The Minimalist Approach To Business I'm Taking This Year

When I first started my business, I had a 10 month old. And within that first year of starting my business, I had baby number two. And we sold our house. Without having another house to move into, I had to quickly learn how to get as much done as possible in a short amount of time. And this whole process has been tested and tried over the past two years. Having two small kids at home, never knowing when they were gonna go back to school or not. So what's really been able to allow me to continue to grow my business trying to do all the things and with the minimal amount of time that I have, has been by creating a minimalist business approach. I've had quite a few lessons learned over the past few years when it comes to what I should actually be focusing on my business and how I can avoid those shiny objects that keep popping up reels and TikTok. But through all those lessons, I come to realize that having this minimal business approach is what's allowed me to have continued sustainable growth in my own business. You see, most businesses don't make it past five years, and we're on year six. And every year for the past five years, I've been able to double my business revenue. It might not have been the fastest growing business, but it's been sustainable. It's allowed me to pay my bills, and it got me through the last two years dealing with what should not be named right. I've enjoyed weeks of vacation in a beach house in North Carolina. I've enjoyed Fridays off with my kids, all because I don't need millions of dollars in my business for success. I'd much rather have time off to eat Ben and Jerry's in my bed watching a marathon of Real Housewives of New York. 2021 has been my most successful business year yet, and one of the years that I've worked the least amount of time in my business. And I want to share with you how I'm doing it. With this minimalist approach to my business, the first thing I did was I eliminated all the service offerings that I had and focused on just one. For the first couple of years in my business, I would literally take any video jobs. It could have been YouTube strategy. It could have been video editing for summits. It could have been video editing for courses. You had a video issue. I was going to take the job. But starting in 2020, I decided I was only going to have one offering, and that was my agency offering. And that was going to be where we literally planned out your YouTube strategy for you. We did all the YouTube stuff, except for filming it. And. And that was all that I offered. And I had multiple people come to me asking me to do different types of jobs. And it was so freaking hard to say no to money. But what I was able to do was really hone in on my specialty. And not only was I able to do it faster, I was able to do it better and get better results for my clients so that they then referred me to more clients. It also allowed me to really understand who I liked working with. And I know this all sounds like business basics, but when you're in thick of it and you're just trying to make money, you're not really thinking about that. But once you see it actually happen in real time in your business, you think that's what they mean. Because also when we started our agency, that's one offering we were taking anybody. And we started to realize who we liked working with. And when I say we, myself and Erica and Aaron, who are now on my team, we realized who we liked working with, who we could work well with, and who we could get results with. So when somebody came and asked about the agency, after speaking to them a little bit, I could kind of tell if they were going to be a right fit for our agency or not. And so not only did I focus on one particular service, we are focusing on one specific type of client. This was huge for not only my mental health, dealing with difficult clients, as you probably have before, but my team's mental health as well. And we are all excited with the people that we get to work with now, now that we clearly have a vision of who we want to work with. The other major benefit of this, because remember, we're talking about minimalizing your business, was the ability to systematize and process this sucker. I'm going to tell you, it is no easy job to get out of your head how you do something onto paper, because a lot of it for me was intuition. But my team really worked with me to try to understand my thought process and my decision making. And I worked with trying to get it on paper. And it was a pain for me to feel like I was wasting time doing all of this step procedure things. But after about a month of truly figuring out our process and me handing it off to Aaron and Erica, they handle the agency almost 80% of the time. They can run the agency literally without me. And that's exactly what they did a few weeks ago when I was able to go to Disney with my family and not even have to worry about clients. Because they knew exactly how to handle everything. Having this now is a process that allows us to potentially scale this even more because we have the training programs in the process to bring on more employees if we would like. But for right now, we're really enjoying this boutique agency. The second thing that I did to start creating this minimalist approach to business is actually going against an entire course that I created. And I stopped multiplying my video content. The initial thought process of multiplying your content was to be able to be on more platforms at once in really getting the most out of one piece of content. And so I would take my YouTube video, put it on LinkedIn, put it on Pinterest, put it on Facebook, put it on a blog, put it on Instagram. Right? But there's something else that you need to realize. When you're putting content on these platforms, you've got to actually show up and engage with people on this platforms if you want that content to pay off. And I just ran out of time to post the content, like literally upload and post it, let alone have the time to engage with it. The first thing we dropped was LinkedIn. And while I would love to get back on LinkedIn at some point in time, it just wasn't working in my schedule. Then we dropped Facebook again. I would love to be on Facebook. I hate Facebook. But I know there's an opportunity there. I just don't have the time to show up right now. And for almost about a month, I haven't been on Instagram feed. I love showing up in stories and talking about things and stories, but I haven't posted a static post or any kind of post on my feed in over a month. Because what I'm really doing right now is taking the time, time to nurture my YouTube content and to take a different path here on my YouTube content. Because I'm really ready to take my YouTube channel to this next level. And if I'm going to do that, that's where I need to be putting my attention. Because I'm going to tell you, out of all of these platforms that I have been on, YouTube has given me the biggest return by, I don't know, tenfold. Not only does it convert much higher than any other content that I've created, but it lives here for so much longer, like years longer. So I just accepted that I am stopping shiny objects. Everyone started a clubhouse thing. I didn't even get on Clubhouse. Everybody's jumping on Tik Tok. I dabbled. But I've also realized, like that's not for me right now. Same with reels. I dabbled and play with it and I'm going to tell you, freaking reels takes way more time for me to create than a YouTube video. And my reels die within like a week, week. Whereas my YouTube videos live for much longer. So I've set reels aside for maybe