Episode 6: 3 Steps to Plan Your Time

Hey. Hey, everybody. This is the last of the core four systems. So if you haven't listened to the episodes prior to this, a, quick recap is, I first went over just why the four core pillars even exist and the four key components of a six figure business. Then we talked about your offer, which isn't a component, but it is a critical piece that we've played through all of the pieces of your business. Then we talked about marketing, managing leads, sales last week. And for our final pillar, we are going to talk about planning. I'm going to give you three steps to plan your time like the amazing CEO you are in the process of becoming and already have developed so far. So in this episode, we're going to talk about, which m, is like glitch there. In this episode, when we're thinking about the three steps to plan your time like a CEO, you're going to learn what metrics to track every week to ensure that you are progressing. We're going to talk about how to evaluate quickly and effectively, and we're going to talk about what CEO scheduling actually looks like.

So when you are thinking about metrics, that is the first thing that a, when we're thinking about the operations that you do as a CEO of a company, and I encourage you to think about that. If the word CEO is like, I did not come from corporate America, so if you don't love that word, totally fine. However, I want to encourage you to think about your business like a leader. Like you are creating this large movement. And when you dream bigger and you see yourself in that light, it really helps you to show up, as a strong leader in your business in the current moment. So within your business, I want you to think about the way that you are really showing up as a leader. And I want you to think about what a leader would do in a larger business. They want to make sure that they know what's working and what is not working very quickly and may not it's not working, but what could use improvement very quickly so that they can make adjustments and change things? One of the biggest things that I have found is a huge detriment is that so many people don't actually know their numbers for the things that they are doing. And I think it makes us work so much smart, harder than we actually need to do as an entrepreneur. Now, as an entrepreneur, you are doing so much every single day. A lot of us, it was like, I think it's 86% of entrepreneurs work more than 40 hours weeks, aka, there are only 14 of us that are working like less, normal work hours, I would say the quintessential 40 hours work week. And I want to make your work week extremely simple, easy, and doable. So you show up, to your business just like you would another job to make it less stressful, less activating. Again, there are different roles that you want to be focusing on each, each time. But when you are thinking about planning out your time, you want to be making database decisions, you want to have metrics to make the decisions. Because I found a lot of the time, if you don't actually know what you're doing and if what you're doing is actually working, your business can feel like my business did at the beginning, which is throwing, it feels like you're throwing spaghetti at a wall. It feels like you're just kind of going through and you're like, okay, I'm really trying here. We are trying our best, but we're not actually seeing any result. I mentioned in, I think it was the, the managing leads episode. I talked about how at the beginning of my business, I went seven months without a consult. It was awesome. Yeah, I didn't say a client, a consult. I just ghosts. It was awesome. And if I had known what metrics to track, I would have fixed things a lot sooner.

So when we're thinking about the metrics to track, there are two things that you want to keep in mind. Every single entrepreneur has completely different circumstances. When you are starting your business, you cannot compare yourself to literally anyone else because it will never, ever serve you. It will create a lot of imposter syndrome. And all these things. People who might have gotten certified at the same time of you might have started their businesses at the same time of you might be in the exact same field as you, a lot of times have completely different connections that we can't see. They might have a bigger following. They might have other, people, a huge network of people. They might have experience in business that you might not have. They might have people in their life and resources that, like, maybe they know a graphic designer and that's why their posts look awesome. Maybe they have resources that you weren't even aware of, and they're able to afford either time or money because of the two most important resources. They're able to actually utilize those things that you can't see. And, those are things that we can't control. We can't control whether or not somebody, how much we come into our business having, it's still important to track, but we can't compare ourselves to anyone else. So what we want to do is we want to see it, within your control. What are the things that are within your control that you can actually focus on to move your business forward?

