Revolutionize Your Business: Strategies for Working Less and Scaling Successfully
Why You Should Aim to Work Less
The Myth of Productivity: Hard Work vs. Smart Work
Chris starts by debunking the myth that working long hours equates to productivity. She emphasizes that a business should support your life and not consume it, comparing the conventional hustle mentality to owning a car that can run only in perfect weather. The reality is, life has interruptions, and your business should be resilient enough to handle them.
Recognizing Stationary vs. Scalable Modes
Most small business owners live in a state of inertia, referred to by Ward as "stationary mode." While this mode feels secure, it often requires grueling hours and yields less revenue than anticipated. To progress, businesses must transition to a scalable model, where efficiency and growth are maximized through strategic system implementation and team building.
The Power of Intentionality
Starting with Your Calendar: Time and Energy Management
One of Chris's most compelling points is how entrepreneurs often mismanage their calendars. She argues that while business owners will rigorously schedule external meetings, they seldom allocate time for their personal, high-focus work. This leads to unrealistic expectations about the hours available for productive work. Scheduling your activities down to the hour can drastically reduce wasted time and improve efficiency.
Focus Hours: Prioritizing High-Energy Tasks
Chris advocates for the practice of handling high-focus tasks during the first hour of the day. Too many business owners start their days by diving into emails, which Chris likens to "coming from a position of fear." By reclaiming those first productive hours for essential tasks, you preserve your cognitive energy for activities that require the most attention and creativity.
Restructuring Work: Eliminate the Frog
Contrary to the popular "eat the frog" methodology, Chris firmly believes there shouldn't be a "frog" on your plate at all—those undesirable tasks should be delegated to competent team members. By structuring your day around activities that generate value and leveraging your team's strengths, you eliminate unnecessary stress and decision fatigue.
Building a High-Impact Team
Delegation Reimagined: Creating Independent Leaders
The traditional view of delegation constrains the flow of work through you, the business owner, effectively turning you into a bottleneck. Chris's approach to building an efficient team eliminates this problem. By developing leaders within your team who can take complete ownership of tasks, you step away from micromanagement. This transformative philosophy turns delegation into liberation, where tasks are completed independently, allowing you to focus on high-level strategy and growth.
Maximizing Efficiency: The Importance of Super Toolkits
Another cornerstone of Chris’s strategy is the implementation of super toolkits—dynamic documents designed for ease of creation, continual updates, and practical use. Unlike traditional SOPs, which quickly become outdated and cumbersome, super toolkits are tailored to be intuitively used and constantly refined. They enable your team to perform tasks flawlessly without necessitating constant oversight.
Real-Life Applications: A Success Story
Case Study: From Overworked to Optimally Functional
Chris shared an enlightening case study of a client who transitioned from working excessive hours to achieving a fourfold increase in income within a year. The client, initially skeptical, was on medication due to sleep-deprivation-induced stress. Through implementing Chris's methods, she reduced her work hours by four-fifths and successfully took a month-long trip to Costa Rica, leaving her business in the capable hands of her team.
Practical Steps to Get Started
Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan
Set your calendar to account for every hour, ensuring you only commit to what you can realistically handle. Start your day with the most demanding tasks and progressively move to less taxing ones.
Leverage Technology and Team Strengths
Utilize alarms and notifications to keep your schedule on track. Invest in building a competent team where delegation means empowerment, not extra management.
Adopt a Scalable Mindset
Focus on creating systems that allow for growth without growing pains. Make sure your business can run smoothly even in your absence.
Conclusion
In sum, transforming your approach to time and team management can lead to significant gains in both personal well-being and business success. By adopting these strategies, you can indeed work less and scale more, achieving the freedom and flexibility you originally sought in becoming an entrepreneur. Whether you’re deep in the hustle or seeking ways to streamline, take the advice shared by Chris Ward seriously—your future self will thank you.
