EP # 157 - How to double your service business and end work by 4pm

In this episode of the Diamond Effect podcast, international business and leadership coach Maggie Perotin shares strategies for doubling your business and finishing work by 4 pm.

She emphasizes the importance of elevating one's CEO mindset, strategic planning, and prioritizing impactful actions. Maggie highlights the role of business owners as leaders and the necessity of personal growth for business success. She discusses effective delegation, outsourcing, and the development of leadership skills. Maggie provides practical advice on creating streamlined processes and time management.

Ready to double your business and finish work by 4 pm to enjoy the fruits of your hard work? Book a sales call with Maggie here - https://calendly.com/maggie-s2l/discovery-call - to talk about how you can get there given your specific situation.

Timestamps:

The importance of mindset (00:00:01) Maggie emphasizes the role of mindset in business success and the need for personal growth as a leader.

Changing work habits (00:01:40) Maggie discusses the possibility of reducing work hours, taking Fridays off, and the importance of intentional preparation for business growth.

Creating a structured business (00:02:51) Maggie emphasizes the need to intentionally prepare the business structure to support reduced work hours and vacations without compromising business goals.

Starting with a strategic plan (00:04:00) Maggie highlights the importance of starting with a strategic plan to understand the current state of the business and identify areas for improvement.

Implementing the strategy (00:07:48) Maggie discusses the importance of implementing the strategy and prioritizing actions to achieve business growth.

Commitment and boundaries (00:13:59) Maggie addresses the need for commitment to finishing work by 4 pm and the importance of setting boundaries for personal time.

Delegating and outsourcing (00:21:43) Maggie explains the significance of delegating and outsourcing tasks to create more opportunities and generate revenue in the business.

Delegation and Outsourcing (00:24:10) Maggie discusses the importance of proper hiring systems and delegating tasks that are not your strengths.

Bookkeeping and Business Growth (00:25:17) The significance of delegating tasks as your business grows and focusing on CEO responsibilities.

Streamlining and Automating (00:26:23) The need to streamline and automate processes before outsourcing administrative work.

Developing Leadership Skills (00:27:28) The importance of developing leadership skills to manage and lead a team effectively.

Transcript

Maggie Perotin (00:00:01) -  Your business exists because you had the idea to start it. Everything begins in our minds. That's why your business results cannot outgrow your current level of thinking. Do you want to serve more clients, make more money without working more, or burning yourself out? Grow yourself first as a leader of your business because that's who you are as a leader. Even if you're the only person in your business right now. When you lead yourself first, the business results will always follow. My name is Maggie Perotin. I'm an international business and leadership coach, an expert in business mindset, strategy and high performance. I created the Diamond Effect podcast to help you elevate your thinking, expand your perspective and through it, grow your business without overwhelm. So let's get started. Welcome, everybody to Diamond Effect Podcast number 157. And today we'll talk about how to double your business and finish your days or end your work by 4 p.m.. Because I truly believe that the more your business growth, the less you can work. Now, don't get me wrong, I do not believe that you can not work at all and have your business running unless you hire the CEO, and the business is so big that you just become a shareholder board member, and you have everybody else running your business day to day.

Maggie Perotin (00:01:40) -  But as a small and medium size business owner CEO, you definitely don't need to hustle. Work 24, seven, seven days a week. Never take a vacation, especially as your business grows, meaning you have more revenue. You're more resource to structured in a way where you can finish by four or take Fridays off, or however you want it to look like you're the CEO, you get to decide. I have a client who was dreaming about taking Fridays off, especially in the summer forever. And as long as they've been running the business, they thought they couldn't do it. And guess what? This year is the first year to doing it. And as they do it every Friday in the summer, they will create a system that will allow you them to continue that even in September. And then I have clients who take their long three two weeks vacation for the first time in the year. And guess what? Their business is not suffering. It continues to operate well, and them taking that vacation doesn't really jeopardize their growth and achieving the goals that they have for their business.

Maggie Perotin (00:02:51) -  Now, a lot of people think that finishing their days by four or taking Fridays off or prolonged vacation, it will just happen at some magical moment in their business that if they keep doing what they've been doing, at some point, there was this be perfect sign from the skies or the moment where it will just happen on its own. And what I want to tell you, it's not going to happen if you just leave it and hope for the best. You have to prepare your business intentionally. You have to create the structure in your business that is able to support you. Finishing your days at four or earlier, or taking Fridays off, or taking prolonged vacations off. And at the same time, the business in your client's needs are met and you're not jeopardizing anything in terms of your goals, your brand, reputation, you know, potential business and things like that. Interior might be thinking, well, okay, maybe, but that's work. And I don't want to do work well. Really, if you think about it, it's just like a garden.

