide what you're optimizing for, and then how to identify your next micro step, next most viable step, smallest step, identify your next most immediate constraint and, and how you should go about navigating that. So to begin with, this idea of optimization has layers. One of the things that for the folks like Penny and Bree who are in the Close the Gap coaching program, and for all the paid subscribers that are reading the advanced copy of the Close the Gap book, we begin with why are we, why did we build this business that we built or that we're building, uh, the business that we're hoping to optimize. And the assertion, my assertion is that nobody actually becomes a solopreneur just to make money. If you want to just make money, there are way easier ways to do it than building your own independent business. Again, my assertion, your mileage may vary. Generally going into solopreneurship, again, my assertion, to achieve some level of freedom, maybe it's some level of time freedom, maybe it's some level of activity freedom. We wanna be able to do what we want. With our precious time, attention, energy, reputation, and so forth. So the first level of optimization is what is this business I'm building for? What's my ideal lifestyle that I'm hoping to achieve through this business? That's the highest level of optimization. And then below that is defining where you're at in that journey. So in the Close the Gap program, what we do is we try to identify our priority by defining it in a way that doesn't have anything to do with money, revenue, by saying, I know I'm being successful when— and if you complete that sentence, that should give you some kind of idea of what a fulfilling meaningful life looks like to you. And that's what you're trying to fund through your solopreneur enterprise. And you're also trying to make sure that your solopreneur enterprise fits around whatever that idealized lifestyle is. So we have all sorts of other things that we do around this, like identifying what our ideal week looks like in terms of, you know, what, what we're doing during our waking hours while making sure that we're taking care of our need for sleep. And then we take a look at what our average weekly schedule looks like now, which is generally a lot different than what we would like it to look like. And so, with that, we have established a vector. We have a clear starting point. We know what, where we're starting and what we're starting with, because we also take an audit of all of our resources and audits, our hard assets like money, skills, and our soft assets like what we're doing with our time, where we're spending our attention, or where we're paying attention, and so forth. And that establishes a vector. And now we can work on closing the gap. Closing the gap, meaning, how can we, how can we get from where we are to where we want to be with the greatest amount of effectiveness and efficiency in the least amount of time with the least amount of risk. So along those lines, we have to optimize, and many of you have already read the article or the chapter of the book that I shared on Friday. If we look at our vector, where we are and where we want to be, and we start to think about, well, what has to happen? What, what's, what's required for me to get from here to there. And again, my assertion is most of the time, if you're— if you do the due diligence of reasoning from first principles as to what is actually required to get you from where you are to where you want to be, it's usually just 2 or 3 things. Just 2 or 3 things have to go right enough for you to start making progress. To actually, given a reasonable amount of time, you can make your achievement of what it is that you're going for inevitable. Because if only 2 or 3 things have to go right enough, once you've identified those things, it's just a matter of system thinking and system reliability. If you have your system dialed in and you have traction, meaning you're making forward progress through that vector of where you are to where you want to be, then you can start to work on momentum, which is achieved through raising the floor. Whatever piece of your system is the least efficient or effective, you want to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of that component of your system, and you will increase velocity, right? So velocity is very different from speed. And so this is where this kind of approach is actually helping us navigate the challenges that come with being a human being. Because as human beings, we're kind of programmed and conditioned to chase after tools and tactics and strategies and to keep adding more things to our system. So I'm going to pause here for just a second and give you kind of a real-life example. During the pandemic, my wife and I in lockdown were thinking about, okay, so what are we going to do when this is over? And what we decided we wanted to do was we wanted to be able to travel. We wanted to be basically become digital nomads. We both have online businesses. We both have a desire to see more of the world than we have seen. So what we did was, uh, because we lived in an area of the country where the pandemic was very slow to hit, and because we live in a very rural area where the pandemic didn't have the high level of impact that it had had in more densely populated areas, the, the, the market for homes was— went through the roof. So knowing that we wanted to release ourselves from the baggage of homeownership and being tied down to this place, we said, okay, well, we'll sell our house. We moved across the street into a rental that opened up, and we thought, okay, we'll just ride this thing out, and when the pandemic's over, we'll just hit the road. So, that was our priority. That was the lifestyle that we were optimizing for. About 6 months after we sold the house and moved, my son and daughter-in-law announced that they were pregnant. And we had kind of given up on the fact that we were going to be grandparents, so, you know, that's why we were optimizing for world travel. And then our priority immediately changed because we wanted to be full-time daycare providers for, um, our grandson. So priority changed. And when I looked at my revenue-generating system, I realized that I was working roughly 10 hours a day, 7 days a week to earn a modest full-time income, leaving absolutely no room to spend 9 hours a day with my grandson. So that I had— so that's where I was starting. I knew where I wanted to end. I wanted to have 9 hours a day, 5 days a week to spend with my grandson. So I created a schedule where I would work 2 hours in the morning, 5 to 7, take care of my grandson in the morning from 7 to noon, have flex time to spend with you all and my clients in the afternoon when my wife could take over daycare. And when I wasn't working, I would be able to spend, spend time with them. I clearly defined where I was, where I wanted to be. And I determined that the 3 things that had to go right in order for me to achieve that It was I had to create an irresistible offer, meaning irresistible enough. I had to find an eager audience, an audience of people, a market of people that wanted the thing that I was selling. And I had to have an efficient system for putting that offer in front of that audience. So those were the 3 things. So I had an offer, I had an audience. What I determined was really mucking up my system was all the time I was spending on marketing and sales stuff. And I'm sure people in this call can relate, right? Spending all— like, I