If you’ve listened to us before, you know that we are all about efficiency.  “Work smarter, not harder” is a motto we live by.

But recently we realized, that not everyone really knows what we mean when we say efficiency, and so today we thought we’d dive into why efficiency is all that matters.

To a business owner, efficiency means getting things done with the least amount of time, money, and energy possible, while still getting the desired results.

Efficiency In Business Strategy

How are you doing inside your business?  Are you following a plan or are you shooting from the hip?

If you set goals, do you usually fall short?

Do you have processes and workflows in place across the board?

• A great way to improve efficiency is by making improvements to your process and workflow.  Finding ways to save time and energy in your processes (like utilizing forms so that you can qualify your leads and spend less time talking on the phone to the wrong people) can save you in the long run.  Creating a better workflow means you are producing your product or service faster, without compromising the quality, therefore making it more efficient.

Efficiency is Ongoing

• If you do a project for a client and something goes wrong, find out why, and fix that particular issue in your workflow for your very next project.
• Over time you’ll craft a smooth process, system, or workflow.

Efficiency means more money

• We are saving money because something takes less time to do, or we are using fewer resources and therefore it is costing us less to do it.
• Overall we’re trading less time for more money.

Efficiency In Work-Life Balance

• Put yourself in situations that will lead to good outcomes
  • Don’t overbook your time – if you’re a person who always runs late, that’s a YOU problem. You’re just setting yourself up for failure. 

Finding Inefficiencies

Where do you see yourself being inefficient in your business?  Sometimes it helps to take a time audit and find where you are spending the most time.  Find where you are spending the most money or energy, and see if you can brainstorm ways to be more efficient.

Simple Process Change Example

We used to offer weddings, and we would constantly get emails or phone calls asking about our pricing or availability for weddings.  Then we made a form on our website to make the process more efficient…saving us the time of talking to people who couldn’t afford our services or were getting married on a day we were not available.  Then we noticed, we were typically responding to the form submissions in one of 2 ways:  we’re booked, or we’re available and let’s schedule a consult.  So to be more efficient, I drafted up two email templates that I could customize to save me time in replying.

Quick-Wins

1. Pay attention to what you’re doing and find the inefficiencies.  
2. Use templates, batching tasks, contractors, and software to help solve your problems.

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources 

Wrike Project Management

Less Annyoing CRM

The post Quick-Win Episode 9: What Does Efficiency Mean? appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Episode Summary

If something triggers you to get into a funk or in a bad emotional space this gives you the opportunity to do a little bit of investigative work.

Hit the pause button and pinpoint the root of these bad emotions or experiences.

We hear a lot about business owners carrying a lot of stress around.  We get it, being a business owner is by no means a walk in the park and you’re going to have rough patches, but we’ve all got to realize that we’re not in business to cause ourselves stress.

Get to the core of the issue for any particular bad day. 

Are your clients causing you stress? If so, what’s it about?  A process that you control or something outside of your control.  

Are you stressed that you don’t have enough time? Do a time audit, figure out what’s sucking away your day.  Usually, it’s tied to a lot of inefficient processes that you can easily fix with a simple plan, automation or outsourcing.

Is money your main stress? If so, it’s going to be hard to become a successful business owner if you don’t have a good relationship with money.  Figure out the root of this – is it confidence based? Is your pricing an issue? Do you not have enough clients?

Is it something going on personally? Or your lack of self-confidence?  It’s easy to let your personal life bleed into your business when you are self-employed.  Sometimes when you really look at it, it’s personal stress of bills or a lack of time to spend with your family, or maybe even a lack of support or self-confidence that it’s eating away at you.  This is why personal development is so important for self-employed business owners like us…sometimes we are our own worst enemies!

Moral of the Story – Bad days put a magnifying glass on things that are inefficient and stress-inducing.  Once you know the problem, you can work towards a solution.

