I often get asked how I stopped doing all the things in my business and started scaling. Now that I’ve built way more of an efficient machine, I get asked the question ten times more. In this week’s YouTube video, I’m going to explain how I stopped doing all the things so I could scale my business.
I stopped trading time for money.
I keep telling business owners to stop trading time for money and they insist on fighting me. The truth is no one ever got wealthy trading time for money because it keeps you stuck. This happened to me in my first business as a content marketer. The only way for me to make more money would have been to take on more clients and trade more time. There are only so many hours in the day and I’m not about to spend them all working.
So back in 2017, I decided I needed to make some changes and created my first digital product group coaching hybrid, Persuade to Profit. I created it once – make sure to do some updates once a year – and still sell it every month almost six years later. In 2022, I decided I needed to add to our product suite and have more sources of passive income.
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The idea is to build something that can make money whether I’m working or not.
Systems, automations and processes.
I spent a long time building out more efficient systems and automating just about everything I could think of. Anything that was repetitive, I automated.
Just this morning I was complimented on how the Thank You pages for my opt-ins already have an upsell – because I decided I wasn’t going to miss a single opportunity!
This has allowed me to automatically follow up with leads, create passive income and most importantly remove unnecessary cognitive load from my mind so I can focus on things that matter.
Speaking of which…
Spending my time on high leverage activities.
One switch I had to make was beginning to build versus continuing to hustle. This meant I needed to start making decisions with the long term in mind rather than just short term.
For many years I pretty much only focused on sales activities. While that is still an important part of my day – I have team to help me with that now – so I’m starting to think more strategically. The question I ask myself is how can I get the most ROI from one task.
For example I can get long term ROI from YouTube when discussing valuable content and using the right search terms. It will bring me leads for years to come. That’s high leverage.
A high leverage activity is building relationships with joint venture partners. One partner sent us 100 leads within 24 hours. Now imagine if I have 250 partners all promoting my stuff.
Another high leverage activity was training people to do what I do which brings me to the final point…
Training people.
The jury is out on whether or not I want a big team or even how big of a business I want. What I do know is eventually you need to train other people to do what you do. In my case, that looked like training people to assist me with clients and do sales.
Admittedly, this has not been my favorite part of building a business and I don’t believe it is for most founders. But it’s a skill that must be learned and leveraged.
Just today I had an emergency with one of our pets and one of the team members I trained was able to take over client calls for the day. Because she is trained the business did not have to stop.
Bonus not mentioned in the video: Using AI
AI marketing tools have helped me increase my marketing output without it taking a lot of time or money. It’s truly incredible what it allows me to do in such a short amount of time. This SAVES me time while I go on to either a) not work more than I have to or b) focus on more important tasks.