Maggie Perotin (00:04:00) -  In order to have a beautiful garden and benefit from the fruits of the plants, you need to do some work first, right? You need to see, then put it in a good soil water. You need to support the plants so that you can harvest. There's no way around it. It's the same in having well-functioning, structured business, growing sustainably in you, not hassling. And what I want to say is like, you're doing the work already and you're probably working way harder than you need to to create the results that are not your full potential. So why not? Instead of just being jealous of others who are already doing it, and you're just telling yourself, well, it's not going to work for me in my industry, my situation is different and you're creating excuses. Why not actually put in the work? That's not extra work, It's just changing the way you operate in your business operates right now. And do that upfront investment of effort or strategy, of thinking things through and changing things so that you can benefit from the fruits of that not only one time, but for the years to come.

Maggie Perotin (00:05:15) -  Once you set up your business in a way where it's doubling every year, it keeps growing the way you want it to grow, and you're finishing most of their days at 4 p.m. and you're taking the vacations you want to take every year, and you're taking time off you want to take. You will be able to repeat that every year. But if you've never done that before, yes, there will be work up front, but you're already working hard and not benefiting at all. And as I said, you're the CEO of your business. You're the creator of it, and you get to decide how you want it to look like. But every creation needs structure. If you believe in your universe and Mother Nature, like everything in nature, makes sense. There's no random things. Everything's work well together. It's a system that works well together. You are the creator of your business. Can do that too. Don't create chaos. Create a structure that supports you, your business, your clients, your employees, your family in a way that you wanted because you get to decide.

Maggie Perotin (00:06:17) -  So let's talk about the main components that are necessary for you to be able to double your business and finish by. For now, of course, what I'm going to talk about is high level, because I'm not dialing into specific situation. Just so you can relate it to yours, right? If I just talked about one type of business and one business growth and so on, you would be like, oh, well, that's not my industry. It doesn't work for me. They're in a different situation. They want to keep it high level. However, just know that when I work with my clients one on one, we dial it into your specific situation. We customize all of it so it works for you, and we take that based on your current business, based on the data in your current business. The first thing is strategy. I always start there because you cannot achieve something when you don't know what you want to achieve and thinking through the best ways to get there. So let's say if your goal is to double your business, then you want to know, okay, how am I going to do it right? What does it look like for my business and the way you want to approach this? First understand what is where my business is right now, what is working well? What isn't working so well? What have I been able to implement successfully, what I've struggled with? Or I would like to, but I don't know how? Then you want to know what do you need to fix? Right? And that's where you start.

Maggie Perotin (00:07:48) -  You don't add new things for your business until you fix what's there that could be working better, that it's important but needs tweaking because those are usually low hanging fruit. This is how I approach that with my clients. One of my clients. We fix the current sales process and we fixed actually just one part of it, the way they quote potential clients who reach out for the quotes. And that fix doubled their sales within a couple of months of that fixed, their sales went from $250,000 a month to half a million. We haven't added anything. We haven't done anything new. We just tweak and fix certain holes that they had in that. So that's where you always want to start. You never know what's going on, were the opportunities for improvement. And you want to pick the strategic opportunities to fix the ones that will give you the most results for the amount of time and effort. And then once you do that, then the strategy should also contain, okay, maybe we need to add new things, especially if you want to grow, right.

Maggie Perotin (00:08:57) -  Especially if you want to double it if If the fixing of whatever happens in my sales process or my client delivery process, or wherever else is not dabbling the business, then maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I need to add or swap. I need to get rid of something that's not working and replace it with something that well, having strategy not only allows you, of course, to figure out how to achieve my goals, but it also especially allows you to prioritize your actions and actions of your team. What is the most important things that we need to focus our time and effort doing? And anything that doesn't fall into that strategy, maybe it should not be done at all. So strategy focuses you and shows you what is busywork, what you shouldn't be doing. It allows you to eliminate things, and I talk about it through my concept of strategic constraint. I will refer you to another Diamond Effect podcast episode to learn more about it. It's episode 141 Strategic Constraint how to grow your service business faster by focusing on less things.

