My post from Tuesday about how I spend my time got a lot of questions and feedback, so I thought I would share a breakdown of how I spent my time this week.
Announcement: If you want to REALLY enhance your effectiveness as CEO of your company (even if it’s a company of ONE), I encourage you to sign up for this resource on $10K per hour tasks.)
Moving on.
Total hours I worked this week: 27.5
I put in a 3.5 day work week this week as I was on vacation on Monday and don’t work full days on Fridays. That said, I do a LOT of thinking, planning, and organizing on Fridays, which of course is in fact highly valuable “work”. It just looks and feels different from the rest of the week.
As always happens when we compress activities into the hours available, the hours I DID work this week were massively productive.
Total hours I spent on growth and client acquisition: 13
I like to work ON the business in “seasons.” There are seasons where I focus more on growth, and seasons where I focus on building the internal resilience of Safi Media. I have just come through 2 quarters of internal resilience focus, where I spent roughly 30% of my time on growth and client acquisition.
The next two quarters will be more heavily focused on growth, so I’m increasing my focus on growth activities to 50-60%. This week 48% of my time was spent on growth and client acquisition. While some of this work will show up in my financials now, most of it will actually show up in my P&L through to October and beyond.
Here are some of the growth and client acquisition tasks I worked on:
- Creating high value, high attitude branded marketing content
- Closing sales
- Finalizing our Q3 and Q4 marketing plan
- Creating detailed delegation filters for the marketing team to implement.
Total hours I spent on delivery: 7
At 26% of my total working hours, this amount of “delivery time” is not sustainable or desirable for an entrepreneurial founder. I aim to keep my total delivery time under 20%, and in fact, a 10% split is the MOST ideal.
That said, we are queens of disqualify selling and marketing here at SafiMedia therefore, our clients are classy, mature and a delight to work with. So if I am being extremely honest, I do more delivery than I “should” because it’s fun.
I spent 4 hours running AWESOME group coaching calls for The Incubator and The Power + Presence + Position Business Accelerator. And I spent 3 hours doing 1:1 coaching with clients. Normally I do only 1 private coaching call per week, but because I am actually taking vacation this summer (unlike the 2020 Summer of Stress and Weirdness) I opened up more time for 1:1 work this week.
Total hours I spent on team and internal systems and asset creation: 7.5
Any work you do developing systems, working with colleagues, and creating assets builds the internal resilience of your company. No amount of hot shot sales or glittery marketing will make up for a lack of internal resilience. (This is why my personal obsession is teaching women founders how to scale BOTH client acquisition AND internal resilience.)
I find entrepreneurs dislike the detail-rich work of building internal resilience. They are super quick to want to hire a “COO” (a HIGH-LARIOUS and overinflated title for any company sub $5M in my estimation, but I will read your email if you want to fight me on this) because they want to spend all their time “being the brand” and “crafting the vision.”
Queen: you have to KNOW YOUR BUSINESS if you want to scale it and the work done under this bucket — team, internal systems, and asset creation — is an important part of knowing your business.
Here’s what I did specifically:
- Crafted a micro-training for my Incubators showing them how to increase sales conversion and free themselves from “follow up purgatory” by making vivid offers that are imbued with legitimate and authentic urgency. This is an ASSET that can be used over and over to help my clients grow sales.
- Ran two standup meetings, met with our online business manager Carrie and funnel build Amber, and briefed them both on key July – November marketing projects.
- Interviewed and hired a new marketing team member.
- Held debrief calls with two Incubator members.
- Client A made as much in the first 6 months of 2021 as she did in the whole of 2020 while working less. AND she just launched her SFSO (Six Figure Scalable Offer), which means she has a clear path to generating even more income with MUCH more freedom. NICE.
- Client B saw Covid basically eradicate her existing business. With our help, she not only re-positioned and launched her business, generating roughly $160K in sales in 11 months. ON TOP of this, she launched her SFSO in the spring and is generating an additional $12K in monthly sales from that revenue stream.
- We have a total of 7 milestones our incubator clients work toward. Each time a client completes a milestone, they schedule a 1:1 debrief call with me. These calls are GOLD for them (natch) and also for ME because they allow me to
- a) remain incredibly close to my clients and customers
- b) hear directly from them how they are doing, what additional support they need, and how they are engaging with the program elements
- c) continuously monitor the impact and effectiveness of what we do. These debriefs feed directly into how I guide my coaching staff, resources we develop for our clients, marketing, sales, and positioning.
Overall, it was a massively productive and valuable week, and I’m wrapping it up feeling energized and ready for some epic free time this weekend. What were the 3 most valuable tasks you did this week?
Want More?
- Book a Debrief call with my team. We are very good at pinpointing the ONE THING that will drive the lion’s share of your growth.
- Uncover your niche by attending the Niche Down, Cash Up Masterclass
- Listen to Podcast Episode 455: Disqualify Selling