Quick-Wins

1. Target the cause of your bad day.  If you can do something about it, do it.  
2. Implement changes to your workflow or processes if you’re seeing work or client related stress.
3. Always work on your personal development to stay balanced and level-headed.

Host Bio –  Rhi and Pete [Rhi-Pete – now you’ll remember] are a wife and husband team who have been in business together for over a decade.  They run a creative media agency [Do Something Different Media] that provides strategy and consulting, video production, website development, photography, graphic design, and content writing for small businesses.  

Recommended Resources 

Time Audit Worksheet

4 Ways to Use Your Phone to be More Productive Video

You’re A Badass At Making Money

The post Quick-Win Episode 6: Bad Days Are A Good Thing appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

In our maiden voyage of the Learn It – Do It Podcast we introduce ourselves and give you a little insight on what this show will be about.  We’re a husband and wife team who’ve been in business for ourselves since the fall of 2008. We share our story of how we jumped feet first into being self-employed entrepreneurs and discuss how we navigated the challenging task of creating our own opportunities in business.  Over the last 10+ years, we’ve worked with hundreds of clients and we noticed that almost everyone struggles with similar challenges. We decided to focus this podcast on the topics of Content & Marketing, Business Strategy and Personal Development, because no matter what industry you are in or what your business is, these topics play a crucial role in running a successful business.

Episode 0 Summary

• We introduce ourselves as business owners and podcast hosts
• We talk about our qualifications and experience in this space
• We share why we wanted to start this podcast
• We tell you what this podcast will be about and talk about who it’s for
• We describe the show format and episode details

Recommended Resources 

Check out our creative media agency: 

Do Something Different Media – www.dosomethingdifferentmedia.com

If you want to apply to be a guest on the podcast head over to www.learnit-doit.com/podcast

The post Episode 0 – Who are Rhi & Pete and What’s this Podcast All About? appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Because we don’t want to come off as slimy salespeople, or we are so scared to be shot down, we tend to take the easier route when it comes to asking for money.  I used to always email our quotes over using an old Apple pages template and I’d just cross my fingers, hold my breath and hope something would happen. Generally speaking, it didn’t work too well – yes, I did sell some jobs that way, but most of the time we’d get a response back saying something like, “We’ve decided to go another way.”  Because the idea of selling our services any other way was so uncomfortable, we kept emailing proposals anyways.

It wasn’t until we lost a prospective client, who told us they had emailed our quote to another vendor who said they could do everything we outlined for less, that we realized we were doing this all wrong.  Thinking about all the time and energy I had put into the research and planning of that proposal, just to have someone else swoop in and put a different price tag on it, forced me to get outside of my comfort zone.  Ultimately, I realized that the whole scenario was my fault! I made it so easy for this to happen, and it was all because I was too uncomfortable to sell my services. So, I smartened up and decided I needed to shake things up and change the way I share proposals with my clients.

Now, I know what you’re thinking…

• It takes me so long to make a proposal, I barely have time to send it via email.
• My clients want me to email them the proposal.
• My competitors are emailing their proposals.
• I don’t want to feel like a sleazy salesperson…and my clients can read

Honestly, there are many reasons why emailing proposals seems like the right thing to do.  I used to think that because other vendors who offer similar services email their proposals, I should, too.  My clients are busy and don’t have time to do anything other than read my quick email to decide to hire me. Not to mention, I am busy, too.  It’s much easier for me to hit SEND on an email than to take any more time out of my day for proposals. But the truth is, no matter what your reasons are for emailing proposals, the ultimate goal is to close the deal, and I guarantee you, emailing the proposal is NOT the best way to do that.

Here are 7 reasons to STOP emailing your proposals or pricing to potential clients

1. It’s easy to say “No” to a number.

If you are just emailing an estimate over with no dialogue or explanation, then all they are immediately reacting to is the price.  Let’s face it — when you’re expecting to spend a good amount of money on your business, do you feel better hearing an explanation of what needs to be done, or simply a price?  If your potential client is anything like most of us, they are skipping through everything in your proposal to look at the bottom line and making a decision based solely on whether or not they like the price.  Unless your goal is to be the cheapest guy or gal out there, this is never going to work in your favor.