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Transcript for Episode 354. How to Work Less & Scale Your Business
Amy [00:00:02]:
How would you like to work less and easily scale your business? Well, today's guest has the solution that you've been searching for. I have Chris Ward with me. She is a leading authority in team building and systems, and I am so excited for her to share just pure strategy. So, Chris, welcome into the podcast, and I would love you to unpack this for us. What is the secret? What do you mean work less? I thought we were supposed to hustle more in business.
Kris [00:00:35]:
Oh, my gosh. Listen, if I only do one thing in this lifetime, is to let people know that you should have a business that supports your life instead of consuming it. That is it. Write that down. That is everything. And that life has interruptions. So you have to have a business that can support it instead of consuming it. Otherwise, it's really like having a car that can only drive in good weather.
Amy [00:01:03]:
I love that analogy. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So if this is the key, that we need to be doing this to build a sustainable business, why aren't we all doing it?
Kris [00:01:14]:
Well, because. So here's the thing is, for there's so many things. Oh, my gosh, pay attention. I'll tell you four stories at one time. First of all is, you know, when we started this business, we started with the startup, right? And so then you crawl out of survival mode, and it was so hard, and it was such a climb, and you're doing so many things at once, and then you get into, if you're lucky, stationary mode. We know, like something like 90% of businesses fail within the first five years. So then you go, okay, great, I'm here. I'm stationary.
Kris [00:01:44]:
I'm doing fine. But what got you here will not get you there. And being in stationary mode still means you're working way too many hours for where you are at this point in the journey. And so what you need to get from is stationary mode to scalable. Like, okay, great, I've got a sustainable business. A lot of my clients look really good on paper. They've got a podcast or a book, or they're doing fine in theory, but they're putting in way too many hours of where they are at this point in their journey. They're burning through their burnout budget, you know? And then also, if they really look at it on paper, they're making a lot less money than they thought.
Kris [00:02:17]:
Because when you do anything for 16 hours a day, it doesn't turn out to be that lucrative. Right? So there's that big piece that no one talks to you about, and then there's the other thing where everything that we value in most cultures is, hey, you're a really hard worker, and then you hear these stories of, oh, my gosh, I started my business and make all this money now. And I started sleeping on mattress on the floor and I was working on these hours. But what they don't tell you is when their life turned around, when the business started to take off, is when they then put some things in play and had some streamlined processes and start to build a team. Those rookie years where they had very dramatic stories to tell you were not the years that the business took off. So, you know, we know they sound much more dramatic and interesting, but it's not where the lessons are learned.
Amy [00:03:09]:
Yeah, it makes for a darn good story, though, doesn't it? But you're absolutely right. You know, we praise this like hard workers. Like, look at how hard this person's working day in and day out, and we're often comparing ourselves, but what we're doing is we're just ending up burnt out, stressed out, overwhelmed, questioning why we left a nine to five in order to work. Twenty four seven. And I feel like we know this, but it's so counterintuitive because it's been ingrained in us forever. I come from a career where productivity was praised. That was part of your performance appraisal, was how hard of a worker are you? So I think it's a really, really hard pattern to break, especially when you are moving from solopreneur, getting out of that stationary mode and into scaling your business. So where does someone even start?
Kris [00:04:04]:
Okay, first I want to unpack a couple of things you just said, though, that I felt really profound because I remember one night. Let me back up for a second. Okay. So I started my business 14 plus years ago. And the first couple of years of my work, I was focused on market messaging, dealing with that, helping people with that service. And the first couple of years I was in business, I worked insane hours. And my husband said, you know what? You're always stealing from sleep. You're getting up earlier and earlier, staying up later and later.
Kris [00:04:33]:
Like, that can be the first place you go. I was also told about the two year mark that I was starting to lose some of my charm. And so I was like, oh, my gosh, this cannot be. He's my biggest fan. He's, you know, doing all these things to support me. So I literally went from working 16 hours a day down to six. Now, that did not happen overnight. That's a whole story on its own.
