Welcome to Meaningful Work, Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker, living and working on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal people here in Sydney, Australia.
In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.
Welcome to this episode. I’m really looking forward to this topic because it is something near and dear to my heart.
I am, in fact, a Marie Kondo devotee. I don’t love all of those plastic bags of stuff that the people in the Marie Kondo program end up bagging up. As the Americans say, bagging up, but decluttering is something that I absolutely adore to do and I love doing it inside of my business. I love cleaning my desk, cleaning my home office. You know, cleaning out anything really when I’m feeling a little bit ungrounded or scattered. And if you’ve missed the traditional spring cleaning period of September or springtime for our Northern Hemisphere listeners, then hopefully you’re going to love this episode because this episode is all about decluttering. And if we can declutter, then of course we’re making ourselves, well, not just feel wonderful, but we’re also creating a lot of space, a lot of space, a lot of time, getting back our time, getting back our focus.
So that’s the purpose of today’s episode. I hope you find this useful.
Right, so the very first thing we wanna do with our decluttering is that we wanna cull first before we streamline and perhaps maybe introduce some new healthy habits, rituals, routines and systems into our business.
So the first one that I love to identify with my clients is the busy work. And what I see a lot of is that that busy work tends to be research and learning. And now that might be a strange and unusual thing to say because I’m a trainer, one of my roles, one of my hats that I wear is as a trainer, I teach and train adults, as well as coaching of course. So it might seem strange to tell you to stop learning and that’s not what I’m telling you, but what I have seen over and over again is that business owners can easily try to shoehorn learning into their days – all day, all week, all month, all year long. And I think it’s really useful to have a dedicated time where, you know, two hours on a Friday or three hours on a Wednesday or whatever it is, that’s your learning time. But I think most business owners are taking this to the extreme, at least most of the conscientious business owners, which are the ones that I attract, and it’s becoming this kind of never ending thing. And if they’re not doing, you know, one qualification, they’re doing another qualification and they’re diligently working through every single lesson and module and recording. And as a trainer and a coach with many, many programs and many, many learning materials, I wanna say, don’t do that. Don’t think that you need to do absolutely every module and every lesson around. It’s just not a thing. So I have started introducing in my large programs, particularly a little one-liner at the beginning of the lesson that says, you will likely not need this if you, you know, x, y, z. You absolutely do not need to learn every single tiny thing. What I want you to consider instead is just in time learning. I have a task to do in the next hour. I need to know enough, not everything on this task, I need to know enough to get me out of trouble and be able to do this task within the next hour, which means I’m gonna spend 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes tops learning the thing in order to do the thing. Same goes with research. Never ending research, and the problem is, if it’s you, yourself, and yourself on Google, then it is a massive time suck and you can just research indefinitely. So again, with just-in-time research, I never research anything unless it’s for pleasure and I know it’s for pleasure and I’m deliberately telling myself it’s for pleasure, unless I’m about to make a decision. So research, make a decision, job done, move on to the next thing. So there’s a lot of busy work, a lot of fluff that can be cut, yeah?
The other thing that is a major time suck for most business owners is the backend part of the business. And I’d like you to consider the front-facing parts of the business and the backend part of the business. So the front facing parts of the business are by far and away more important for most soloists and small business owners, for most consultants, experts, you know, leaders who have a kind of a knowledge-based business, they’re knowledge workers, they’re thought leaders. They don’t need to be caught up in the backend stuff nearly as much as most people are. So I’m talking about admin, tech systems, tech in general, accounts and bookkeeping. I’m talking about all that stuff that can just consume you if you let it. That is not stuff that most of the time needs to be done. A lot of stuff can be automated. A lot of stuff can be delegated. You know, if you can’t automate it, then you can delegate it possibly. And oftentimes it’s just not necessary. It’s not actually adding enough value to justify the time suck that it is.