2. You don’t get to explain or tell the whole story.

Part of what your client is paying you for is expertise.  If we’re being honest, I’m sure there are lots of people who can provide the checklist version of the service you are offering.  Sometimes the biggest value you are providing your client is the time and expertise you’ve put into figuring out what they need and putting that into the proposal.  When you email the proposal over, you’re not giving the client any information as to why you’ve recommended the services you’ve outlined, what your version of these services looks like, and why they should trust you with the project. This is a huge part of what could make or break your sale, and it’s not going to happen without your guidance.  If you email your proposal, it’s like sending over the last page of a novel and hoping people understand the value of the whole story.

3. You give away all control to the client.

Remember when you were in school and the teacher would pass around a packet and everyone in the class would flip to the last page before the teacher got through the explanation?  The truth is, nothing has changed. When you email your proposal over, you’re hoping that your client reads through the entire document, but the reality is, you have no control over what they do with it.  You’re essentially relinquishing all of your negotiating leverage to the client and have no idea what they actually looked at, what they skipped over, and what they are thinking or basing their decisions off of.  Sales 101 would tell you that you need to be in control of the situation at all times, even if you make the situation feel like the client is in control.

4. It’s so impersonal.

Sending a proposal in an email means you are just like everyone else.  If the client is getting multiple proposals, you and everyone else are just words on a page.  You don’t get a chance to set yourself apart as THE company or person they should hire. Especially when you’re selling a service, you need to set expectations of what it will be like to work with you and to see if you vibe properly with the client.  It’s extremely important that you get to explain who you are, why you’re different, and how you can help them achieve their goals. Think of this as an opportunity to build a relationship with your client right from the start.

5. They can share the proposal with competitors.

As I said earlier, it’s happened to us.  By building a relationship with your client, you will naturally engender respect with them and the odds of this type of behavior happening will decrease.  Emailing your proposal over means it’s a simple click or two for the client to shop out your ideas and find the lowest bidder. And although you might think it’s unlikely, believe me, this happens a lot.  Because you’ve emailed the proposal over, the potential client thinks of it as just words on a page and most of the time wouldn’t think twice about sharing it to get a better price; even with the best of intentions.

6. You don’t get a chance to handle objections or questions.

This might be one of the most important reasons to stop sending your proposals in an email. As any trained salesman knows, dealing with objections is a huge part of the gig.  It’s your job to handle any questions or concerns and to act as a trusted advisor for your client. Emailing your proposal leaves them totally on their own to figure things out.  And no matter how simple you might think your proposal is to understand, there are ALWAYS questions or comments that potential clients have, and the longer they go unanswered the bigger they become and the more likely they are to ruin your chances of closing the deal.  Picture this: Your proposal arrives in their inbox and although everything looks good, the potential client wonders if you could break out payments differently. A simple question for sure. But their day gets busy, and the next day, too, and now another proposal comes in their inbox and it outlines the payment option they want.  That’s it. You’ve lost the sale and you never even knew how close you were to working with them. Questions left lingering or unanswered can certainly kill the sale.

7. Emailing proposals leads to a way lower closing ratio.

When we redirected our proposal method away from email our closing ratio went through the roof.  We not only closed more projects, but we were able to charge more money for the same services, and we were working with clients who respected us and our work more.  

By simply following our easy proposal strategy, you’ll put yourself in a way better position to close more jobs and make more money!

Now that you know all the reasons why emailing your proposals is hurting your business, it’s time to make some changes.  If you know that this is an area of weakness for yourself, then it’s definitely time to sit down and audit your own process.  Write down your current system and strategy for writing proposals and selling jobs.

If you want to see our proven system for successful proposals, access our FREE Mini-Course here: “How to Present a Proposal.”