have this thing I love to do. I'm really good at being a coach or being a consultant or being a creative person or whatever it is. And you end up spending hours and hours a day creating content, scrolling social media, starting podcasts, writing books, you know, doing all these things that are— that we do to, to— for the privilege of earning an audience to do the work that we actually started our business to do. And over the course of the 9 months— or it was actually a year because there were some complications with our grandson's early days that required him to stay in the hospital for a little bit. We, um, over the course of a year, I went from working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, to working 2 hours every morning and working whatever I felt like working in the afternoon, spending all the rest of my time doing whatever the hell I wanted. Absolute time, attention, freedom. Not only did I maintain my revenue that I had been earning working 10 hours a day, I actually ended up doubling that revenue over the course of a year. So that's the power of clearly defining where you're starting, where you're heading, what's required to get you there. And then it becomes a practice of via negativa. Is everybody familiar with that phrase, via negativa? So Um, some of you know that I'm a complete geek when it comes to Hellenistic history and philosophy and language. So via negativa is obviously Latin. It comes from an idea that was put forth by a Syrian Christian monk in the early days of Christendom, where what he was doing was, as everyone talked about God with all these superlatives. God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful, God is all-loving, and so forth. And he said that, you know, all these things really don't mean anything. And so what he did is he just decided that he was going to define the divine by what it was not. And that idea of defining what's unnecessary, what doesn't matter, is an idea that I applied to my business. I cut out all the things that I was doing that didn't give me any return on investment in terms of attracting prospects, acquiring leads, and converting them into clients. And so when you're optimizing a system, you have to start with defining your system and defining the essential necessary elements of that system. And you have to be willing to, you know, in the words of Stephen King, kill your darlings, right? Anything that isn't a part or having an impact on that system, basically you have to cut it out, right? And that's what we make hard decisions as solopreneurs sometimes. And decision, also an interesting word with a Latin etymology, de-ki-dere, meaning to kill off. When you make decisions, what you are actually doing is you're killing off an infinite amount of alternative possibility. Doesn't mean that those things can't become part of your possibility going forward, but you make a decision, you, you act on that decision, you put yourself in the position to make the next best decision. And so one of the things that we think about when we're talking about optimization is Like, I know what I'm ultimately optimizing for in terms of this ideal lifestyle. I know what I— I know the system that I'm optimizing to help me get there. And then what happens is, and this is, you know, what the book is really all about teaching and what we do in the Close the Gap program, it's about defining the next most immediate constraint. Identifying and navigating the next most immediate constraint. If you think, I'm going to use the leaky bucket and kinky hose analogy. And yes, Cato, I know kinky leaky hoses can water your garden beautifully. But when we're trying to fill the bucket, leaky kinky hoses don't do so well. So, what we have is we have a bucket, this, you know, thing that we're, this ideal lifestyle that we're trying to create, the bucket that we're trying to fill. We had this leaky, kinky hose, and what we kind of tend to do is we attach the hose to the spigot, turn the spigot on full blast, and we're shocked and dismayed when the bucket doesn't fill very fast. Even more shocked and dismayed when we discovered that the bucket actually has a lot of holes in it that we weren't paying attention to when we put the hose in it in the first place. So we have to start with Fix the bucket. What's the ideal lifestyle? Where are we starting? What are we starting with? Make sure the bucket— that you have a container that can actually hold water, metaphorical and literal. When we are working with our hose, what we, you know, we might be tempted to say, well, there's all these kinks way downstream. I'll unkink those first because they're easier. But the thing is, what we want to do is actually Get the bucket fixed, get the hose in the bucket, attach it to the spigot, turn the spigot on just a little bit so that we can identify the first kink, the first leak. And if we can address that and fix that, we have increased flow that will help us identify the next hole or kink, which we can then address and fix. Increasing flow to the next, and so on and so forth. So what we want to do is make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time in the right order. To quote the famous philosopher from Frozen 2, just do the next right thing. So I'm going to end this, this portion of our time together with some ideas about how do you identify. So I always pick on Penny when I talk about this, but I won't do that today. Oh wait, I just did. So I often talk about what's the step before the step? Because when we are, when we think we're optimizing, Often what is happening is we are falling prey to narrative fallacy, right? We make sense of everything through narrative, through storytelling. We tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about other people to ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about the stories we think other people are telling themselves about us. We tell ourselves stories about the situation that we're in. It's all narrative. And it's very easy to get locked into a narrative fallacy or some sort of echo chamber where we just start to believe the things that we believe simply because we believe them, which is actually the definition of delusion, not belief. And so what we have to do is make sure that we're not victimizing ourselves by falling into this narrative fallacy trap. Where we talk ourselves into doing something because it's less, it's not as hard, it's, it's not as scary. Uh, some guru or digital marketer told us to do it, so therefore if it doesn't work, we can blame them, and on and on and on. Um, one of the reasons why I think our group is so powerful is because we are all on a similar journey, and we're all holding each other, you know, supporting and encouraging each other by helping each other see our own BS that we're all prone to, um, to, to believe in. So what often happens is we will— for instance, I, I need revenue I need more money this month. So what am I going to do? A lot of the times what I hear from clients and community members, well, I'm going to create a new offer. Okay. New offer requires a lot of time, attention, and effort, which is complicating your system, which is automatically driving down the efficiency of your system, which is actually ending up getting you further away from what you want as opposed to getting what you want. So maybe creating a new offer is not the best idea. What can I do instead? Anybody want to come off mute and tell me what the first thing I'm going to suggest that you do is? Go ahead, Catherine.