i used to believe running a successful business meant 80our weeks and an endless stream of clients turns out that belief was the exact reason I worked so bloody much because guess what you can scale your business working just four focused hours a day but only if you make these four strategic changes and every time I've helped a client implement this at selfmastery. co they made more worked less and finally felt in control again so I'm going to show you what these changes are and most importantly how you can implement them so you can scale your business in less than 4 hours a day let's dive in so there's a habit that silently makes or breaks every business owner's results and almost nobody does it and I'm not just saying that i I truly mean it because here's a harsh truth if your business isn't where you want it to be it's not because you're lazy it's not because of the market or because you need more time or whatever excuse that you use it's simply because you're not doing the right things or you haven't done the right things for long enough because if you did the right things and you did them for long enough your business would be where you wanted to be simple and look I'm not immune to this okay i'm not some super soldier or superhero in a past life you I suppose you could say I used to spend 10 hours a day doing all the right things or so I thought but my revenue was stuck for so damn long and it didn't matter how much more I worked nothing changed until one day I hired a coach who made me realize how hard you work doesn't matter if you're working on the wrong things so I implemented one simple rule at the end of each day I would simply ask myself what is the single most important thing I can do tomorrow then I blocked out 90 to 120 minutes every morning with my phone turned off emails disabled and distractions removed to do that most important thing no reacting no distractions no you know quick tasks beforehand i'm not going to just do this one thing before I start this no it was straight into that most important thing and the results they were wild within 30 days I think it was I relaunched my at the time high ticket offer broke through my revenue ceiling and I did it all whilst working less because I finally worked on that right thing but here's how you apply this and it takes less than 5 minutes a day so there's you know there's no excuse not to do it every evening ask yourself if I could only do one thing tomorrow to grow my business what would it be then schedule 90 to 120 minutes so an hour and a half or 2 hours in your calendar to go all in on that one thing that means you should be doing that task in a state of deep work because something I see with all my clients at selfmastery. co links in the description by the way all the time is that a 1-hour task or project ends up taking you know 3 hours simply because every 5 minutes are checking emails and then checking in with the team then getting distracted that okay stop that okay you will literally reclaim hours every day and make so much more progress if you just focused and this one habit of figuring out your most important thing alone will transform your business because most entrepreneurs don't need more time they just need to stop spending it on the wrong things because the most powerful skill you can build in a business is that of being able to prioritize and this is the most simple way to do that because obviously there's more complex ways to prioritize but if you can just sit down and think okay what's the most important thing I can do to grow my business and then you do it tomorrow your business will grow okay it is that simple but here's the thing executing on that most important task and doing your deep work becomes almost impossible if you're buried in chaos and that's where this next step comes in so let me say something that might sting a little and I don't apologize because somebody needs to tell you and if that makes me the bad guy so be it it will help you if your business does not have systems then you are the system and if you are the system then you're also the bottleneck which means two things okay one your business is capped by your potential two the more your business grows the more it traps you because it is growing because of your effort and most business owners say they want freedom but yet they'll never build systems they'll avoid them and without systems you don't build freedom you build a bloody high stress job that relies on your constant input like one of my clients was doing like 20K a month and absolutely hated what they were doing from onboarding clients to writing emails to chasing tasks with his small team everything flowed through him every decision every delivery every problem came straight to his phone nothing could done without him doing it or at least approving it which meant he didn't have the capacity for more clients which meant his revenue was stuck and he had to spend serious hours working every day just to keep the business running he needed a new way of working so I get him to strip it all back we mapped out every process in his business starting with the ones he didn't need to do that took the most time and that he hated doing the most i get him to document the steps and SOPs we then audited the SOPs simplified them automated steps and turned them into repeatable systems suddenly his team didn't need him for every little thing clients were onboarded automatically content was edited perfectly clients got results and the amount of time he spent