The post 7 Reasons to STOP Emailing Your Proposal or Pricing Today! appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

Tell me if you’ve experienced anything like this in your professional career –

It’s way past your bedtime, you’ve been burning the candle at both ends and you just feel completely drained.  As you finally get ready to drift off into the coveted dreamland where you can finally relax — it hits you. Your brain reminds you about an important email that you need to remember to send, or you come up with a great idea or solution to a problem you’re having, or you stress about an interaction with a client/family member/friend/co-worker that you had recently.  All of these things, good or bad still put you in a slightly frantic state because you don’t want to forget it tomorrow, but you’re not going to do anything about it immediately — because, remember, you’re in your bed — resting “peacefully.”

What does this all mean?

Your brain’s memory card is maxed out.  It can be tough to function when thoughts are overflowing in your brain.  Whether you’re dealing with issues in your personal life or your professional life, it is extremely tiresome and taxing to hold it all inside.  It will start to drain your energy and, in some severe circumstances, cause physical ailments to your body.

In addition, it is very difficult to conjure the energy to be the best business owner or creative entrepreneur that you can be.  All business owners and entrepreneurs are creative. We use creativity to find ways to solve problems in our businesses on a day to day basis.  We are creative in the ways that we deal with our project management and our client management. We’ve used our creative brain to develop our products and services and by being in business for ourselves we’ve literally created something out of nothing.  

Being creative takes energy

Not just mental energy, but physical energy, too. So where do we get this energy if we always feel overextended and bursting at the seems?

We journal.  It may sound sophomoric – but a journal is the best antidote to stress problems, overwhelm and confidence issues.  

Let’s define what I mean when I talk about journaling.

Journaling is a physical way to let go of all of the bloated thoughts in your brain.  We’re not writing a diary — we’re not throwing ourselves a pity party either. We’re simply rolling up our sleeves, putting the pen to the paper and allowing ourselves to release all of the mental anguish that we’ve been storing that’s been causing us stress and sleepless nights.

Personally, I have a composition notebook as a journal.  I commit to writing one handwritten page a day [about 10 minutes].  I use daily prompts that I Google to make it an easier task — simply answer the question provided by the prompt.  I write entirely stream of consciousness and hold no weight to what I’m writing. The point is to let it flow. Let it out. Simply.  I actually never re-read any entries. For me, the purpose of the journal is to let go of bad things and set intentions for good things.

For you to get started journaling I really strongly recommend using prompts.  It eliminates procrastination by about 97%. When we got started, we used prompts from www.marcandangel.com for the first few months.  Marc and Angel are best selling authors and professional life & happiness coaches.  If you just head over to their blog and search “Journal Prompts” you’ll find plenty of content to get you started.

So, what are the creative benefits of journaling?

1. If you start your day with journaling then you will find that you’re automatically starting your day with creative momentum.
2. As you write each day, you’ll uncover things that will lead to thoughts and ideas which will help you be more creative.
3. It helps get your brain in shape – EXAMPLE: Running – At any time we can just run from here to there, but for most of us our distance and speed are limited by the shape our body is in.  If you start running daily [like a training regimen], it won’t take long before you can consistently run further and faster. So the more that you journal, the more sustained creative energy and momentum you’ll have in the long run.

Now picture yourself getting ready for bed after a day full of positive energy and momentum — yes, you’ll still have ups and downs, we all do, but now you know that if you just write it down, you can allow your conscious and subconscious to let go and, finally, you can go to your dreamland and relax.

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This will happen when you just assume that in order to be successful, you need to be busy. It’s exactly what I had thought originally. I remember thinking, “If I can just get enough clients so that I can tell everyone that we’re really busy, then my friends and family will be impressed.”  

Straight up, there are two things that are very wrong with this mindset. Number one, your friends and family’s opinions are not at all any sort of reflection or meter for the worthiness of your business, and number two “being busy” is not tied to success.