Maggie Perotin (00:10:11) -  Because ultimately it's not about doing it all. It's about doing the high impact things or taking actions that have the highest probability of you creating the results and outcomes you want. And that's what I help my clients do when we create the top SEO winning strategy for their business, it's very tailored to their business. But I also make sure that it's as simple as possible for them to implement, and it's really proportional to their business complexity and what stage of growth their business is in. So then the second thing that you need is of course implementing the strategy. And that's a separate skill. There are so many businesses that have this amazing strategies and they never implement them and do something completely different. And then they wonder why they're not getting the results they want. Or on the other hand, so many businesses, even probably more that don't even have a strategy, and they're just doing a bunch of things based on what others are doing. What they learned along the way picked up one thing, and it's the same.

Maggie Perotin (00:11:16) -  They're wondering why they're not growing as fast, or why it's so hard to grow when there's nothing guiding them. So the secret sauce is to have a good, robust, simple strategy that can be implemented and really implementing it. How you're going to do it is the strategy can just have the theory and not really drill down to specific actions you as the CEO need to do, and your team members should do, because actions is what you can plan, right? You then take those actions and you ensure that you do them every week. And that comes with scheduling and weekly planning and time blocking. And it starts with you as the CEO. So then when you have that system down for yourself, you can pass it on and train and mentor your employees to do similar. And then this is how you ensure that you're maximizing the time that you do work in your business with impactful action. So then you don't have to overwork a lot of overwork, and staying after for and working more is because people waste a lot of time wondering what to do, or designing in the moment, what to do or doing the things again that are not creating the results, and then trying to kind of like figure it out on the fly.

Maggie Perotin (00:12:36) -  But when you know what creates the result and you only focus on that and you plan it ahead and you're effective doing it, you don't have to work that much. Your output will be created in half the time of somebody who is not doing that. Now, when you just implement it, there's other things that you need to take into consideration, especially if you're a high achiever who developed a habit for years of working till 7 or 8 or longer, and has also socialized the belief that only working this long and this hard creates the results right and create success in business. If you have that ingrained belief, it's going to be more challenging than just scheduling your time and deciding to finish by four. Your brain will think that it's wrong. So first you need to decide why finishing by 4 p.m. is important for you. If you create that boundary and you decide yep, I want to finish by four. Why? Only because Maggie says so or you're dreaming about it, but you're not really clear. Why would it be important then? It will be so easy for your brain, who is used to working more in as high achieving to sway you the other way and say, yeah, no, no, no.

Maggie Perotin (00:13:59) -  Like you have to be working more like we've been doing that all the time. Why are you changing now? What do you do after 4 p.m. in your personal time? Needs to be equally important for you as the work in business. Because again, if you do not important work, work or things that your brain thinks are wasteful, let's say scrolling on TikTok for three hours, then the brain will create guilt for you to do important things rather than unimportant. I will say, well, why are you doing this? You should be working on business. You have those goals. So how you spend time after 4 p.m. in your personal life? It's also important. Now. It doesn't mean you can't scroll and tick tock, or it doesn't mean you can't rest. That, for example, resting or watching movie is not important. You need to make an important right? So for example, I will give you my example when I'm done and I just want to hang out in my garden and do nothing.

Maggie Perotin (00:14:55) -  I know the importance of that for me. I know that this is my rest and recharge time, that I need this to operate well. So so my brain treats that equally important to me working in my business or on my business. So that's why it's easy for me to finish. At the time I decided to finish that day, and I don't have guilt coming up, but it hasn't happened overnight. I am definitely a high achiever. I've worked many, many years past 4 or 5 p.m. and I definitely struggled with guilt. If, let's say I finished once in a blue moon regularly and then spend time watching TV thinking I should be doing something different. But I work through that belief system. I spend my time intentionally, my personal time as intentionally as I spend my time in my business doing things that matter. And it's the same in my personal life now. Things that matter to me, things that are important to me and that could be watching a movie with my husband. But what I don't do is mindlessly doing things that I haven't decided on.

Maggie Perotin (00:16:05) -  So, for example, scrolling on social media for hours and then realizing, what the hell did I do and feeling guilty about it, I don't do it anymore. I eliminated that from my life. It doesn't mean I don't scroll. Sometimes I do, but it's either at the time chosen by me, or if my brain goes almost without realizing, I catch myself very quickly. Right? So I'm also human. I get pulled into social media, but I have systems or things to catch very quickly when I'm doing it and when I'm not supposed to be doing, or I just choose to do it at a time that works for me. So then another thing that you need in order for you to honor the boundary of finishing by 4 p.m. is you need commitment to honoring that. And don't expect yourself to be perfect. So like the day you decide that you're going to be 100% perfect for the rest of the days, be realistic. Have compassion for yourself. We're human. So even honoring that commitment at first 50% of the time.