The next thing on the list, on the culling list, item number three is offerings. So what are you selling? And I want you to consider the low profit service, you know, offerings that you’re doing, the packages perhaps, that perhaps you’re starting to feel a little bit of resentment or a lot of resentment about delivering and it’s selling and people want them and they’re buying them. But resentment is a really good sign that something needs to change. And maybe it’s the price, maybe it’s how you deliver it, maybe it is the delivery full stop. For example, people ask me for years for social media marketing. I did a lot of social media training, social media marketing training for many, many years, 2009, 10, 11, 12, 2013, 14, 15 people kept, you know, it was one of the most popular subjects, topics that I taught on, but I really hated delivering it. I really hated delivering it. And so it, you know, it was a tricky decision and it was a decision that didn’t come easily. But eventually, you know, I thought, okay, this doesn’t make any sense for me to keep delivering this the way that I deliver it. And I still do do social media strategy, a little bit of custom social media marketing training, but no longer do I teach public courses in relation to social media marketing because it just, you know, it was hard. I didn’t like it. It was complicated. It was emotional for people. I didn’t want to do it anymore.
All right, number four on the cull list. Isn’t this fun? Number four on the call list is clients. And of course, not all clients, but you know the ones I’m talking about. I’m talking about the clients where when you see their phone number on your phone, when you see them calling you, or you see their email in your inbox, your heart starts to race a little faster. You know the clients I’m talking about. I’m talking about the bad fit.
Energy Vampire clients, the clients that are costing you a lot of thinking, a lot of effort, and you know in your heart of hearts, really you don’t need me to tell you that it’s time to call it quits. And it’s a rite of passage in any business, for any business owner, to fire their first client. And it’s not a lot of fun, it’s not something that anyone wakes up in the morning and, you know, loves doing but it is a necessary rite of passage. And of course, it’s your business, right? Like what is the point of creating a, you know, a thriving, lovable, livable business through your own sweat and smarts, and then, you know, working with people who, you know, you resent.
All right, last on the list of culling is our energy leaks. So every single morning we wake up in the morning, say we’ve slept well or reasonably well, we wake up in the morning, we are feeling as good as we’re ever gonna feel pretty much after our coffee, of course, or tea or whatever. And then what happens? We start leaking energy. And so I want you to think about, I want you to notice, and you can do this tomorrow, right? Get a piece of paper first thing in the morning and start noticing where your energy leaks.
So let’s start with the obvious stuff. Maybe it is your computer. You’ve got an old computer. You’ve got an old system. You’ve got software that doesn’t work very well. You’ve got an uncomfortable desk chair. You’ve got an uncomfortable desk or no desk. You’ve got a space that’s less than ideal. You know, maybe there’s too many people around. You don’t have enough privacy. Maybe you’re being interrupted constantly by people, by emails. Maybe you’re looking for those interruptions. Those energy leaks are going to, you know, pull you back into doing the busy work, into doing the not so useful stuff, into the bad habits. Yeah. And into this kind of cycle of seeking dopamine, chasing dopamine in order to feel better because you’ve lost energy and you need energy to do the work, but you’ve allowed too many energy lakes to happen.
So this is our whole list. Yeah. And you might be thinking right now, okay, I’m going shopping Black Friday. I’m buying myself a new computer. I need a new desk, you know, a bed and a chair and a desk. These are essential things, right? These are not, you know, they’re, they’re not luxury items. They’re essential items. They have an absolute definite impact on you and your energy.
All right. The next part to look at, once we’ve done the culling, and that was rather a lot of decluttering, is the streamlining. Again, your focus is on the front-facing parts of the business, because there are endless things that could be done, right? There is a never-ending list of improvements and to-dos that you could focus on, but I don’t want you to do that. I want you to focus on the front-facing parts of the business, which mean marketing. And the marketing that you’re doing should be resulting in lead generation. It should be resulting in inquiries in your inbox or whatever, you know, whatever way that you, you receive those inquiries and then the sales process.
So what is the sales process? Can we streamline the sales process? You have a sales process, even if you think you don’t have a sales process. I promise you you do. What is it that you do in order to get clients, in order to get new clients, to turn an inquiry into a sale. Could this be systematised? Could this be streamlined? Could this be decluttered? Yeah.