Breaking the Busy Myth

When we were “busy” just as I had asked for, I noticed my patience would wear thin, my energy levels dipped, and my body felt the physical and mental symptoms of constant stress. My work became something that I was falling out of love with. I kept telling myself that I love being a creative person. And I knew that I love taking photos, making videos, and designing and launching projects, but I just couldn’t stomach tomorrow’s To-Do list.  

The Busyness of Business

I grew with my business, just as we all do. In the beginning, I only had to do the tasks that I loved to do — ya, know, the creative stuff. But as we got busier and grew, my role expanded because the business chores expanded, too. These chores were usually dropped in my lap and would take hours of time and energy away from the creative duties that I would still have to complete afterward.  

Burning the candle at both ends led straight to a tipping point where I had a serious sit down with Rhi to talk about what “the point of this all was.” It was hard. I was putting my own “baby” on trial as if it had purposefully slighted me.

The truth is, I just never stopped to actually figure out, track, and choose the tasks that were assigned to me. I just did what was in front of me and did it enough to feel “busy;” as if that was the goal. With that in mind, it was no wonder that I felt overwhelmed with tasks that didn’t bring me joy or necessarily help the business move forward effectively.

Gametime Decision

We decided that it was time to do a basic SWOT Analysis to gauge the general health of our business. This led us to create a time audit questionnaire to find out what will create more energy, what will deflate us, where we excel, and where we fall short.  

The name of the game for your business is to be as efficient as possible. If you’re the one gumming up the tracks, then step aside and get help from someone who excels at that particular task.

I started by physically writing on a sheet of paper the daily work I had completed. The trick to doing this successfully requires writing down every. single. task. No matter how long it does or doesn’t (so you think!) take.

Why? Because for some reason, we tend to only track time if it represents a significant expenditure. In other words, we won’t record 2-minute emails or phone calls– but if we did, we would see that these tasks “not worth tracking” amount to 15, 20, maybe even 30 minutes of our day. That adds up.

Evaluate Your Efforts

Looking at your total time expenditure, break out your week’s worth of tasks into categories as follows:

1. Tasks that could be completed through technology [thinking automation]
2. Tasks that can be outsourced to contractors
3. Tasks that can be better planned and batched together

Within these lists identify the tasks that you:

1. Love to do
2. Hate to do
3. Spend zero time on  
4. Spend too much time on
5. Frequently procrastinate about (and consider why that is. Hint: see #2).

Envision Some Strategic Support

Although you may not be at a point in your business that you can outsource tasks quite yet, it’s a good idea to have a roadmap for when you do get to a point where you can hire outside help. You’ll never be ready for help if you don’t have any ideas as to what they would do for you…this is a great place to start!

Cherry Picking is Key

As far as technology is concerned, there are an infinite amount of free websites and applications that can help you solve problems and be more organized. The key to using apps and automation is to choose the programs that you’re going to actually use. It’s easy to get caught up in signing up for subscriptions and memberships just to forget about them. Make sure that you’ve made good use of any trial subscriptions and commit to using the software before you decide whether it will be part of your business.

We use software to make bookkeeping simpler and project/team management more efficient because we found those to be our most time-consuming tasks.

Oh My, Organize!

Next, create a plan of action to re-organize all of these tasks. It’ll take some work to get organized, but you NEED to make these changes in order for you to maintain sanity and to allow your business to grow.

When organizing your schedule, make sure to batch similar tasks into the same time blocks. For example — we have set times that we check our email and social accounts each day. Rather than being at the whim of notifications or your email inbox – check these accounts on your terms.  

This concept may take some getting used to, but it helps if you just give your clients, co-workers, and team members a heads up and let them know, “Hey, I’m checking my email at 10 am and 4 pm and I’ll be sure to respond accordingly.” Establishing this kind of schedule will tremendously reduce getting derailed by random messages and will reduce your daily stress.

Here’s a quick video from Tim Ferriss further explaining the concept of batching.

