the bossbabe podcast - 228. BBS: This Is Where You Should Be Spending Your Time

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

It's a battle every entrepreneur wages: busy vs. productive, efficient vs. effective. We all fall into the easy trap – going days and weeks thinking you’re crushing to-do lists and making progress, only to realize it’s been busy work all along. Sometimes there’s so much to be done, it can be overwhelming trying to prioritize your time and energy. Natalie is your host for this edition of bossbabe business school, where she reveals the ONLY two things you should be spending your time on.  Take out today’s checklist and be honest with yourself, how much of it absolutely NEEDS to happen today? And how much of it is only there to keep you comfortable and distracted? Highlights: The ONLY two things to focus on if you want your business to grow. How to decide what to sell + how to sell it. Why you can (and should) take a red pen to 80% of your to-do list. Follow: bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie Danielle Canty: @daniellecanty

If 80% of your time is spent on thinking, what are we selling? How are we selling it? And actually making sure it's working, getting sales in, it will allow you to then start to hire, start to build a team, start to think about systems,

start to think about all of the other things. A boss babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on. She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself, confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own vision of success. Welcome to the Boss Babe Podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance and learning how to balance it all. I'm Natalie Ellis, your host for this episode. And today I'm coming in with a solo episode. And the reason I

wanted to do this is because probably one of the most common questions I get asked is, Natalie, as an entrepreneur, where should I be spending my time? Maybe you're a full-time entrepreneur and you're really not sure what to be doing with your days. Maybe you currently have a job and so you're working any hours you can get, but you're not fully sure what you should be working on. And so many of the scenarios that lead you to feeling like you're just busy. You're not actually being effective. You're just busy. And I see this all the time. If you're wondering where to spend your time, it's a very, very normal question and you're in really good company. Now, what I want to share is that business is so much more simple than we think it is. Like so much more simple than we think it is. It's really

solving a problem for a specific kind of person and repeating that process over and over and over again. But I know saying that it's like, okay, that all sounds well and good, but how do I know what problem I'm solving for who? How do I sell it? How do I get them to know it's a problem? How do I get them to tell the people about it? How do I start to create enough repeat payments that I can predict my sales? How do I hire people to continue doing like all of the questions, right? I get it. There's a lot of unknowns, especially when this is your first time doing it. So I want to talk about the two hats that I've primarily worn at Boss Babe. These are the two hats that really every founder should be primarily wearing just to keep things simple and sure when you get to a certain point in your business other things take priority and you start to wear other

hats and you start to think about culture and hiring and scaling and all of those things but that's for another episode. Really, the two hats that I primarily wore at Boss Babe when we were in the phase of building the business and getting the business to the place it is now was, what are we going to sell and how are we going to sell it? Now, it sounds simple, but most founders will spend their time almost everywhere else. So they'll spend their time on systems, procedures, social media content, you name it, almost everything else, because that's a bit more comfortable to them than focusing on what am I selling? What problem am I solving? Who am I solving it for? Getting really specific. And then secondly, how are we going to sell this thing? What's the exact process we're going to use to sell this thing?

And how do I create mastery in that exact process and go all in with that exact process and put my blinders on and not get distracted by anything else. Because distraction is the easiest way to guarantee your failure. Distraction is the easiest way to guarantee your failure, right? So coming back to this, what are we going to sell and how are we going to sell it? This is something you don't just ask yourself when you're first starting your business and then you start worrying about everything else. No, you continually ask yourself this until you have a really robust business model that you have predictable income, predictable sales that you can scale, which for most entrepreneurs, most founders

takes a pretty long time. So these are the hats that you're going to be wearing the most. These are the hats that are going to move the needle in the business the most. But like I said, it can be really uncomfortable to spend time on those things when everything else is a little bit more familiar and comfortable to you. Plus, these two things often take the most learning. Most entrepreneurs aren't coming into their business with real expertise around knowing how to connect that problem to their ideal client and how to sell it directly to their ideal client over and over and over again. So you're not alone if you're thinking, okay, well, I'm really not an expert in those things. You're not alone. But it is really