Maggie Perotin (00:17:06) -  So let's say you've always been working past four, and now you're starting to implement that. You want to finish by four and you tell yourself, okay, if out of five days I'm working, I'll do 2 or 3. That's good. And then you increase that number to five days a week most of the time. But occasionally you might slip or something comes up in your business and you need to do it. A good rule of thumb is to get to 8020, right? You're 8020 rule, meaning 80% of the time. I honor my commitments in 20% of the time or less. I don't because of circumstances that arise in my business, or just because of old habits or because I'm human. And that's okay. Once you start implementing it, you might realize that, hey, finishing at four is challenging, and not because wasting a bunch of time during the day, or I'm doing a bunch of things that are not unimportant and busywork because I've eliminated that. It's just because the size of my business and complexity of my business is generating a substantial amount of work.

Maggie Perotin (00:18:11) -  That's got to be done. So then there's a few things that are also need to be implemented, and that's just part of creating a business and a system that runs well, that keeps growing and allows you to have work life balance that you want. The first thing is prioritization. Okay, so if I have a bunch of tasks that I need to get done, do they all need to be done today? Do they all need to be done this week? Maybe I prioritize them and push certain things that are. I don't have a hard deadline like a client commitment or some government commitment, but it's a deadline I created in my mind. You have no idea how many times I coach my clients on their brain, creating an unreasonable deadline to accomplish something where the only person who decided on that is my client. Where whether they finish something today or at the end of the week ultimately doesn't matter. So you have to be on to yourself when you prioritize, or all the things on your plan and time blocking really need to be done today.

Maggie Perotin (00:19:17) -  And that comes after you've eliminated things that don't need to get done at all. So that's one strategy to allow you to still finish by for now. Of course, at some point as your business grows, even that strategy might not be enough. And that's the signal that you need to start outsourcing and delegating and hiring help. Because when we do things that create results, then our business grows. Then we're more resourced to invest in the business, and we're ultimately more busy because we have more clients and so on. So now those are the signs I need to hire help, and that can look like many different ways. It could be outsourcing certain tasks to a contractor. It could be hiring a contractor or some sort of part time help. It could be hiring full time employees. You get to decide how that looks like depending on where you're at with your business. What are your financial resources? What does your business need right now and what it will need in the longer term? And I just want to say that's the beauty of having the strategy and planning your actions weekly ahead of time.

Maggie Perotin (00:20:33) -  It really that can quickly tell you when you need extra help. I do have an episode on weekly planning and how to hire your first help, and I will give you the numbers. I've done many episodes on planning, but I will give you the two most recent ones. So first one is episode 142 Maximizing Your Effort how to Master Time Blocking as a Business Owner and episode 148 Plan Your Way to Success, the significance of project and weekly planning. And then that way you can learn more about how to do it and dive deeper into the subject. The same comes with hiring. Actually, I didn't realize it's episode 46 from May 20th, 2022, where I talk about preparing to hire your first help. It's been a while. Somehow I thought that episode was more recent, but what I share there is timeless, so please learn from that. On hiring. So we talked about strategy. Then we talked about implementation. And then of course the third part is delegating and outsourcing. So yes listen to the episode 46 on hiring.

Maggie Perotin (00:21:43) -  But here I want to talk about a couple of things. Is that when you delegate certain tasks or outsource certain tasks, you want to make sure that when you do that, you create more money in your business. This is not just about, again, delegating busy work that doesn't bring anything. And in ways that makes you money. There's three ways. One, either you outsource, let's say client service work that you can build to the client. So if you are a lawyer and you're hiring another lawyer or a medical practitioner, right, that therapist and you're hiring another practitioner or practitioner? Another therapist. There are time will be billable to the client. Or if you are a contractor, hiring somebody to do drywall or demos for you. Another way is that you're giving tasks that will free up your time, and it will allow you to create opportunities and do the things that generate revenue. So that could be bookkeeping, for example. Right. You're struggling with bookkeeping because you have no how to do it.

