Treasa Edmond: 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Boss Responses podcast. As business owners, we frequently get busy with doing all of the things. We have client work, we have marketing, we have prospecting, we have all of these fun things, and if we get too busy, our business is what suffers first. We drop the marketing, we drop the prospecting and we focus on the client work. That can be really detrimental to your business. You need to make sure that, no matter how busy you get, a certain percentage of your week is spent marketing for new clients. We talk about that with today's question and this is one of those topics that I really hope you will walk away with something that you can directly apply to your business. So spend the next 10 minutes taking notes and getting ready to apply this to your business.

Treasa Edmond: 0:56

Let's jump into today's question. If you're a freelancer, business owner or anyone who deals with clients, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Teresa Edmond. I've been dealing with clients and running my business for nearly two decades and in that time I've dealt with my share of doubt, imposter syndrome and not knowing what to say when a client ask a question. I wasn't ready for. I created this podcast to empower you with the Boss Responses. You need to grow your business. Each week, my guest co-host and I will bring you five episodes packed with practical insights. Monday through Thursday, we answer your questions, and Fridays we dive deep to explore how our co-hosts embraced their role as the boss of their business. Welcome to Boss Responses. We are back for day three with Ed Gandia. Ed, how are you feeling about this week so far?

Ed Gandia: 1:52

I'm feeling great. These are wonderful questions.

Treasa Edmond: 1:55

I know I have the best listeners, All right, so what is the question for today?

Ed Gandia: 2:01

The question is what strategies do you suggest for balancing client acquisition with delivering quality work, especially when one is a solo operator? It seems like I spend more and more hours marketing for each new client, and that cuts into my creative slash work time, so what are your thoughts on that?

Treasa Edmond: 2:23

One. I think this is probably more a scheduling issue than a marketing issue. Scheduling can be really hard for people who come from the corporate world, where everything's nine to five or eight to five and then all of a sudden you have all of this time and we forget to block time for work. So time blocking is huge for me. This is what I personally do. I have specific days that have specific goals, that have specific blocks of time for client work, and that's when it happens. And then Fridays, because I know by Friday I'm pretty much dead. I have a giant block of time that I focus on business marketing and business tasks. Can I use some of that for client work? If I'm running behind? Yes, but I try to make that an exception rather than a rule. But I really block out specific time for specific types of work and then within that time, I use a tool called Llama. Have you seen that? It's pretty awesome.

Ed Gandia: 3:24

No, not familiar with it.

Treasa Edmond: 3:26

It lives in your browser and you can put what tasks you want to accomplish in there, set a time limit on them and it will flash a red alert whenever you approach that time or have gone past it. And when you click off a task it celebrates with you. There's confetti and a little dancing llama and it makes me happy. But within my time blocking, I try to say structured. Sometimes I have four hours today for client work and I know I'm going to be writing for all four of those hours. But if I don't schedule breaks, I don't take them. So I still schedule my time. I give myself leeway if I go over, if I missed a break or if I'm in the groove and I don't want to take a break, but I still block my weeks out. Someone once said to me if you're not scheduling your time, your time is scheduling you. And it's such a weird statement, but it makes sense because that's how you lose time is by not knowing what happens. I'm also time blind, so I forget that time is passing, especially when I'm doing a creative pursuit. So if I don't have something like an Apple Watch or a program on my browser that flashes red and says, theresa, you need to get up and take a drink or you need to take a snack break, then I really struggle with that. So time blocking. Very important Part of my time blocking is marketing and we mentioned earlier this week.

Treasa Edmond: 4:48

The biggest part of my marketing is relational, so it's finding my clients, interacting with them on social media, touching base with people that I've worked with before, see if there are any new referrals out there, and then I spend less time on the marketing tasks that I don't like, like LOIs, because they make me incredibly uncomfortable and my best clients come from relational. So figure out what works for you, leverage your time on those things and then spend less time on the other things. The important thing, I think, is to make sure you're doing it every single week. Some people do it every day and that's what works for your schedule. Then do that. How do you handle it, ed?

Ed Gandia: 5:31

Well, first of all, we're very much aligned when it comes to I don't like to use the term time management, because you can't manage time, you can only manage yourself, so I like to call it focus management. Good point, right, because all we need is more periods of focus. So how do you manage your focus in, more specifically, your energy? I'm big into getting clear on your energy levels and how to fluctuate during a day. So not just you mentioned the flow of your week, but also during the day, and I have tracked this and it's just all anecdotal, it's not scientific, but I can basically chart how my energy fluctuates and what I do is based on that. I schedule tasks during certain times of the day that are appropriate for that kind of energy and it works beautifully for me. So, and that's for everybody, if you take the time to do that, because you're gonna be able to get into a flow state much more easily for any one of those tasks if you have the right kind of energy. I also love what you said about basically time blocking and having, I call it, themes for your days, so knowing when you're gonna do certain activities like marketing and batching, clustering tasks, doing really nice focus sessions like you talked about. I have very specific. I work in two hour increments with a big break in the middle. So all those things I've always said look, give me your schedule, let me sit next to you. I guarantee you I can find 30% productivity improvements overnight. I mean, I know that sounds crazy, but literally I can help you in a day or two. We can get you 30%. So that takes care of a big part.