Kris [00:04:52]:
But moving this story along, why it's really important is a couple of years after that, my husband was diagnosed with colon cancer, and I was pulled away from the business for about two years. When I returned after his passing, my existing clients had no idea of my absence. And they kept saying to me, how could we have not known? And it was just not how we navigated his journey. We were very positive in nature. And so they started to say to me, like, hey, if you could do that, maybe you could help me get to my kids soccer games and get some of my life back. And so I started working with these clients under that capacity. And one thing led to another, and I wrote my book, win the hour when the day. And I realized that these are the people most, the ones that, again, looked good paper.
Kris [00:05:33]:
And we, my clients all say they get 25 hours back a week within the first month of working with us. But what that lends itself to is something you just said that's really powerful. I remember back in the early years, one night, I was working at 02:00 in the morning. I'd been up since five, and I was thinking, there are laws in the land to protect me from this. Like, they, people fought and died for labor laws so that this could not be. And here I am getting around these loopholes by working for myself. And you're right. That's the whole thing on productivity.
Kris [00:06:07]:
We tend to also think that you, when you go fast and you work hard, that that means, you know, you can go fast on a rocking chair, you know, but you're not getting anywhere. Right. Or a dog can dig a hole really fast. Okay, we got the hole. What's the purpose? Right? So we want to really understand that what it, what are we being productive about? And I, you know, after working with so many entrepreneurs, I've also noticed that they fell into one of five categories. So we have this quiz, which is really interesting. You can check it out at ww dot freegiftfromkris.com. free gift from Chris Kris.com.
Kris [00:06:47]:
and one of the interesting things is I myself, what I call a recovering rushaholic. I thought speed was my superpower. But what I didn't realize is I was skimming over things. I wasn't getting traction or depth. I was just always rushing to the next thing. So we, you're right. So many of us are taught that that means we're working hard. So where do we start? Well, to simplify this, I would say that my clients, we focus on your team, your time, and your toolkits.
Kris [00:07:13]:
Your team having a virtual assistant, which we will find hiring on board for you. It's a philosophy, not a number, so you can have a team of one your time. 90% of people do not know how to use their calendar. They also look for more time when it's about energy management, not time management, then your toolkit. So many of us have either pushed back or started using SOP standard operating procedures. And they're not written by the end user. Usually they're static in nature. They take a long time to make.
Kris [00:07:42]:
They become outdated really quickly. Our signature super toolkits. The biggest difference between that and sops is their ease of use, ease to create, and how they constantly give you time back so that you can move on to your next ambition.
Amy [00:07:57]:
Oh, very, very cool. And it really sounds like you're saying so much of it comes back to being intentional, being intentionally focused. Stop doing all of the things. So you mentioned team. Does this look like we just need to delegate everything out or how does this work? Can you unpack that a little bit deeper for us?
Kris [00:08:20]:
Yeah. So there's a word I'm going to push back on a little bit. It's the commonly used word. And you're right. Delegate. So I tell people all the time that delegating is a lateral move. The work still has to come through you. So that's why that doesn't work.
Kris [00:08:35]:
It's time consuming. So I'm not actually into delegating. I'm into a setup where your team is liberated when we find hire on board a virtual assistant for you. We put them through our leadership program and with the super toolkits, they're given work of so that they have independent work instead of the delegation coming through you. Right. And the super toolkits self correct and do all these things. You don't have to supervise their work. That's just not how we set things up.
Kris [00:09:01]:
So that delegation takes time. And that's why, and we get so many of our ideas from the corporate world and they're very flawed, even for the corporate world. But we tend to think, oh, because it's a corporate world, it's a big building and they make lots of money. We don't notice how much money they're wasting or how these systems don't work. But think about it like, Amy, if you were really good at sales and youre working for a corporation, and they say, amy, youre so good at sales, we want you to be the sales manager. Well, then all you do is start managing the other salespeople. You dont do sales or you do a lot less sales. And so thats what happens when you start delegating.