Finally, we want to leave you with our time audit questionnaire to help you complete your own.  Fill out this Questionnaire and get your answers emailed to you so you can start to outline your plan of action:  

The Time Audit Takeaway

Ultimately, how did doing a time audit save me from my business? Plainly stated, I was able to filter out tasks that drained my energy and created stress. I found wonderful team members to assign these tasks to, and I started using programs to automate tasks that I didn’t enjoy or became a waste of my time.

Taking the time and organizing my day to day routine opened up a whole newfound perspective on my business and it gave me more energy that helped me be a better business owner and creative entrepreneur.  

Now, I can honestly tell you that I absolutely love my “job” in my business and I stay excited to crack into my task list every day!

It doesn’t take long to get organized, and doing so will save a lot of time and energy…so what are you waiting for?  

You’ve got this!

The post Doing a Time Audit Saved Me from my Business appeared first on Learn It - Do It.

The client experience should be taken seriously because it can be extremely beneficial to your business and your project. Happy customers, simple processes, and raving reviews should be your focus. You actually get to control what happens, how it happens, and you can lead your clients through your process and avoid push-back, stress, and frantic emails.

CLIENT JOURNEY

A client journey refers to the sum of each interaction they have with you and your company. Your client’s journey begins when they first reach out to your business. Each time you interact with your client you are training them on what to expect from you. Setting your client’s expectation is the most INVALUABLE tool to use. So, it’s a good idea to audit your own client journey from time to time. Is it easy to be your customer?  Is working with you an enjoyable process? And, most importantly, when the transaction is complete, does your customer have a good or bad taste left in their mouth?

You can solve any issues by taking a look at each client/business interaction and pinpoint ways to improve communication, set better expectations, and improve your performance.

SETTING EXPECTATIONS

It’s a simple concept. If you tell someone ahead of time exactly what to expect, you can go ahead and assume that the interaction between you will go as planned, with happy parties on each end. And I’m not just talking about the day of service expectations, I’m talking about setting the expectation on when they should hear back from you or when they should send payment, etc. It’s totally okay (and preferred) to inform your customers of your normal operating procedures so that:

1. They are better prepared on their end
2. They feel more comfortable and are able to let their guard down a little
3. You’re less likely to receive push-back or frustration later
4. You’re in control of each interaction and the whole experience

Always tell your client what the next steps are at the end of your current interaction — whether that is by email, an in-person meeting, or a phone call. The key here is to SAY what you are going to DO and then DO what you SAID you were going to DO.

AN EXAMPLE OF HOW IT WORKS

For example, say you’ve just met with a prospective client. The meeting went really well and they want you to put a quote together for your service. You get back home and get a call from another job that needs your immediate attention. Then, the two following days you’re fully booked. Then, it’s a long weekend and you’ll be out of town. You get the idea.

Normally, it takes you about a week to get a quote back to a client, but you failed to disclose that information. To you, it’s no biggie getting back to them anytime next week because you know your process. However, during all this time (5 total days) your potential client has called you 1 time and emailed you 2 times because they’re excited to get started and haven’t heard from you. After the long weekend, you finally send the quote and it ends up being way higher than what your client expected.

What happens then is — their energy immediately turns sour and they start saying to themselves, “How can they charge so much?  They don’t even return calls…etc”. Now, not only do you have an agitated potential client, you’re probably stressed out about it and you’re spending 1-2 extra hours dealing with the issue.

If you had focused on setting expectations about your client experience, all of this could have been avoided. You would have been able to reduce your client stress, job stress, and overall life stress just by setting proper expectations. Also, your customer would have had zero stress, anger or resentment toward you or your company if they knew what to expect.  

Setting clear expectations about the client experience you deliver equals a win-win that will make your day-to-day work much more enjoyable!

The post Why Does the Client Experience Matter?: Create Happy Customers and Reduce Stress appeared first on Learn It - Do It.