Ed Gandia: 7:13

So I'll talk a little bit more about the marketing side. One is you need to systemize what you do and when you do it. You talked about the when, but let's talk a little bit about what you do. So obviously this person is already doing quite a bit of marketing. It sounds like and that's the problem is like this takes a lot of time. Well, free up some time, but then, okay, focus on what's working. I'd be honest with yourself what seems to be working more than something else, even if it's not what other people say you should be doing. If it's working for you, yeah, and just do more of that, okay. So systemize what you do, systemize and standardize when you do it, and you need to treat it very methodically.

Ed Gandia: 7:57

I focus more on the consistent execution of certain tasks than I do on the outcomes. I'll give you a quick example. Outside of this, everyone that tries to meditate wonders am I meditating right? Am I doing it right? Am I doing it right? And if you, that's your concern. You're never going to do it right.

Ed Gandia: 8:18

So what I do is I don't really care if I'm doing it right. I sit there with my eyes closed, focusing on my breathing using a guided meditation app, but very limited guidance. I just care about maintaining my win streak, my run streak. I want to make sure that I'm doing this every single day, that I can check the box, and if you just focus on checking the boxes consistently, day after day, week after week, then it just becomes so much easier. If you do that, the result will come. But if you obsess over the outcomes, that's going to be really difficult.

Ed Gandia: 8:52

And then the last thing I would say is you need to have a rule in terms of how much time you're going to spend on it, and I'm big on percentages. For that, I say allocate 10% of your work week, which is great, because that adjusts, no matter how much time you put into your business. If you put in 40, 45 hours, guess what. That's four to five hours a week. If you only work 20 hours a week, then that's two hours a week. But commit to that and then have a plan for how you're going to use that time, which would be the obvious next step from that it's don't just OK, I'm going to spend four hours this week. Great On what? When is it scheduled? Is there an alert set to it? And, by the way, are you willing to treat those time blocks like your wooded doctor's appointment? And if you do all those things, the stuff is going to happen, it's going to get done. Bottom line your business.

Treasa Edmond: 9:50

Time is important. Working on client work is important. Don't underestimate the importance and say, well, I could just do it later. Treat it like an appointment. I set appointments in my calendar. I have appointments for specific work and it has to happen. Then, like tomorrow, I am working on a case study and it's blocked out already and that's when I have to work on it. So I'll hold myself to that. Now, if you're not following Ed on LinkedIn, you should be number one. But, ed, a week or so ago, like I said, I'm time blind. You talked about rating your clients and I was so intrigued with that and I'm going to start doing it. So if you're my client, please know I'm providing or I'm assigning you a value from now on. But when it comes to marketing to your clients, how does that rating kind of play into that? Do you say these types of clients are usually rated higher because of specific things, so I'm going to market more closely to them, or does that even play a role at all?

Ed Gandia: 10:52

Well, if we're talking about clients or prospects, so existing clients.

Treasa Edmond: 10:56

Yeah, do your existing clients and their quality impact who you're looking at as prospects?

Ed Gandia: 11:04

Oh, absolutely, because I'm trying to model that and I'm trying to find more like them and if I really understand who my ideal client is and the ideal, you never quite achieve that. To me, the ideal has always been kind of an amalgamation of these people, who, that there's no single person who embodies all of these qualities. But I use that as my guide and I'm looking for more people like them and it absolutely shapes who I go after. And fortunately, some of these factors are invisible, right? Nobody is raising their hand or putting something on their LinkedIn profile saying how great they are to work with because of these reasons, right? So you have to kind of look at outside factors and then make a determination. But it's not until you get into that first conversation. That's when you really know and that's when you can ask better questions because you know what you're looking for.

Treasa Edmond: 12:00

Right and those initial conversations. It all comes back to relationships, but one of the ways I think that we can really make our marketing time more effective is by looking at the clients we already have, that we really enjoy working with and finding more clients specifically like them. We know who they are, we know what they respond to, we already know how they work and we can directly apply that to our marketing whether it's building those relationships, interacting with people on social media or even what you say when you send someone an email to make it more effective. So build on what already works, like you had already said, but consider who the clients are as people and your rating system, if you have one, and make sure you incorporate that into your marketing in some way, and I think it'll make it much more effective. All right, that was day three with Ed Gandia. Come back tomorrow for day four.