Right. So one of the things that I would recommend is that when you are thinking about planning out your time, you want to be tracking, I would say, two big, important things. You want to. Well, three. Let's throw in three. You want to be tracking the way that you are able to show up each week, and your energy, the way that you think and feel, is important. And we want to be seeing if that's making an impact. I went through, a breakup, which was super fun, in 2022, right after I had started my business. It was my first year full time. And within that, I, of course, was in feeling lots of things. My energy was quite low, lots of feelings were coming up. And when, of course, you're going to experience unexpected things, like expected and unexpected things in and outside of your business. So, for me, that was not expected, did not think that was going to happen. And so within my energy, of course, my energy levels were lower, and that meant that I didn't. I was showing up, but kind of just checking a box, you know what I mean? It's like when you're like, okay, I'm just doing the best I can. And of course, when that happened, I did see a, decrease, in sales and things like that. I actually thought about shutting down my business, so glad I didn't. But within that, I want you to know that, like, your energy levels are going to ebb and flow as you grow your business. They're going to be times when you're feeling awesome, and they're going to be feeling times when you're feeling less than stellar. What we want to do is we just want to monitor that, and I want you to see that your business will make it through the ebbs and flows. It's not that you are in a, dip forever, and it's not that you're in a high forever either. But either way, even when I was at a lower point in my energy, I could also see that I was still, my business was still working and it was still going. And even when I was a hide, there were points when I was like, oh, I'm feeling really great, this content is awesome. And people still weren't buying. And that's okay. We just want to make sure that, like, first off, we're tracking that, and we are aware of, like, the way that we're showing up the way we're thinking and feeling, and we also don't want to put all that pressure on you, on you to show up as a perfect robot all the time and thinking that you all, you could only be happy for you to sell things in your business, because that's just never gonna be the case. You're never gonna be happy all the time. And from a pretty, like, genuinely happy and joyful person, I can guarantee that over 50, probably around sometimes even more than 50% of the time, I am feeling that less than stellar side of life, and I'm still able to totally show up and serve people in my business regardless of how I feel. So it's important to see the feels. But that is the first thing that I want you to track, is where your energy levels at. one, being like, I'm not really feeling it. Ten, being like, you know what? I'm feeling pretty good. And so that's the first thing I have my clients track. And when we're thinking about understanding your business from a data sense, I want you to understand that these numbers are our best guess at taking something that is as far as your energy levels. It's taking something that is subjective and making it objective. So it's taking something that's, like, your way, you personally feel, and it's making it something that we can track. And whenever we have data, it can get us out of the drama. And when we can see those numbers, oh, it's like our numbers will go up and down as we grow our business. It makes the shift in your emotions and your energy a lot less scary. It feels predictable, and you're like, oh, I'm just in one of those phases and one of those cycles for me. So that is something that's really important for you to track. The second thing that's really important for you to track is the actual actions you're taking. Again, we can't control, like, when we're thinking about, like, your business, we can't control how much, how much resources you came into this business with. We can't control your audience size just to start with. Right? You can't change that. It's just what you, your baseline, where you came in with. But we can control, how much you do, how tenacious your actions are, so that you can make your results inevitable. Like, I want you to think that you can truly do anything you put your mind to with your business. And if you have that drive, you're like, oh, my goodness. This is my purpose. This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing in the world. Then when you show up in that energy, it makes you taking action so much more enjoyable. And when we can track that action, it makes it so much better.

So I mentioned in the last podcast that I would like for you, or, not the last podcast. A couple podcasts ago, I talked about managing leads. That means just talking to people. So my goal for you is that you talk to ten people a day, which results in 2500 conversations a year. Now, of course, there are going to be times when you're sick, there's going to be stuff that comes up, but my goal overall is that you can talk to 50 people a week, just ten people a day, for 30 minutes a day, but that is going to get you out there to a point that makes it inevitable and statistically really inevitable that you are going to create the results you want to in your business. And I even shared about, like, how if you have an offer that's 2,000, if you just convert 2% of those people, that is six figures, it's 100. Like 2,000, 102,000 for your business. So I want you to think about that. About like, okay, as the CEO of my business, when I'm scheduling my time, I want to make it statistically inevitable for me to succeed. And I want you to think about when you are tracking your data. You're like, what data? How can I move the needle forward and actually see it? And like, like, actually, it's like, be like, okay, I talked with Rhonda, I talked with Jill, I talked with Timmy, I talked with Janae, all these people that I talked to within my business throughout the week, and making sure that you have, you know, who you talk to, and making sure you've got a system to track it, of course. And then I want you to track the number, just the number of humans that you talk to, then after you. So that's one way that you can take action through that interactive marketing. And I want that to be like you, just talking to as many humans as possible. And if you think about it, apparently it takes around 7 hours for someone to develop a friendship and a relationship that's not necessarily saying that they're going to buy after being with you for 7 hours. However, that is something when we're thinking about building a relationship. So that can help. And a person needs to see your offer 17 times. So even if you reached out to Janae, you reached out to her once. What you can do is you can be like, okay, how can I talk to her at least 17 times and see if that is actually going to be something that will help her to see that, man, this person is the best person for me. I have to buy their offer. They have been so helpful. They've sent me all this awesome information and I totally want to work with them. So that's my goal, is that you have 50 people, and sometimes it'll be the same person that you are talking to. It's just 50 messages that you're having a week. From there you want to think about. That's the interactive marketing piece.

