4 steps to start treating your business more like a business
This is a follow-up on the blog where I am discussing if and why you might be afraid to treat your business more like a business, what the impact of this is and how the outcome of treating it more like a business might surprise you. In this post, we’ll be looking at what steps you can take if you’re in this situation.
You’re an established designer and you’re often near or at capacity but you see yourself more as a freelancer or as a designer, not as a business owner. And there are a lot of reasons why you might be afraid or have resisted treating your business more like a business. Reasons I have heard from clients are:
Because they were afraid that taking their business more serious would mean that there would not be enough time to be creative, which was one of the reasons they started their business.
Because they want to give a very personalised service to their clients. And they felt that if they would create workflows, email templates and automate their client processes they would not be able to personalise or provide the level of service they want to give.
Because they felt that it was too overwhelming. It felt too big because it was too far away from where they were. There was too much to do and they did not have a clear plan on how to get there. So they got stuck into the feeling they did not know how to run a business.
Because they had convinced themselves they were not going to make it work. They had been putting so much effort into their business but weren't seeing the results.
Or on the opposite side: because they were scared about the success they might have. The 5-figure months were so out of their comfort zone that they could not see it becoming a reality.
Because they knew it wasn't going to be easy. They knew they would have to learn new things or have to face things, like knowing their numbers, that they had been dreading. So instead they were focussing on those things that were easy and they knew how to do (the design work)
Does any of this sound familiar?
Then keep reading this blog, as I’ll dive into what steps you can take if you want to stop feeling like your business is so encompassing that you're working evenings and weekends because you always feel like you're behind on where you should be. And that even when you're not working your mind is racing with all the things you should be doing.
Step 1: What is your vision for your business and your personal life?
To me, a business is not just about building a business that makes money, but it's about building a sustainable business, the overall long term results this brings and being able to use your business as ‘a vehicle’ to have the freedom to live the life that you want. Whatever this freedom looks like.
Maybe you want to spend more time with or have to care for your family, stay home more for your kids or travel more.
It doesn't really matter what the reason is (I mean of course it matters but not in regards to this point) that you started your business. But it's about that you create a business that can really help you support the kind of life that you want to live. So this is a business that is aligned and sustainable.
But what does this look like in practice? To me, it means that:
This is a business that is aligned with who you are and helps you to achieve your personal goals
This is a business that is not overwhelming you because you have a very clear direction.
This is a business where you are very intentional with how you spend your time. And every task is there to help you achieve your goals
This is a business that has clear processes in place to run day-to-day tasks as well as a process to evaluate progress towards the overall goals
So the business is that vehicle to support your life rather than as being the end goal.
And don’t get me wrong, I love my business and what I do, I could not imagine going back to a corporate career.
But it’s not just a business to make money, not at all. But if you can start from having your life vision and creating a through-line to your business it will really help you to create a business that is aligned with your life and who you are
So to get here, you first need to know what those personal goals are. What is your big picture vision?
Creating a vision board might help you to determine your vision.
WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON'T HAVE A CLEAR VISION?
Your vision will drive your goals, which will drive your actions.
So if you have no clear vision, what are you going to base your goals on?
Without goals, how do you know what to focus on?
And without focus, how will you make sure your business will be a success?
And without it succeeding, how will you get the freedom you've been looking for?
So knowing your personal vision (no matter how far this might be away from where you are now) is the first step to take, as it will guide (and is connected to) everything else in your business.
Remember what I said above? Without goals, how do you know what to focus on?
Now you know your vision, but your vision might be far away from where you are at this moment. The 2 things that are most likely impacting this: the money and time you need to live this vision.
Step 2: How much revenue do you need to make this vision come true?
So now we need to look at how your business can support you financially to make your vision happen. But to be able to create an action plan to help you get to this vision, you need to know what this looks like in numbers.
I hope that while you're just getting started with reducing the overwhelm your business can give you, you can start to see that the numbers side of your business can actually help you. And make you feel empowered because you exactly know what is going on in your business and you know where you’re going and how with each small growth of revenue, you know you’re getting closer to this vision.
If you don’t already know this number for your current situation start here. To get to this number you need to start by adding up all the costs that you have every month to keep your business running. So this will be your software subscriptions like Adobe, costs for your website, social media schedulers, email providers like Flodesk, accounting software, project and client management software like Dubsado and Clickup.
Then you need to do the same for your personal expenses if your business revenue needs to pay for or contribute to the mortgage/rent, water, electricity, insurance, groceries etc. Then multiply it by 12 months and add the things you have yearly payments for to know what you need to make in a year to cover your costs.
In the blog about how to price your design packages for profitability, I go more into depth into all the elements you need to consider when determining your pricing to make sure you’re not just covering your costs but also make a profit and how to include the overall revenue number you need to make.
Next is to calculate or roughly estimate (as it is often difficult to know exactly) what this number needs to be if you want to live according to your vision. To do this, you need to know how your situation will change between now and when you’re living your vision (luckily you determined this in step 1).
Do you need to make more money because you want to be able to travel more, take up an old hobby, start investing or move to another house? If so, how much do you need for this?
I can imagine that you might get discouraged if this is a large growth. But remember that you don’t need to achieve this in one year, it is something that you’re working towards. In step 4 we’ll be looking at how to break up your goals.