something I want to do later. I also did get sucked in. I will tell you, there was a shiny object that I got sucked into in November. My friend Christina was talking about Black Friday sales, Cyber Monday sales. And as I hearing her speak, I did come home immediately from that mastermind in November and do a Black Friday sale which totally pushed back all the plans we had for the end of the year. So I'm not going to say I'm not good at avoiding shiny objects, but I try to do my best. So I have really cut back on the amount of platforms that I am actively on. But the platforms that I am actively on, I've been focused on up leveling my content. The third way I'm taking a minimalist approach to my business is less tech and less stuff. Now this is going to involve less software, less camera equipment and less education. Right now we're focusing on moving all of our behind the scenes tech stuff, like our funnel stuff over to FG Funnels. I talked about FG Funnels in this particular video that you can watch after this as one of the systems that is helping me make over half a million dollars in my business. But the reason I'm moving to FG Funnels is because it compiles quite a few of the softwares that I'm currently using and paying for. So just using FG funnels, I can eliminate ConvertKit, I can elimina lead pages and I can eliminate teachable and have a really streamline look at how things are running in my business. And this is going to allow me to have a really bird's eye view on what funnels are really making me money and how I can double down on those funnels and what content is driving traffic to this funnels and double down on that kind of content. I am also forcing myself to learn less and hit that like button if you get it. There have been courses that you have purchased and never even opened again. I've been there too. And so what I had focused on last year and on this year as well is finding one person and just learning from that person for the entire year, then trying to implement everything that I learned from them. So whether it's a podcast Whether it's a course, whether it's YouTube videos. So last year I dove into Digital Insiders with Julie Stoen and I went through everything that they had her and Kathy had within Funnel Gorgeous and learned just that and implemented a lot of their tactics. Last year, in fact, I did an entire episode over on my podcast, the Video Refrain Podcast about Masterminds and the experience that I had. If you aren't listening to my podcast, make sure you check it out. I'll leave the link for you to do that down below and you can hear, you know, what I really think and what my experiences has been with masterminds. And then real quick leave me a comment below and tell me who you like learning from. Who are some top educators that you are committed to learning from this year? Because I always hear quite a few I also learn from, from Mariah Cause, Alex Beadon, all great entrepreneurs that I have learned from over the past six years. Now, while I am talking about podcasts, I'm going to tell you I don't listen to business podcasts. The problem with listening to business podcasts is it gives me ideas and that shiny object syndrome starts peeking in and I'm not focusing on what I really need to be focusing on. So literally the only podcast that I listen to is Ear Biscuits Smart List and any type of podcast that recaps Bravo Shows. The next thing that I've done to minimize my business is focus on just three projects a quarter. So when I sit down at the beginning of the year, I do kind of get a bigger look at my year. I know when I'm going to go on vacation and figure out what kind of big projects I want to focus on that year and then try to figure out where I can fit them in. And I like to work in 90 day chunks. So for example, this first part of the new year, January through March, my three big projects were host a challenge which check Launch Video Strategy Academy 3.0 Check and deliver new content for Video Strategy 3.0, which we are currently doing. And that is the only project that I was focusing on in Q1. Now here at the end of March, I'll start to look at what I initially had planned for Q2. And I already know one of the things that I had planned is actually going to get moved to Q4. But this gives me the flexibility to have a plan but really feel my intuition and make sure I'm not overbooking myself and trying to do too much. This next thing has been a game changer for me to Minimalize my business. And it has been using my Google Calendar. So the way I've been doing this is the way they talk about it in full Focus Planner, which is a planner that I started using almost, almost a year ago now. And thinking about your workday startup routine, your workday end routine, and I put that on my calendar and block that time off so I'm not having to sit down immediately and jump on a phone call or do a project. That also allows me at the end of the day to take a breather and reflect on the day and figure out what worked and what didn't work on that day. And that really allows me to take things out of my week, out of my day by having that reflection time instead of working like from 9 to 5 straight through. I also block entire days off in my calendar every single week to create content. So I love creating content and I will need the time to do that. So every Wednesday I block that entire day so that nobody can book any type of calls with me. And my team knows that is when I'm focusing on content, so nobody disrupts me. And really utilizing my calendar has been allowing me to simplify my work week. Plus, when you put it into Google Calendar and you mark busy and you link that with any kind of scheduling app that you have, people can't book calls with you when you want to focus on certain things. The biggest piece that I've really focused on minimalizing the past couple of years is expenses. And let me tell you, running a business is freaking expensive. And personally, as an impulse buyer, I do pretty bad at this. So the past few years I've been really good at looking at my books and speaking to my accountant every single month to figure out how to get a reign over my expenses. So one of the ways we are doing that is, like I said, moving everything to FG funnels. And we're going to be able to cancel at least three softwares and taking time every single month, like I said with my accountant, to see what is a reoccurring expense that we're seeing. Do we still need this? Can we get rid of this? Am I actually using it? Nope. Then goodbye. Now, before I share with you how I'm saving a month boatload of money on Facebook ads, I want to know that you made it this far in the video, so type the word minimalist in the comments below so I know you got this far. Okay, so how do I save a boatload on Facebook ads? Because YouTube is organic and all of the traffic I get from my YouTube content is free by having a good YouTube strategy. Yes, I do spend money on Facebook ads. I did the numbers and in 2020. In 2021, I spent about 13% of my revenue on on Facebook ads. But that is significantly lower than the majority of entrepreneurs because my business has thrived off of organic traffic here on YouTube that I don't have to pay for. And if you want to start using this organic strategy by using YouTube in your business as well. So one, you don't have to create so much content on platforms like Instagram and Facebook that the content is gone within a day. And take a breather off of that content creation hamster wheel. Then watch this video that I have on your screen right now, because it's going to share with you the exact details for my current YouTube strategy in 2022. I'll see you over there.