Kris [00:09:39]:
You bring somebody on. Now, thats where people say, oh, its easier just to do it myself because now I have to manage them. That's because the setup is flawed. You don't have our signature super toolkits. You're relying on sops that become outdated. They're clunky, they're mixed up with training. You don't know how to create leaders because people talk about leadership, but they tend to talk about it in the capacity of, oh, I need leadership skills so that others will follow me and do as they're told. When you want to be surrounded by leaders, you know, if you hop on one of our daily scrum meetings with my team, you'd have a hard time telling who's in charge of.
Kris [00:10:13]:
And that's, that's a strength. Right. Because then I'm working with my peers. So there's some real fundamentals that we're throwing around that often are misused and not helpful.
Amy [00:10:24]:
What an awesome perspective. Because I agree, 1000% delegation. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of brain capacity that we're using up as so much energy because if we're constantly in that role, we're having to delegate. Yeah. It still has to go through us. So it is a fundamentally flawed setup. It makes so much sense.
Amy [00:10:51]:
But when you are surrounded by leaders, I mean, there's so much strength in that. So if we can go back and change how we're approaching this, that's a huge light bulb moment right there. It makes sense. It will save us time. It will save us energy. It will give us that time back in our day.
Kris [00:11:16]:
Yeah. So we often think, no, everybody thinks their business is different. And so many times I just hear people, myself included, back in the dark years, I call them just think, well, there's too much work. So I had this client that came to me, and she was referred to us by somebody else. And I'm not saying it's okay, but this does happen a fair bit. When somebody's meeting with me. Things are, you know, stressed. They're, they're just, you know, they.
Kris [00:11:39]:
So many of us keep thinking, once we get past this next thing, things will be different. But when you hear yourself saying that, ding, ding, ding, that's an alarm bell. So she went to meet with me, and as I said, it's not okay, but this sometimes happens. She missed her first appointment. Cause they're just all over the map. Okay. No, problem. It happens.
Kris [00:11:56]:
So we reschedule. She missed the second appointment, and I'm like, okay, I'm out. We're done. Yeah, but because she was referral, she begged me. Please, I'm so sorry. I promise you. I promise you I'll show up for the third one. Please.
Kris [00:12:07]:
And I'm like, all right, whatever. So she shows up. Now, she started working with us, and she didn't tell me this till later, but she said she was on medication to sleep at night because her cortisol and her adrenaline was just so high. She was working insane hours within the year. And I have clippings from our session. So, you know, it's. It's not even a revised testimonial. It's just raw stuff.
Kris [00:12:29]:
Within the year, her income went up four times. Her hours went down to one fifth. And here's the interesting thing. I forgot to tell you. She said in the beginning, I don't even know, Chris, how you're going to help me, because she helped large organizations that were five to $10 million get ready with their systems to sell, to sell their business. And she said, I help them with the systems. There's just too much work. How can you help me? And I said, well, I don't know, but we haven't failed yet.
Kris [00:12:59]:
So within the year, she's making four times the amount of money. She's down to 150 hours. Within a year, she went to Costa Rica, left her business with the VA that we found, hired an onboard for her, and had no Wi Fi in Costa Rica for a month and came back and everything was perfect. Right. So that's what you need to understand. It's just really basic things you have to put in play that you can't run out in between jumping around on your to do list and try to put these things in there that, frankly, are you whole nother career that you know nothing about and then wonder why, you know, why it's not happening for yourself.
Amy [00:13:38]:
That's amazing. So with that example, would you mind sharing with us what was step one of that process? What did that look like? Because, well, everyone's situation is different, but if you could offer one piece of advice that we could take from her.
Kris [00:13:53]:
Sure. There's lots of things that we can always do. So, you know, we. We do always start wherever you're at. So it's very custom to your work. But I will give you some things just that anybody can implement today, because I'm all about tangible takeaways. So the super toolkits are a little bit more elaborate. I mean, they're, but they're easy to make dynamic documents.