Or does living your vision mean that your revenue needs to be the same while working fewer hours?
Step 3: How do you need to spend your time to make this vision come true?
When you have a big vision that you’re business is helping you to achieve, you need to take control over how you’re spending your time. Because when we decide upfront on how we spend our time, we are working pro-actively towards the ideal vision of our lives
So to be proactive in how you spend your time, you first need to know where you are now to be able to decide what you need to do next. This is where time tracking comes in.
Time tracking does 2 things:
Business back-end related tasks: time tracking will help you to understand where your time is going. So you know what is taking up most of your time and you can reflect if that time is well spent. It's so easy to lose an hour each day by browsing on IG or in Facebook groups, searching for emails that you can re-use, figuring out if you're not missing a step in your client process by going back through old projects or having to search for files in a messy dropbox folder.
Client project: when you track your time for client projects it will help you to understand if you have a profit left at the end of a client project (which relates back to step 2). Because it's one thing to define the price of your services but if you don't know how much time you're spending on each project you might work more hours on it than you're getting paid for.
And I'm not saying you need to get paid per hour but I get more in-depth about this topic in my blog about how to price your design packages for profit.
Once you started tracking your time you can evaluate how you've been spending your time so that you can identify opportunities to eliminate, outsource or automate. The next step is then to be more intentional with your time.
Have a quick look at the video below to see how you can implement your ideal week in your daily life.
If you're not structuring your week yet with theme days and time blocking, I would advise this to be your next step. This will help you to be more focussed, it will help you to be more productive because you're not losing time switching tasks and to reduce the time you spend on a task because you're limiting it. Want to know more about this? Continue reading How to use theme days and time blocking to structure your week.
Do you know what your ideal week looks like? If not, then I would advise spending some time on this. When you define your ideal week you will have a clear structure to work from daily, it will help you to focus on what matters most, it will increase your productivity and it allows you to be able to do more of what you want. Especially when you combine it with the first suggestion to structure your week with theme days and time blocking. Want to know more about this? Continue reading How defining your ideal week can help you reach your goals
The final step in determining how to spend your time is something that is a huge mindset shift; working on your business before you work on your client projects. If you only spend time to organise the backend of your business so you can onboard clients more efficiently or dive into your numbers and profitability when you have finished your client work you are never doing it, right? So to be able to work towards that vision you will need to make time for those things that will move the needle in your design business. This is where working with sprint blocks come in. Want to know more about this? Continue reading how working with sprints improved my productivity & saved my sanity & how to determine what to work on in your sprint blocks
Step 4: Create a phased approach to reach these goals
I really don’t want you to get overwhelmed at the thought of how far you might be away from your vision but without knowing what this vision is and how much money and time you need to achieve this you’ll just be wandering around aimlessly. Which is one of the main reasons a business can feel so overwhelming and give you the feeling like you’re always behind.
So you need to make sure that having a large vision for your life and setting goals is not adding to the overwhelm. And this is where I like to use a phased approach.
In another blog, I go into more detail about how you can use a phased approach if your big goals seem to be unreachable or make you feel overwhelmed and give phased approach examples of creating a full product suite and selling and marketing your services. So I'll try to keep it short here (which is never a strong suit of mine ;) )
A phased approach means that you set a goal but then break it up into smaller goals. So this doesn't mean that you're just breaking down the goals into actionable steps to reach the goal but that you have smaller goals on the way to your bigger goal.
Let's say this year you are making 30.000 in revenue. But ideally, you want to make 50.000 in revenue. So you could set yourself this goal for next year. But the jump from 30 to 50K is quite large. Especially when you have been able to make this 30K with only one-on-one brand or website design work because there are only so many clients you can take on at the same time.
To make this jump there is a large chance there's quite a bit that you need to change, improve or develop in your business to get to this number. You might want to launch brand strategy-related services like clarity calls or brand audits. All of these options mean that you have to develop these new services/products which takes a lot of time (and often even more than expected), especially if you're fully booked with design clients most of the year. Add in additional education, like a program about brand strategy, and you can add in a couple more months.
Before you know it you're already in the second quarter of the new year and nothing has been launched yet. Every time you look at your goal, you know that in theory, you're getting closer, but there is nothing tangible you have to show for all your hard work and no extra money in the bank to confirm that you're getting closer. This is where a downward spiral can come in, where setting goals actually has the opposite effect of what they're supposed to do. And where you start to feel overwhelmed instead of motivated.
So to make sure that this doesn't happen what you can do instead of working towards the end goal of 50.000 is create a phased approach and set yourself the goal of 40.000. And all the action plans that you're creating are geared toward this 40.000 goal. This does not mean you're not working towards your ultimate goal. All those things that you will put in place to reach your 40K are also necessary to reach the 50K.
But this will help to lower the pressure on yourself and for you to get the right things in place.
And I use the sprint blocks that I mentioned above as the time blocks (within my week structure with time blocks and theme days - see how everything is connected?) where I work on those actions that need to happen for me to achieve my goals.
And there you have it
There you have it, 4 steps to start treating your business more like a business to that you can stop the overwhelm and start to pro-actively transform your business to be more aligned and sustainable so that it can help you to achieve your vision.
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