The next thing I want you to track as far as your metrics go, or how many times you're doing that billboard marketing, that social media posting, whether whatever way you get out your business information, whether that's a blog, social media, email. I want you to write down how many times you are actually showing up for my clients. If we're thinking about utilizing Instagram, it's my favorite platform. I would recommend doing three posts and three reels a week. And I broke down a little bit of what that looked like in the marketing module, but I'm definitely going to continue to share about that because I think it's really, really important for you to track that. So what we want to do is we want to see, okay, here are the things that I am doing. Here's how I'm showing up. Here's what I'm doing now. What are the results that come from it? How can I actually track what's happening? So the things that we want to track on the circumstances, the outside of you piece of things, is how many consults did you get a week? How many clients did you sign and how much revenue have you generated for your business that week? How much money have you brought in? So that's the things that I would recommend you tracking every single week, making sure that you can see whether things are progressing. Because step two of the planning time, planning system that I have is how to evaluate very quickly and effectively. So a lot of times we'll do our evaluation and we'll be thinking about, like, our business, but we won't. Like, I found that for me, I was just, like, thinking about six figures. I was like, yeah, I just, like, really want a six figure business. That would be awesome. But I didn't know what it took to build my six figure business. So the importance of having metrics is that you are going to create a formula that is specific for you, that you will know how you can grow your business. You will know the exact things that you did to bring in humans. For m my clients, I actually track that for them, and that's called their six figure formula. So I actually know exactly what it takes for every single client's business to work. I m want to make it statistically inevitable for them to reach their goals. And if they just show up, do the things, then we can get data. And again, instead of going to drama, we can actually have data to be like, okay, this worked. This didn't work. What are the things that we need to do here? So that's things I would recommend for you, too. Making sure that you make your business statistically inevitable for you to grow. Then you want to evaluate it. You want to think about, okay, what worked. What worked for me to show up in maybe a, higher energy levels. How could I make a system around that? To make sure that I, like, if I was, for me, I was a life coach. I love coaching myself. It's something that I do every day. And every time I coach myself, my energy levels go right up. So for me, I'd be like, okay, self coaching always makes my energy go up. That's definitely something that's working for me. Then you want to think about what would be awesome to improve. What would you love to improve for the next week? Because when, again, you think about things in a phase of, oh, that isn't working, a lot of times that can feel really negative, really scary, and something that is just not helpful overall for your business. So what you want to do is instead, I want you to think about what would be awesome to improve next week. Like, I'm proud myself. I crushed it this week. Good job. This is the best I could possibly do, which sometimes is going to be not great. But you know what? I'm proud of myself for still showing up. I did create something. I did something to move my business forward, even if it was solely focusing on my energy. And what I would do is I would be like, this is what I would love to improve for next week, and then actually write what you would want to do differently. So if for you, if you're seeing that one of the things that you would love to improve is maybe you're like, oh, something that I would love to improve is I would love to try this data thing that Megs is talking about. She's mentioned in metrics, and I want to check out what my metrics are. There's something I would love to improve because I don't really know what makes my business work. Not m really sure what my formula is for success. So what I would do is I would write down, this is what I want to do differently. And then you want to schedule it. You want to put those things on your calendar. You want to make sure that it is inevitable for your business to grow. And the way that CEO scheduling looks, one of the things I would offer for all of you is I would love for you to put your schedule out into the world, and I want you to put in the clients that you have currently. And I want you to think about the amount of time you have to run your business. How much time do you want to spend for me? I knew I did not want to work more than 40 hours a week. I, was very, very inspired by people who were my mentors as I was growing my business. And they mentioned things like they were working 30 hours or three days a week, that they were working these very short hours. And I'm like, m this is statistically something that is different. Most business owners are. Again, 86% of business owners work more than 40 hours a week. How are these people doing it? And I knew I want to work less. So I was like, what if I could choose the amount of time that I would work for my business, and I would make that time work for me? Especially because, as I've mentioned previously, I started my business not full time. I was teaching during the day, coaching by night, and I had a limited amount of time, and I needed to make sure that within that finite amount of hours, I was utilizing my time to the best of my ability. So for you guys, I want to make sure that you write out the allotted time you have, write out the amount of clients you would need, and again, making sure you're taking a look at your goals. And if you're like, okay, I want to make 100,000 this year, but based on how much my offer is, like, if you have a 2,000 offer and you only have ten, not only, but you have a wonderful ten to 20 hours a week to work. I want you to make sure that the math is mathing. I want you to make sure that it actually works out, that you can make that amount with the time that you have, and either adjust the goal, adjust the time, adjust the, even your offer if you need to, again, making sure that it's a good offer, that is an over deliver for your clients for whatever price you have, not just being like, well, I would like to work 10 hours a week, so obviously I should charge 50,000 for my coaching or whatever service you provide that isn't always in service. And, I will, I think that you will find that that might be something that you would like to improve in your business, something you want to shift in the future, and then you want to actually take that time.