Kris [00:14:14]:
Super easy. But it's not something, sadly, that can do in five minutes. Right? And then a virtual assistant. We've got a twelve point hiring process with a 90% retention rate. And it's a whole beautiful thing. We're talking like five, $6 an hour. So many of our clients came and they're paying something like 50, $60 an hour, and they just weren't getting the return on their investment. And then we find someone for them, like, oh my gosh, Chris.
Kris [00:14:36]:
Like, I would have kept that other person if they had been this effective. Right? But here's some basics you can do today. So many people do not know how to use their calendar. Their calendar is set up for external forces only. So if I have an appointment with you today, Amy, it's on my calendar. But what happens is they don't put their own work on the calendar. They're like, oh, Chris, I do that every day. I don't need to put that in the calendar.
Kris [00:15:00]:
I remember that. Well, first of all, business is not run on memory. Secondly, that's like saying to me, oh, my car payment comes out every month, but I don't count it because it comes out every month. Well, that money is still gone. So what happens is when you don't put your own work on the calendar, you may stumble into the workday thinking you have 8 hours and you may only have five. So right off the bat, your math is completely off. And then you're running around like a lunatic thinking, why can I not get things done? But you're spending time and money you don't have. The other thing I would say is the work that requires the most attention or focus you do.
Kris [00:15:38]:
The first hour of the day hopping into your email is coming from a position of fear, and you're eating up your decision fatigue and your attention residue, right? Huge. So you want to do the work that requires the most attention or focus. I have no patience for this foolishness of eat the frog first. You shouldn't have the damn frog on your plate. You don't need the frog. There's no need for there to be a frog. Don't eat the frog. The VA will deal with the frog stuff.
Kris [00:16:01]:
There's no frogs. There is nothing. I hate to do that I have to do nothing. Right in the workday. Right. So now we're doing the work that requires the most attention or focus first. Another thing people don't talk about is working backwards. We do this in our personal life.
Kris [00:16:16]:
Let's say, amy, you say, I have to be at the in laws Saturday at one for somebody's birthday. And you're like, okay, that's an hour away. It's twelve. Okay, I want to work out, so I'm going to do that. But it means I have to get ready 11:00 so you do the bath, and you might find out you have to get up at ten to be somewhere at one. As entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, small business owners or founders, we get excited about new business or a new project. We jump all in, guns ablazing. And then other things get neglected or things happen.
Kris [00:16:45]:
And what happens is, you know, we don't know when we're off course or other things get, you know, as I said, neglected. So what you want to be looking at is when I wrote my book, when, the hour, when, the day I learned that I had to have it to the editors by June or she couldn't look at it till September. So I did the math, and it looked like I had to do five pages per day, Monday to Friday to get that book in on time. Now, most people, myself included in their early years, would be like, okay, I'm going to get up, and at the end of the busy day, I'm going to LA. La. I'm going to, when my brain is all beaten up and tired, I'm going to write some of my book. And then today it doesn't happen because it got busy and they're like, well, you know what? Tomorrow the pages will just fall off. We'll be totally fine.
Kris [00:17:26]:
Right? Because there's nothing more hopeful than tomorrow. What would happen is, a, because I do the most important work first thing in the morning, I would have to make a choice. Just like when I get up every morning to work out, am I going to work out today or not? There's no falseness about it. If I don't do it now, it doesn't get done. So then I say, oh, no, no, no, I'm not going to write my book today. Okay. A, why? B, I don't have it in me today. Okay? If I don't have it in me today, hmm.
Kris [00:17:56]:
If I don't have five pages in it in me today, will I have ten in me tomorrow? Not so much. So that sobers you up really quickly and keeps you on track. So I find that working backwards gives you great clarity, and then you can be realistic, and also then you can set projects that get done because you have a plan in place versus just some ambiguous ambition. People will say, well, I have a goal to do that this quarter. Well, where's the plan? You've got a goal. What's the strategy? I can have a. Somebody can have a goal to lose 50 pounds by Christmas. Where's the plan? Right.
Kris [00:18:36]:
So some of the. Those are some key things that should help you today.