Maggie Perotin (00:22:50) -  It takes you half as long as it would take a trained bookkeeper. So a doing it right is important for taxes and even having data to grow your business and be that time you could spend growing your business. And then the third way is hiring somebody to directly help you generate revenue. Now, I'm going to have a caveat on that. And I always say, well, is that you're not hiring to delegate the responsibility of somebody to create money and clients for you. So if you're hiring a sales person, yes, of course, they're responsible for finding clients, but they're not solely responsible. If they're not performing, you can say, well, my business is not growing because of this the salesperson. No, your business is not growing because you've hired the wrong person for the position as its leader, or you didn't give them enough training and support required. And there will be always part of business development that only you can do as CEO. Maybe it's their relationship with the key biggest client, or maybe it's creating certain parts of marketing because you're like me, you're a coach or consultant whose knowledge becomes this intellectual property and thought leadership, and you are the only one who can create that.

Maggie Perotin (00:24:10) -  But at the same time, if, let's say you're hiring some marketing and sales help, there could be actions that the contractor employee is doing that will help you make money, like doing research, right, or coming up with the content strategy, or following up or doing initial reach out to potential clients, whatever that is. The next aspect of delegation and outsourcing is you want to have a proper hiring system, which is really a decision making system. How do I make sure that I get the right person for the job I have for them? So having processes for that and ways to help you is key. Some basics you will find in the episode 46. I help my clients create that as well when we work together, so I'm happy to help you just reach out as usual. Other ways to think about delegation and outsourcing is you want to start with the things that you are not good at. There it takes you also way more and longer time that it would take an expert to do it. And also the quality of your work is not great.

Maggie Perotin (00:25:17) -  So bookkeeping is one of those examples. If you're a service provider serving your clients other than bookkeeping, probably bookkeeping is not your strongest thing to do. And if you're like me, you probably hate it. Therefore you procrastinate. Text you forever. Yet the finances are key for you to also understand your business. So having them clean is important. So that's one of the things you want to think about. Then when you've done that, then the next thing is you keep delegating slowly as your business grows or the things that you as the CEO are not uniquely qualified to do. So then it comes back to, you know, if you're a therapist, there are other therapists that you could hire that you could train on your process and your philosophy that could serve the clients who then you can focus more on being the CEO of your business rather than the therapist, because this way you can help more people. If your business grows, it will be able to help more people. And then of course there's admin work, right? So admin work has got to be done.

Maggie Perotin (00:26:23) -  But before you start outsourcing it, make sure it's streamlined. It's automated as much as possible and it's a lean. So again you're not delegating busy work that doesn't produce outcomes in your business or doesn't contribute a value to your business. And you just pay somebody else to do it. And I'll give you an example. When I was in a corporate world and the corporation that I worked, executives didn't have an executive assistant 1 to 1. So it wasn't like, oh, the CEO had one executive assistant, and then his five closest executives had other five. There was actually two executive assistants for the hire for the entire company. And I think one was supporting CEO, maybe CFO and CEO, and then the other other executives, which was a bunch, and they were also responsible for other things. So administratively, you want your business to be as clean as possible. You want to have clean processes, automated things, and then use administrative assistance for important things that gotta be done. But you as a CEO at some point should not be doing them.

Maggie Perotin (00:27:28) -  So the last point I want to make here in this part, once you start outsourcing and you start hiring and delegating, developing your people leadership skills is key. Many people think that, oh, you're either born a leader or not. I don't believe that. I believe leaders are made. Those are skills. Like everything else that you can develop. You can be amazing at leading people if only you get to learn how. I'm very passionate about it because I know with me I became a great people leader because I had mentors and I did trainings and I practice it, and I intentionally focus on develop those skills. I wouldn't become that if I didn't, if I just relied on, well, I'm supposed to be born. I'm supposed to know that. So if I don't, that means I can get better. Course, I help my clients to do that with, you know, in terms of hiring systems and making sure you have the structure for decision making and leading people. I have my top SEO leading high performing system framework, but also I teach you how to be great people leader, and you can't escape that.

Maggie Perotin (00:28:41) -  If you want to keep doubling your business every year and finishing work by, for, and taking time off and not doing it all by yourself. So I highly recommend book sales. Call with me today through the link in the show notes, and let's talk about how I can help you grow in a way that you want. Have a fantastic week. Bye. Thank you for listening today. If this podcast resonated with you, please come back. Also, you can leave a review on whatever platform you're listening and if you have a suggestion, question or a topic you would like me to talk about, let's get in touch via email. Email me at Maggie at Stairway to Leadership. Com. See you in the next episode.