The next part is the client onboarding. This can be time consuming and less than perfect for a lot of businesses, myself included. I’m always seeking ways of making my client onboarding experiences streamlined and elegant and classy and helpful as I possibly can do. So what happens after somebody says yes? What happens after money is exchanged? Can you systematise and streamline this? Can you automate this? What is the information they require? Can this be automated? What information do you require from them? Can this be automated? These are key front-facing business focuses for streamlining and systematising. And of course, part and parcel with this, is metrics and especially for sales and marketing because, you know, it’s amazing to me how many business owners don’t follow any metrics, don’t actually monitor any metrics. And I’m not just talking about soloists, I’m talking about big businesses with multimillion dollar turnovers I work with and they don’t actually, the owner never sits down in a kind of a methodical, predictable way and reviews key metrics. So this could be its own episode, but what I want to focus on particularly is what I think are the most important metrics to be looking at regularly.
The first one is how many leads and inquiries does your business receive every single month? For most business models I work with, we don’t need to be looking at this every day or every week, every month will do. So how many inquiries, how many people have made active inquiries into working with you. Yeah, what is that number? And then the next metric that’s super important is what is your sales conversion rate? So 10 people made inquiries in the month of November and five of them became new paying clients. So you have a conversion rate of 50%. These two metrics are, I believe, the most important metrics that you could be monitoring. And like I said, this could be its own episode. We could be talking about, you know, how to influence those metrics and what other metrics kind of relate to those metrics. Absolutely. But for now, these are the two metrics that you want to be looking at on a regular basis, a recurring date in the diary once a month, every month to look at these metrics. All right.
Finally, in our declutter, we’re now going to move on to time. Time is a massive one, right? Time is a massive one. And again, this could be a whole season of the podcast, how to manage your time well, how to make better decisions, how to figure out whether decisions are big decisions or small decisions. These are all things that I talk about with my clients regularly. But I wanna leave you with a couple of hurlers.
The first one is having a theme for each day of the week. Now, the way that I structure my week my weeks currently and this is not set in stone. I don’t do this once and then never do it again. I revisit this to make sure it’s working and to evolve it over time as my life changes, my business changes. But generally speaking, at the moment, Mondays I don’t do any client work, Fridays I don’t do any client work. These are the buffer for me. And I’m working on a Monday, but I’m certainly not rushing into some kind of manic Monday where it’s like, it’s all on, it’s all on, you know, and I’m exhausted by Monday night. That’s not how I want to be. I currently do client calls. So one-to-one and group calls, any training webinars, any training courses, custom training and facilitation that I get on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And when I say Wednesday, it’s a Wednesday afternoon. So I’ve got Wednesday mornings to myself. It’s a Wednesday morning right now as I record this. And then on a Friday, by the way, that’s where I try and keep it a little bit light. I maybe have a creativity day to create some marketing materials, do some writing. I go to yoga first thing, I might go out for lunch. If I’m gonna do any networking, I try and schedule it on a Friday. And I do kind of admin and tidy up stuff on a Friday so that I can kind of start the weekend feeling fresh and not feeling like you know, I’ve kind of manically worked until 7pm and then crashed into the couch. So day themes can work really well. And specifically, I want to give you a couple of tips to make this more workable. The client work that you’re doing, the paid client work that you’re doing, can you group that together? Can you make it more boundary so that you’re clustering similar things on the same day or similar days? Yeah. If you’re going to be doing certain tasks, you want to be doing them in a cluster, yeah, otherwise known as batching similar tasks.
All right. My final way to organise time, of course, and again, this could be its own episode. This could be its own season of the podcast. So I’ve got plenty to say on this, but for the sake of brevity – one of the things that I did in my business many, many moons ago, I think it would have been a good five or six years ago now, I created monthly themes, January to December. Every month has a theme, every theme has a month. And I have reused and recycled that ever since. So across all my programming, across all my marketing, I’m working to that 12 month theme. And those themes were considered by what I’ve observed, you know, having done what I’ve done for as long as I have, what typically happens throughout the course of the year in a small business owner’s life. And this makes my business that much more streamlined and simplified because I don’t need to make these big decisions. Those decisions were made, it’s printed out on a piece of paper that’s staring back at me, and Bob’s your uncle, it’s as easy as that. So this is another way for you to organise your time across the year so that you’re not having energy leaks happening when you’re thinking, okay, well, what’s my theme for the month? You’ve already figured it out in advance. It’s already been done. It’s already been brainstormed and decided upon. That’s one less decision to make and one less energy leak to grapple with.
Let’s go declutter.
Real quick before you go. If this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.