Amy [00:18:40]:
Oh, my goodness. Rewind what Chris just said. Write it down. I swear, Kris, if I would have heard that when I first started my business, I would be so much further along. I still remember because I came from an outpatient career, so I had my schedule laid out for me every half hour. My days, you know, working 40 hours a week. It was laid out every single half hour. I saw another patient.
Amy [00:19:08]:
I struggled. I struggled with this hard when I first became an entrepreneur because it was like, well, now I have all day to get these things done, and it's so easy to put it off, like, oh, yeah, I'll get to that later. Oh, yeah. I literally did exactly what you said. I had to put everything on a calendar to hold myself to that standard because that's how my brain functioned, and that's how most of our brains function. We need to take that decision fatigue out of the equation, because you're absolutely right. We get so wrapped up in all these decisions all day long that nothing actually gets done then that was such a game changing moment. So I am encouraging you, like, I can 1000%, like, attest to this.
Amy [00:19:51]:
Do it seriously. As weird, as silly as it feels, because it's new, just write it down. Start using your time that you have to your advantage, because then what happens is you don't have to work as much. It's beautiful. You get so much done in such a shorter period of time because it keeps you on track. And in an era and age where there's so many distractions. Gosh, we need it. We really need this.
Kris [00:20:20]:
Yeah. And I would just add, this is where sometimes people get confused and it turns into busy work. Do it in 1 hour blocks. That's why it's when the hour, when the day. And so in that 1 hour block, you might have at 11:00. Okay. I'm going to do all communication. That means email and phone calls.
Kris [00:20:34]:
Right. Don't start busying your calendar with every. It's not a to do list. I don't believe in to do lists at all. To do lists are excellent if you're looking for additional stress or unfinished projects, because all they are percolating lists of emergencies. So don't turn your calendar into a to do list. Okay. What I'm saying is plan your work in 1 hour increments.
Kris [00:20:53]:
And then another little hack is first thing I do every morning is I look at my calendar and I alert some device to say, okay, I've got this meeting with Amy. So then I say, okay, set an alarm at 1150, at 1250, at 150, so I could be deep in work and alarm goes off. Go. Oh, right. Thank heavens. Because a, I have had people over the years for sure. Oh my gosh, I was busy in deep work and I'm so sorry I missed our appointment. I'm so embarrassed.
Kris [00:21:19]:
They just had to set an alarm. And secondly, then your brain is constantly switching back and forth. You don't give something full attention because you're like, wait, what time is it? Right? And so we really want it not to have divided energy. So just some basics like that are step one.
Amy [00:21:34]:
Oh, so good, you know. And what you said to do, lists are percolating lists of emergencies that will, like, forever live on my brain because it is a fact. And yeah, I also have like 50,000 alarms set on my phone. It's always ten minutes before the task because it gives me time to move from one thing to another. So if you are listening to this episode, take one of these strategies and implement it. Start, try it. See how it feels for you. Because it is possible, it is possible to work less.
Amy [00:22:07]:
And it feels weird at first, but gosh, it is so worth it. Because isn't that the dream that we all say we want? We want more freedom and flexibility. I hear that over and over and over. But you can make it a reality. Implement what you have learned from Chris. Go to her website, free gift from chris.com. it will be linked in the show notes. Grab it and start taking action on these strategies.
Amy [00:22:36]:
Because exactly as you said, win the hour and you winden your day.
Kris [00:22:44]:
Yeah, I agree for sure. And there's no reason why you cannot work what I call school hours. Long weekends, summers and then 6 hours a day. Easily done. My clients go through it all the time. It's incredibly doable.
Amy [00:22:56]:
I love it. Chris, thank you so much for being such a wealth of information, for sharing just so many actionable strategies. You are truly changing lives. I appreciate you.
Kris [00:23:10]:
Oh, well, thank you for trusting me with your audience. I appreciate you. Thank you.
Amy [00:23:13]:
Absolutely. And until next time, cheers. To making the money you want so you can create the impact you desire.
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