And I want you to schedule, when are you doing your marketing? M when are you managing your leads? For every single person on here, I would really love for you to put 30 minutes a day just to talk to ten people. Actually put, when you're writing your posts. We're going to talk about next week, the eight hour work week. It's a philosophy that I've come up with is a way that I actually break down each hour of the work week and I'll talk about how to make that really flexible. But for you, I really want you to focus on creating this really like a tight knit schedule that you're like, okay, I'm just going to show up. I'm going to make sure I'm getting my marketing done. I make sure I am m managing, my leads, and I'm going to make sure that I have a way to replenish my energy and a, time for you to plan every week. Once you've got that, then all the things that you want to do differently, you can schedule in around that. Another thing that's really important when you're doing your, your CEO schedule is you're going to have your work hours. But I also want you to make sure that first and foremost, you make sure you're taking care of yourself. It is so burnout is something that apparently 95% of entrepreneurs experience. Like, that's a really huge amount. I've been burnt out. I don't know many, I really haven't met many entrepreneurs that can say, like, in the entire course in my business, I've never been burnt out. So I want you to take time to realize the ways that you replenish your energy, and I want you to prioritize them. For me, working out in the morning is something that's extremely helpful for me. And I love cooking every night. Again, you'll see on my insta, I am usually posting my meals, like pretty much every day. I need someone to sponsor me. I'm like, I love posting about the food that I'm making and it's so fun for me. And I make sure that I have a hard boundary. I work my butt off during the times that I've allotted, and as soon as I, like, decide I'm done with working, I really focus. Unless I'm like just doing something, like posting a story. I really, really try and honor that time, and I try and be present with my family and friends as much as possible, or myself, just enjoying time by myself, watching fun tv shows. So that is. Or doing anything, nothing. Anything and nothing at all that is really important to me. The other thing that I want, that I think is really, really important is you want to schedule in time with your relationships. My, Within my business, there have been people that have come and gone, and there are people who have been in part of my life and have actually passed on. And one of the things that I found is that I, a lot of times sacrifice time with my family because I really wanted this business to work. And I never want to look back on my life and be like, I'm so glad I created this amazing legacy, but I totally sacrificed time with my family and friends. I want you to schedule time for your relationships for me. I talk with my brother every Wednesday. He lives in Boston currently, and it's something that's really, really important to me. I have a game night every Friday night, which is actually tonight with some of my friends and family. I, really make sure that I try and show up in those areas as much as I can. I go out with one of my good coach friends every week and I make sure that I prioritize that. So I want you to add that to your calendar before you even get to your work stuff. Then I want you to add those reoccurring activities like I mentioned, marketing, managing leads, planning. You'll sprinkle in those consults whenever they are available, and a current clients you have and other responsibilities. And then that next piece is like, okay, all those things that you want to do differently, then you sprinkle it in, make sure you have time for it. Sometimes I like have like an admin time where I get all my other tasks done. And last but not least, you also want to make sure that you are including time for just miscellaneous stuff. Again, lots of times I'll do admin. I include time for laundry because it is the vein of my existence. And I have a checklist for that too. Making systems for the home stuff, making sure that you actually can take care of yourself. Those things are so, so important.

So first off, you are doing amazing. I am so excited that we got through those pillars so that you could understand, okay, this is what a really, this is what a six figure business could look like. And I want you to get there to a place where you're like, I'm really seeing myself as a person who could run a business like this. I like to think about, like, okay, it's like, I've given you, like, a Lego blueprint for, like, this is what your business could look like, and then you can get to work in building it. I am so proud of all of you and so glad that you decide to start this business. I am cheering you on every single step of the way. And if you need anything, feel free to reach out always. And, you know, I've got you.