Like so many other entrepreneurs, I left corporate America to own my life. I wanted to own my day: take yoga at 10 A.M., have long lunches, work with people of my choosing, and not have meetings about nothing. I longed to work in environments that did more to foster my productivity. I wanted to work from home or even from a park. Owning my day, looked like having my own business.
Also like many entrepreneurs, I quickly found out that owning your own business was a labor of love. Yes, your business is your baby and you love it, but the labor part can seem ever-present. Starting out as a solo-preneur, it’s just you and the process of how you alone can serve your clients. Entrepreneurship can quickly start to feel like an unwanted personal job or even prison.
There are 5 keys to infusing freedom into your business:
#1 Design Your Business Around Your Joy. Make sure that what you do in your business every day includes what brings you the most joy. On the Netflix show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, Marie always says, “The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: “Does this spark joy?” You should apply the same concept to how you work in your business.
I love to write. So much so, that I also write content for other people. However, I do not enjoy the process of the content review that can sometimes lead to rewriting requests and suggested changes that do not align with my vision for the content. To avoid this, and keep my joy, I now write content that is licensed with Private Label Rights. That way, I have written it only once and they can change it how they like without my involvement.
#2 Balance Your Active and Passive Income. Be sure that there is revenue coming in from what I like to call “set it and forget it” products or passive income products. Having passive income, allows your business to continue to make money with you having to actively provide a service. There are only so many hours in the day. Instead of working the majority of those hours to bring in money for your business, have time that you make money while you live a life that you love.
Examples of passive income can be digital products like eBooks (an electronic version of a book), eTrainings (one training video), and eCourses (modules of eTrainings), that were created and can now be sold over and over again without recreating them.
#3 Repurpose Your Content. Content creation is a huge thing for entrepreneurs. Producing content that potential clients find valuable, allows you to garner the attention of those potential clients for conversion into sales without paying the huge advertising costs of traditional platforms like television and radio. However, to keep the attention of potential clients, content creation is an ongoing process. A great way to extend the life of content you’ve already created, rather than spending time creating more content is to reuse old content or use one piece of current content in various ways.
My audience on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are mostly made up of different people. For this reason, I have the luxury of creating content for one platform and republishing the same content to the other platforms to repurpose it. However, if you have the same audience across platforms, then you can take one piece of content and post it differently across each platform. Simply write a blog post and post it to LinkedIn, then post a meme of a quote from the blog to Instagram, then post one idea or bullet point from the blog to Facebook with a related question to your followers, then post a short exert of the blog along with the link on Twitter. Viola… one piece of content spread across four platforms.
#4 Use Automation In Your Business. Technology can be your best bet when saving time is your goal. Entrepreneurs should be infusing it to take care of mundane, repeated processes. You can use automation to take care of your marketing, client onboarding, and even contractor onboarding email sequences. You can also use it to sell passive income products.
There are platforms that allow you to upload your mp4, mp3, PDF, or Word Document files containing the digital product and sell them by simply sharing a link. When the purchaser clicks the link to buy the item, everything is handled automatically: receipt of the money, delivery of the digital product, notification to you of a sale, a deposit of the money into your account.
#5 Hire A Team. The more help that you have to serve your clients, the more time you can have to yourself. Hey, entrepreneur… get out of your own way. You cannot and should not try to do everything in your business. Even if you start off doing everything, after you lay the foundation of your business, you will still need others working your processes to help you scale your business. If you can service 10 clients at a time, then each qualified team member you hire can also service 10 clients each. More help; more money in the business and more time for you.
Remember those duties in your business that do not bring you joy? Delegate those duties to a team member. Have a role in the business that you are not an expert in? Put aces in their places by hiring people that good in the areas of business that you are not to leverage having greatness in each area of your business.
Yes, being an entrepreneur is a labor of love, but it doesn’t have to feel like prison sentence. If you start infusing freedom into your business, then you can definitely have a business is that is more love than labor.