Let me ask you this: how much money would your business make if you stopped working for a week? What about a month? A year?
It’s perfectly normal for income to decline when you don’t work but if it gets to zero, it’s a problem. Let’s see how we can fix that.
🔦Community Spotlight
- My friend Peter Boyle just launched the Growth Models Community. Check it out if you want to get help from other owners growing their businesses, get access to exclusive content and ideas to generate more revenue without headaches.
- My most recent discovery is Amanda Goetz’s epic newsletter, Life’s a Game. It covers personal growth, mental health, and productivity. The insights are priceless, so join 110,000 people who devour it every week.
💡 Want your name here? Scroll to the bottom of this email to find your referral link & start referring people to Ideas to Power Your Future!
In The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, Michael E. Gerber makes an interesting argument. People typically believe that businesses are founded by pure-blood entrepreneurs but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Most businesses are founded by people with technical expertise: engineers, accountants, or bakers, who, at some point, get the itch to go out on their own.
This is especially true in the creator economy, where most businesses are founded by people who have some background working for others in various capacities — until they want to use their skills to build their own thing.
Herein lies the problem: while these skills help you start a business, they won’t help you grow it. To grow a business you need to constantly get better at marketing, sales, leadership, financial planning, and more.
Psst, my subscribers read this before you did. Want to be the first to get analyses and roadmaps like this? Subscribe to Ideas to Power Your Future and receive them in your inbox every Thursday:
In my experience, this is where most micro-business owners hit a wall:they have a good product but no one’s buying it.
More often than not, that happens because you’re working on your product/service instead of working on your business.
[Psst, real quick: if that rings true, it’s because you don’t have a business problem, you have an audience problem. I’m dead set on fixing that for you! Join me at the Audience Accelerator Live Workshop on February 6th.
I’ll teach you how to build an audience that’s ready to engage with you and buy from you without spending 30+ hours on social media every week!]
Working IN your business versus working ON your business
The daily nitty-gritty gets to the best of us. Bikeshedding creeps in and we end up focusing on menial tasks because. They are easier and more approachable, so we convince ourselves that they are also important and/or urgent.
Plus, no one cares about your business as much as you do and no one knows it as well as you do, so delegation isn’t going to fix things.
Both of these things are false: you can find people who care about your business and you can teach them everything you do.
If you don’t, you’ll never be able to remove yourself from your business and still keep it afloat.
Sounds familiar? Here are a few things you could do to fix it:
Delegate but do it wisely, not haphazardly
Ever wish you could clone yourself? I used to have this recurring thought ever since I started my first business, a digital marketing agency.
Then it hit me: it might actually be possible.
Not cloning myself per se, but something close enough: delegating smartly. After having failed at that a couple of times, I realized it wasn’t the people I was working with, it was me.
Cue Taylor Swift’s 🎶 “It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me”.
For delegation to be successful, you need clear SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and briefs.
To get those, start by documenting everything you do that can be delegated.
- How do you send/schedule emails?
- What about social media posts?
- Invoicing your clients?
- Managing your CRM?
- Creating graphic assets for your marketing?
- Cleaning your inbox?
- Creating reports for yourself/your clients?
Document every step of the process, from the time you open your email client/browser until you check the task off your to-do list.
If you can do this on video (Loom is a great tool!), even better. Then send this process to whomever you’re delegating the task to.
Remember the goal is for that person to replace you eventually, so put in the time to train them and don’t withhold any information. Get this step right and the time you spend now will pay you handsome dividends.
Automate (within reason) → my own approach to automation
A few things are obvious candidates for automation. You should automate them because your clients expect near-instant completion:
- Order fulfillment, especially for digital products. They should arrive instantly.
- Invoices, for digital products and recurring clients.
- Email welcome sequences.
- Emails that ask for feedback/social proof.
Here’s what else I automate:
Product-pitching emails:
- 7 days after someone subscribes to this newsletter, they get an automated email about my 5+1 pre-written email sequence.
- 7 days later, they get an email about The Guided Marketing Strategy Template
- You guessed it — another 7 days later, they get an email about the 1:1 strategy session.