working halfed he went from being the bottleneck of the system to being the visionary of the business and if you want to grow whilst working less systems are non-negotiable okay and something I say to my clients all the time is that systems can seem incredibly overwhelming and complicated like where on earth do you start where but here's the thing no system needs to be perfect like ever you can just change your systems in the future and you likely will change them in the future so just get something down just map out the functions then the processes off those functions then the SOPs off those processes and don't get caught up in how good it is or how effective the system is or even if it's right because guess what there isn't really a right or wrong way to build a system like yes there are guiding principles you should follow you know but systems are half art and half science the art part of systems is that you can go as high level or as granular and detailed as you want and that they're entirely custom to your business and your needs so just build them don't put all this pressure on yourself of being right or wrong and look to help you out I made a massive deep dive video into how to build systems so your business can run without you i will link it at the end of this video you can check it out it'll show you everything you need to know about building systems but in short to make this applicable and not overwhelming pick one area of your business this week something that takes a ton of your time follow the steps in the video that I'll link at the end of this one and systemize it then move on to another area and repeat because it doesn't matter where you start really with what system because in the long run everything will be systemized but it'll only be systemized if you start by systemizing something so just choose something choose the thing that takes the most time this is how you streamline workflows make delegation easy and actually separate your business from your direct input because until your business can run without you you don't own a business you are the business but look even the best systems won't save you if you're still spending most of your time in the wrong task so let's fix that you have to understand that you don't have a time problem you never have a time problem nobody does you simply have a prioritization problem you see every task can be split into two categories it's either a maintenance task that is necessary for keeping the business running or it's a growth task that's necessary for growing the business obviously you probably also have tasks that fall into a third category which is useless they just don't need done but that's besides the point your whole job when you think about it as a business owner as an entrepreneur as a finder as a CEO is to focus as much as you can on growth tasks on the things that grow the business that's your job yet most entrepreneurs business owners CEOs founders are stuck doing $10 per hour maintenance tasks whilst complaining that they don't have time for a $1,000 per hour strategy or $10,000 per hour systems look have you ever lay in bed and tried your best to fall asleep but the more you tried the more anxious and awake you became and it just it wasn't working well business is the exact same okay most business owners work 60 or 80our weeks putting in too much effort on the wrong things the maintenance tasks and it actually stops them from growing because you end up with no time to spend on the growth tasks this is why you feel like nothing's working and why you have to work 10our days 12-hour days just to grow slowly but the solution here is pretty simple especially when you've built your systems from step three list out everything you did last week okay categorize each task into either a $10 per hour task $100 per hour task or a $1,000 per hour task the $1,000 per hour tasks are your growth tasks they're what grow the business so it could be systems it could be content creation it could be strategy whatever grows your business okay the $100 per hour and $10 per hour tasks are maintenance tasks they're necessary for the business to operate but they don't grow it this is the likes of customer support video editing emails admin etc the $1,000 per hour category will have the least number of tasks okay but they are your priority that you should be focusing on they grow the business that's your job but look at every task in the $10 per hour and $100 per hour categories go through each task and ask yourself these questions if I eliminated this task would my business fall apart if no then eliminate it if yes ask yourself if I automated this task would my business fall apart if no then find a way if possible to automate it if yes or if there's no way to automate it ask yourself if I delegated this task would my business fall apart if no then find a way delegate now theoretically in an ideal world every $10 and $100 per hour task would and can and should be delegated and it'll have no impact on your business it's really just a choice that you have to make as to whether you already have someone on your team you can delegate these tasks to or whether you want to hire someone etc that's up to you because look you don't have to delegate them but understand that if you can't eliminate it if you can't automate it then you choose not to delegate it then you have to spend time doing it that's fine you're allowed to do that this is your business but it's only fine if you choose to do it see at Selfmastery.
