Working Less and Making More: A Practice in Patience, Systems and Trust
You’ve heard it a million times. “I want to work less and make more.” But do you actually know what it takes to make this happen? The entrepreneurs who are making bank are NOT lazy. They are strategic, methodical, and extremely patient.
Do you think Pat Flynn went from being laid off to earning over $100k per month revenue overnight?! Are you kidding?
Do you think Oprah went right from waitress to world-recognized thought leader?! Heck no.
Do you think Marie Forleo rolled out B-School her first year in business?! Absolutely not.
Their careers didn’t fall out of thin air. They spent years perfecting their craft, tweaking their processes and making shifts towards their big dreams.
We’re no different. We absolutely want world domination (for all female creative business owners). But we know the tide won’t shift overnight.
We want to retire our husbands and support our families in ways our parents never could for us.
We know that this won’t just fall out of thin air. We know we have to put in the work, but we also know overworking ourselves doesn’t serve us any better.
The Raw Truth
Emylee and I never work 40 hours a week. We start late on Tuesdays and Thursdays so we have time to workout and catch up on our favorite podcasts. We have half days on Friday’s because… LIFE. This doesn’t mean we aren’t working our booties off. Instead we are focused on the tasks at hand. When they are done, we shut it down.
Burning the midnight oil may have helped us grow an extensive blog archive, but it wasn’t sustainable, and it made us very crabby people.
Systems Matter
We spent a TON of time figuring out the necessary pieces in our business. We rely on a ton of systems to make this whole thing work like a well-oiled machine! Ready? Want to know what is absolutely necessary to make our business function? Here we go:
Trello - The ONLY way this all WORKS together!
Teachable - Where we host all our educational opportunities for our tribe. P.S. Want to try it for a month for free? Click here
WebinarJam - We teach multiple trainings online every month & WebinarJam makes this possible
Leadpages - How we capture all your pretty faces
ConvertKit - How we send you all the awesome emails. Hello, marketing
Squarespace - You are reading the blog here
Later - Pre-scheduling content for Instagram is a total lifesaver
Tailwind - Pinterest drives nearly half of our traffic. This is why
PostPlanner - Our newest addition to the scheduling family
An Editor - Sarah keeps us in line
Two VAs - AllieDanae runs the entire blog and manages all our guest contributors! She also handles the show notes for The Strategy Hour podcast and helps with some social media. Katie is our email genius and her role is to make sure you have email responses back quicker than we could on our own.
Graphics and More - most of the graphics you see on our site and social media are created by Nicholette. She also manages a few other behind the scenes tasks like TCCtv and social media.
Finances - Parker helps us with the money side of things here at TCC and we love him for it!
What works for us may not work for you. But this recipe of people, software and systems did not just pop out of thin air. We spent weeks testing, trying, failing. We fell in love and we fell out of love. This is our magic sauce, but it didn’t happen overnight.
A Sprinkle of Woo-Woo
As much as I would like to say doing #AllTheThings will make this thing a success, I totally believe a dash of woo-woo magic and a heck of a lot of faith and gumption plays a big ‘ol role.
If you are constantly a Negative Nelly and are telling everyone you are “kinda sorta doing something” you are always just gonna kinda sorta make money. If you tell the universe, what you want and you take the steps necessary to make it happen, things tend to fall in line.
Now, no one said it would be easy. Or there wouldn’t be obstacles or roadblocks. But first and foremost you have to believe whole heartedly you are cut out for this. AND you have to make everyone else believe you are too.
No easy feat, but we know you can do it!
Do you fill up post it notes, notebooks and that dreaded iPhone Notes app (blergh!) with “things to remember”, but then somehow you never, um, know where they actually are? Do you have a metric shit ton of biz tasks to accomplish, but constantly feel like you don’t know what to work on next? Then you need this. Check out Trello for Business today.