- Somewhere in between (21 days), they get an email about using my referral program (see it at the bottom of this email) to get the email sequence and a shorter strategy session for free.
I ordered these according to their price (low to high), as my take on the value ladder demands.
These automated emails generate roughly 10% of my sales. It’s not much but it allows me to generate sales without actively working on them.
They’re not endless sequences, just one email for each product. I don’t want to spam you, just make you aware of how I could help you.
Nothing feels better than stepping out of the dentist’s office only to see you made a few $$ without even touching a keyboard. Or that someone bought your products on a lazy Sunday afternoon when you were Netflix and chilling
Some social media posts
I post natively whenever possible but I’m not always glued to a screen. When I’m offline, I use a solution like Sendible or the native scheduling function of the platform ifavailable.
I also schedule social media posts on platforms where I’m not overly active and rarely login. They don’t have such a big impact but I’ve been surprised to see leads and subscribers coming from platforms I hadn’t logged into in weeks. It’s rare but it happens and it takes minimal effort to make it happen.
If, like me, you have a “main” platform and dread creating an account on another because it takes up too much of your time, try this for a while. Schedule the posts (you can reuse stuff from your other channels) and forget about them until you’re ready to spend time on that platform.
Sending this newsletter
I schedule this newsletter only because I want to be consistent with when I send it. Even if I’m done editing it 5 minutes before 7:30am EST, when it usually goes out, I still use the schedule function in ConvertKit so it goes out at the right time.
You could also try:
- Hypefury has an interesting Twitter auto-plug: when your tweet reaches a certain number of views, you can set Hypefury to automatically add another tweet to it. You can use this to add a link to your newsletter/product without killing the reach of your original tweet.
- While I don’t use a CRM personally, I know how daunting it can be to move data between a CRM and an email automation platform. Solutions like SyncApps help you automate data flows and even automatically move your client segments between platforms — from Salesforce to ActiveCampaign and vice versa, for instance.
Other things that allow you to remove yourself from your business
Paid growth as in paying for ads instead of trying to grow your business organically allows you to get conversions without actively working for them. For example, instead of spending 2+ hours nurturing social media posts, you can reach a similar number of people through social media ads.
Referral programs (like the one at the bottom of this email) help you grow your audience without actively working on it every day.
Affiliate programs i.e. paying people a commission if they sell your products/services. This is the best way to get autopilot sales without lifting a finger. However, it requires that you have a big enough audience to recruit affiliates and a great product that people are willing to recommend.
Speaking of a big audience, how about we grow yours together? I created The Audience Accelerator with this purpose in mind: to help you build a large enough audience so that you don’t have to be ON all the time. Yes, you can let your audience champion you and your products.
Save your seat and I’ll tell you how!
✋Limitations: the myth of passive income
You’ve heard these before:
- “Build a course and you’ll make money while you sleep.”
- “Pivoting from services to digital products allows you to escape the time-for-money trap.”
Not really, no.
If you sell digital products you will, indeed, spend less time on delivering what your clients pay for. You’ll spend it on marketing and selling those products instead.
The choice is yours: do you prefer to deliver a service or focus on marketing/sales? I’m talking about choosing where most of your focus goes because you’ll need marketing and sales whatever you do.
Realistically speaking, you need to be in your business. You can’t automate or delegate everything for long spells.
But you can (and should!) take time off without your income defaulting to zero. It’s all about systems and finding the balance between what you automate and what you tackle yourself.
What about you, [FIRST NAME GOES HERE], how do you make sure you don’t always have to be ON? What systems do you use? Reply and let me know, I’m always looking to improve mine!
That’s it from me today!
See you next week.
Here to make you think,
Adriana
Need me in your corner? There are three ways I can help you:
- Boost your chances of success by 400%: document your strategy with The Guided Strategy Template.
- Get my product launch email templates that sell: 5+1 emails you can send to your list in 45 seconds.
- Book a 1:1 strategy session with me. Let’s unlock your growth in 60 mins!