important to start building expertise in those areas if you are wanting to grow your business. If you can think about spending 80% of your time on these two things, you will really see a big difference in your business. Now, it might feel good to have the most organized back-end business ever. It might feel good to be showing up on stories every day. It might feel good to be doing a lot of things in the business. Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things

so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible. I definitely recommend Kajabi to all of my clients and students. So if you're listening and haven't checked out Kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering Boss Babe listeners a 30-day free trial. Go to kajabi.com slash Boss Babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's kajabi.com slash Boss Babe. What's the point of

having those feel-good things if you're not getting any results? It's kind of pointless. It's kind of having a feel-good hobby, right? Whereas if 80% of your time is spent on thinking, what are we selling? How are we selling it? And actually making sure it's working, getting sales in, it will allow you to then start to hire, start to build a team, start to think about systems, start to think about all of the other things once you're in a place where you have predictable income. But until you have that, that's the one thing you should be focusing on. That is the one thing that should be taking precedent in your day. And even if you feel like every day your to-do list has 20 things on, I want you to start taking a look at

that to-do list every single morning and really answering the question, is this where I should be spending my time? If you're not making the sales you want, if you're not making the revenue that you want, if you're not connecting to your ideal clients in a regular way, then those 20 things on your to-do list, I'm going to argue, probably don't need to get done. Whether it's your website, your SEO, blog posts, social media posts, throwing lots of things at the wall and just hoping one of these things is going to stick, right? I've been there and I've seen this time and time again. So if you are in this place, I really, really want you to examine your to-do list every single morning and go through and ask yourself, are these things really helping me to get predictable

income in my business? And if the answer is no, I really want you to re-evaluate where you're spending your time. It's as simple as that. What are you selling selling how are you selling it and are you doing the thing is it working great now how can you scale it I'm not sure who needed to hear this today but I feel like someone did and I know that sometimes listening to episodes like this can make you feel really bad about where you've been spending your time or where you're perhaps not seeing results and just know that is totally not my intention here I'm sharing this because I know this is the thing that most people struggle with so if you are struggling with it this is a good thing that you're hearing this because it means you're not alone and this problem is really

really common right you're totally not alone and I can only teach from this place because I've been in this place I have been in a place where I don't know where my next sale is coming from. I don't know what things exactly are creating sales in the business. I don't know what my dial is that I can turn up to make more sales because I feel like I was doing everything. I was doing social media, email marketing, affiliate marketing. I was doing everything to just try and make something work. And that was my problem. I wasn't focused. And once I got laser focused and started thinking about what's the one dial that I want to be able to turn up in the business, whether it's social media marketing, paid ads, whether it's getting on people's podcasts, whether it's getting in front of other people's audiences, whether it's generating more web traffic, whatever it is,

think about what the one dial is that you want to be turning up in your business and get really good at that one thing. Because when you master that, you can turn that dial up and you can make more sales in your business. That's something that I've personally learned how to do. And I have a dial now, I can turn up and make an extra seven figures in my business if I wanted to. Not saying I necessarily would because it's not always a good idea, but I have those dials now because I've been doing this for nearly a decade. I've put in the time. So don't listen to this feeling like it means that you're behind. Listen to this knowing it means you're in a very, very normal place and you get to change what that looks like for you. And hopefully it helps. So give me some feedback,

leave a review if you like these kind of solos and let me know in there what kind of topics you would want to see more of because I love doing these kinds of episodes. So I would love to know what you would love to hear more of. As always, feel free to tag me on Instagram at IamHallie. Thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode on the Boss Babe podcast, then I'd absolutely love it if you leave us a review. As a thank you, we'll send you our side hustle success kit. Your simple, no BS guide to keeping track of everything that you need to do to start and grow your business. To access this freebie, all you need to do is leave us a review, then share a screenshot of your review with contact at bossbabe.com and we'll send this

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