co my company my whole thing is helping entrepreneurs scale their business in less than 4 hours a day but what you do with the other hours is up to you if you want to work more you can if you want to pick up a new hobby you can it's entirely your choice so you can do the maintenance tasks if you want that's fine but if there's a maintenance task you're going to do you must and I mean must do them after your growth tasks because the growth tasks are the priority so you need to prioritize them and that simply means you do them first so when you're planning your days creating your schedule schedule your most important thing first then schedule your other growth growth tasks that you need to do then schedule your maintenance tasks if you're choosing to do them and yes you need to schedule your day if you want to improve how you spend your time and take back control of your business you first need to bring order and clarity to how you spend it and you do that through a schedule i see so many entrepreneurs and founders and business owners etc whatever you want to call yourself complaining that business is hard and then they don't have a schedule it's like well of course business is hard you're not choosing where you're going to dedicate your time to and what areas and therefore you just as humans will always resort to the path of least resistance so we fight a schedule and a predetermined way to spend our time we end up doing easy tasks maintenance tasks that don't grow the business therefore business feels hard because you never have the time to do the tasks that actually matter because you don't create the time to do the tasks that actually matter therefore business doesn't grow and it's all stress okay so have a damn schedule don't complain about how little time you have or how out of control your day feels when you don't have a schedule simple now there is a final lever you can pull to work less or more and it is the one most entrepreneurs actually avoid most people undercharge not because of logic but mainly because of fear fear of rejection fear of losing clients whatever it is but underpricing is the fastest way to overwork and ruin your bloody business if your whole business strategy is being the cheapest guess what somebody will undercut you which means your ideal clients who want the cheapest thing will go to them therefore you have to drop your prices further to get your ideal client back and therefore you make less revenue per client less profit per client so as your margin shrinks scaling gets hard if not impossible like this is exactly why I charge a lot of money at selfmastery. co it's not cheap to work with me it's why I also only work with people already making six figures because here's the thing about lowering your prices especially of a service-based business the lower your prices the worse your client quality as a general rule you know there's obviously exceptions to that but it's a general rule the tighter your margins due to lower prices the more stressful and difficult your business becomes i had a client once who was charging like $2,000 for his service great offer strong results but he was constantly overwhelmed couldn't grow and on a call I just I just straight up said to him once "Raise your bloody prices. " And by the look on his face you'd think I I shot him but he said "If I raise my prices you know I'll lose my clients.
" Whatever he said i ended up basically explaining some unit economics of how if you doubled your price you can lose 50% of your clients and still be making the same amount of money even if your close rate drops 50% you still only need to sign half as many clients to make as much money etc but you do it you can make the same money through lower volume therefore you work less whilst making higher profit because you have higher prices and therefore you also have less probably operational cost due to dealing with a lower volume of clients it all it always works out better now obviously that relies on your service being good and you actually being able to do what you say and the result or outcome that you're promising being worth the higher price that you're charging 100% you obviously have to consider that nuance but it almost always works out better so with that all of that that was enough to basically convince him and so we raised his prices but we didn't just raise his price because really a price rise should be justified by supply and demand and you know that's a whole other video on the economics of pricing and how to manipulate supply and demand to allow you to raise your prices without ruining the business so I'll not go into that here but if you want me to make a video on how you can do that just let me know in the comments below but we basically rebuilt his offer to justify the price rise we added bonuses increased support clarified some outcomes and he started charging I think it was 5K or 6K and guess what his close rate actually barely changed but yet his income doubled and his clients they were more committed because they had put more of an investment in they got better results than ever due to their higher commitment and also due to the fact that he had more money because it was higher profit to hire more people to give better support etc and due to those higher profit margins he could also hire people to take some tasks off his plate so he made more money and worked less and he had more time to work on things that actually grew the business to growth tasks trust me raise your prices it almost always works out best in all seriousness you don't need more clients you can get more clients if you want there's nothing wrong with scaling through volume but what you do need is better positioning and pricing and 99% of the time the only thing stopping you from raising prices is you there's always this huge level of resistance that people face when you tell them charge more and I get it every single time I've charged more I've been like "Fuck what if this doesn't work out? " But guess what you do it you make more money you thank yourself later so ask yourself what would need to change in your offer to confidently double your prices i'm not telling you to double your prices you can that's up to you like you know especially at selfmastery.
