What Do We Actually Do Every Day?
Episode 264: Show Notes
Welcome back to The Strategy Hour Podcast everybody! We are so happy to have you and can’t wait to share another batch of super useful biz info with our beautiful tribe. We thought it would be a good idea to let all of you know what our day-to-day work looks like and how we actually spend our time while working. To do this we are going to look back a bit and see how things started. Then we’re going to reflect on what we did in the beginning and then run through the developments over the last few years and discuss how our processes have evolved. Sound good? We thought so!
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A lot of what a successful business is, is the day to day dealings, the schedule, as well as how you spend your time. If you can figure out effective planning and calendar solutions, you are halfway to realizing your dreams. At least that’s what we’ve experienced. This podcast has been a great way of measuring our progress and we have plenty of old episodes with related content, so make sure you are all up to date on those! Today, we’ll be delving into our individual schedules before we joined forces in 2015. Then we’ll show how our relationship and partnership has continued to mould the way we work. So without further ado, let’s get right into it!
Looking Back at 2015 and Where We Started
Before we became biz besties, Emylee was her own boss, working according to her own clock and avoiding work when she wanted to. Abagail, who just got layed off the second time in 2015, used this bummer as an opportunity to invest seriously in her side-hustle. She had been tired of the corporate ladder and a normal job for some time, but she needed this to call her to action, so it really was a blessing in disguise. Abagail even admits that she started working on her own business during her final month, while at her old job. Don’t let her old boss know! When she was out of the office officially she pretty much took every job that came her way and worked Monday to Friday mostly. In those day she was working much longer hours, really buckling down and getting as much work done as possible.
The bulk of the work that she was involved with during this time was in her area of expertise, design. Abagail would design whatever anybody asked from her, not really passing up any opportunities. It was only by the next summer, when we were partnered up, that Emylee helped her slow down a bit. This was really important because she was on the fast track to burnout. Emylee had been working for about 3 years on her own business in different capacities, trying out different things to varying degrees of success. Early in 2015 she decided to get serious about her MVP and work as a more focused photographer. She started to work with lifestyle bloggers and created a lot of headshots for more personable blogs. She then started her consulting website, Emylee Says where she would offer strategy session to clients. A lot of this time was actually spent learning new biz skills and she was able to make her first course and launch it in March 2015!
Meeting Each Other During the Summer
We were grouped together in the community we were both a part of and quickly realized how similar we were. A lot of the content we were now creating sounded so much the same! Instead of this causing a problem we allowed it to draw us closer together and we bonded over our similarities. As we started to grow closer as friends we started to communicate constantly and this changed our days and how we worked quite a lot. We would spend much more time bouncing ideas off of each other. And then we really started to actually work together and we divided the responsibilities so neither of us would have to work too hard! The structure and support we supplied for each was great, it motivated and inspired us to stick to our goals and made us work harder! After this we started wanting to simplify things. Each year since we started this business we have grown a lot and we have needed to be able to handle this growth. This meant creating processes and a structure that could hold more weight. A lot of this translated to more pre-planning and optimization. It was at the end of 2016 that we really started to plan more than two weeks in advance! Before that we just worked in launch cycles of every two weeks. Sounds crazy, we know!
This Year and What Are Days Look Like Currently
Our goal for 2018 was pretty much to make everything as automated and evergreen as possible. This way we could run live launches as a bonus on top of all our other revenue. It was around this time that Emylee got childcare and our current schedule really fell into place. We never schedule work on Mondays so our planned week runs from Tuesday until about midday on Fridays. We have now gone back to the older format of working more separately, which is quieter and seems more productive at the moment. This is the first year we started to batch tasks according to the day, so each day of the week is mostly set aside for a different kinds of work. Tuesday is designated for meetings, we have our core team meeting first thing in the morning and if there are any other meetings we need to have during the week they fall later in the day on Tuesdays. Wednesday is for the podcast and we try to get two to four episodes done each Wednesday. Thursdays we use to interface with our communities in different ways. We do our webinars, Facebook Live videos and all that sort of stuff together then. And then we use Friday as a bit of a catch all and get anything done that we missed. We both definitely finish as early as possible on Fridays to spend time with family and friends.
When Does the Actual Work Get Done?
These days we don’t actually schedule our work time and prefer to just fit it in when we can. For Emylee this might be after working out in the morning, whereas Abagail likes to batch her jobs as much as she can. We also delegate much more of our work than we used to, so the bulk of what we do is strategizing and conceptualizing. Communicating these ideas to our team is very important, hence the meetings we do. We also envision doing less of the technical support in the future. But we do still do the core of the work ourselves, mainly because it is the easiest and best way to get that stuff done. Communicating our specific vision to someone else would actually take longer than just doing it perfectly ourselves, so for the most part we are happy to keep doing the really important stuff. So much of what we do has been set up to be done with such little effort that we find we have less and less repetitive work to do, which is just great! The roles we have now found ourselves in have grown and become new things over time. We both see it as more of a visionary and classic leadership position, something we have both had to grow into and adapt as we have occupied it. We spend a lot of time interacting with our team and our students and this is really the good stuff that we love. Now that you know what we do, we hope this can inspire you to go out and do your biz as best you can! You got this!
Quote This
Our goal for 2018 was pretty much to make everything as automated and evergreen as possible.
Highlights
Looking Back at 2015 and Where We Started. [0:03:35.8]
Meeting Each Other During the Summer. [0:12:20.4]
Doubling Down After Our First Year. [0:23:22.5]
This Year and What Are Days Look Like Currently. [0:30:05.2]
What Happened Each Day This Week? [0:39:05.3]
When Does the Actual Work Get Done? [0:43:30.9]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Daily Schedule, Routine, MVP, Responsibilities, Graphic Design
