As business owners, we often spend time working more on client projects. While it’s important to work on your clients it’s important to work in your business to continue the development of the business.
In 2014 after reading Tim Ferris’s book “The Four Hour Work Week” he set a 100 day goal to be self sufficient and to leave his home country and start traveling the world. He since lives in Bangkok running a 6 figure marketing consultancy working with clients in Singapore, Hong Kong, United Kingdom and the United States and other areas in the world.
Show Notes:
Burhaan Pattel 0:01
Hey, welcome to the marketing stack, my name is Burhaan. And in today's episode, I want to talk a little bit about that thing that happens when you have a business. Or even if you're freelancing, and you are doing it almost as a side gig, where you're, you've got to be working on your business, you know, building your website, doing your marketing, creating content, all of the things that you need to do to promote yourself to basically get yourself more clients. But also, you know, you stuck in this vortex of working with clients. And depending on the number of clients, you have all the size of the projects, the client work can very easily and usually does very easily take over your life, in that, you know, clients can be demanding. And, of course, they have the right to do so based on the fact that they're paying you money for delivering stuff. But also, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's about managing expectations. So it was in a sort of mastermind group yesterday, and we were talking about, or one of the people mentioned that, you know, he was struggling with balancing the time between working on his business and doing his personal things, versus spending a whole lot of time on the on client work.
Burhaan Pattel 1:29
And, you know, it's an issue, it's, it's something that freelancers or solo entrepreneurs have, and, you know, we're often we're often chasing chasing the cash. But it's a, it's one of those endless loops, right? It's one of those situations where, if you don't work on your business, you don't work on your value statements, you don't work on delivering your mission, you don't work on creating that uniqueness in your business, you know, refreshing website promoting writing, or creating content, like a podcast or video for months and months at a time, we're working on client related things. And if you're externally focused like I am, I tend to put my customers first I tend to put my girlfriend first I put tend to put others first in not only trying to make them happy, but also delivering on the promise that I've made to spend time with my girlfriend, you know, give her the love, give her support, spend time with her. And then, of course, in a personal context, yeah, we needed to be doing those things. But in a business context, you know, we we can't survive as human beings, if we're not promoting ourselves, if we're not working on the business, the business wouldn't exist if we didn't work on it in the first place.
Burhaan Pattel 2:52
But then there's also the situation that happens, where people recognize maybe that you have a skill, or maybe somebody asks you for some help with something. And then you end up doing that thing. And they're like, hey, you're actually pretty good at that. And so you decide to do a little bit more and more people ask you for that help. And so it's almost like you've started selling services or selling time, out of just the fact that you want to help people. And eventually, you're sort of at a point maybe where enough people are asking you and you're able to do that thing full time. And so you haven't really built a business, of course, you made the decision to do the things that you that people have asked you to to do for them. But when you make the decision to quit your job, or you know, or to do those things full time, you don't actually have a business, you're doing something, well, in fact, you actually do have a business, you have a business out of the necessity of serving people. And if that's something that you're interested in, in something that you love doing, then that's cool. But in order to really formalize I guess the, the fact that you're doing this as a business, you know, there are certain things that need to happen or that I feel that needs to happen.
Burhaan Pattel 4:14
Like your website, like a Facebook page, like, you know, your Google Google business page, registering the business maybe as an LLC, or, or some sort of a company or whatever, those sort of formalities on those, that structure will help who will help you in a couple of ways. One is to get you more clients and also two if you're positioning yourself properly, using the right copies, saying the right things promising the right things, you get better customers. And we're all after that, right? We we don't want to be competing in the space where cheapest, cheapest wins, right? There's loads of people offering a cheap solution and if you're somebody like me who values your time, who wants more, who wants to be able to do more remarkable, more unique things and also generate more revenue, but also be able to help more people, better clients, doing projects that you really love doing spending time with people, and in people's businesses, who you like and adore, and, and value, you know, then those are the clients that you want.
Burhaan Pattel 5:29
Usually, clients who pay cheap, are often the ones who don't value as much, because they're just looking for a cheap solution. And so this pricing thing comes into play purely because when you start working on your business, start thinking about the positioning and start thinking about the copy, start thinking about your values and the type of clients that you want. That's when you need to actually be spending time on your business, and thinking and writing down and strategizing, all of these, these things that will help you find those people, because without it, it's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen on its own, there needs to be some effort on our part. And of course, when the low value client comes along, we could say no, but what are we doing to find the high value client, you know, we all got to start somewhere. And so most of us are starting with, with low value clients. But we get to a point quickly, where we realize that those value, low value clients are not the best clients for us. And that's when most people quit, is because they don't want to do the work in their business or on their business, to actually make it to actually find the better clients.
Burhaan Pattel 6:44
And so this is this is sort of a little bit of a riff on, on, on on, on what this discussion was in the group yesterday. My suggestion was to this gentleman in the group was to dedicate some time, you know, for me, it's putting a couple hours in the morning, to do a couple of things, one, to journal. Two is to, I decided to learn guitar. And so I put aside 30 to 30 minutes to an hour to actually learn to play. And then after that, it's kind of thinking about content, or depending on which day it is. And then only I start with client related things. And right now as I'm recording this, it's 2pm. And basically, the whole morning has gone to my personal stuff. Of course, today is a little bit more of a relaxed day, because it's just, it's just been that way for for today. And and also because I work at night, I have basically the day to work on my own stuff. However, when we all in the situation when when clients deadlines, and when their demands on us in terms of delivering and fulfilling on the promises that we made, that consumes a lot of time, you know, staying up late, staying, staying up nights, working through the day and night to get those things done, and those things are necessary.
Burhaan Pattel 8:15
But then, but then there comes a time when you know if you manage yourself, well. And if you manage the client expectations well, and you say well, I'm going to be working on your stuff on a schedule, and you've got maybe two, three days, a couple hours a day, or whatever this whatever your plan is, to work on their things, then you've got to set those boundaries and stick to those boundaries. Right? It's just like in a relationship, if somebody is doing something that's against your will, you know, your girlfriend, your boyfriend's doing something against your will, you got to ask yourself, whether you're willing to put up with that, or accept it or, you know, move on. And it's the same thing with a client stuff, you've got to put your foot down and say, Hey, like, your deadlines are unrealistic. You know, let's talk about it. Let's figure out how we can both accommodate each other because I want to do the best work that I can for you. But you need to give me more. Not necessarily give me more time, but be be aware of the fact that I this is my schedule. And so as a freelancer we tend to forget that we are doing what we want to do for our freedom, for our lifestyle for our goals as a human being.
Burhaan Pattel 9:37
We don't want a boss, we don't want to report to people on a daily basis, we may not necessarily want to go into an office. You know, we may have clients around the world or in different locations where we can communicate by Skype and via email and by WhatsApp and via Facebook Messenger and all of these other tools that allows us to work remotely and so this is what what we've got to go for. And that also translates into getting clients who understand the fact that we are free spirited individuals who need our time to explore and to experiment and to play in the work that we do, because when we don't play, when we don't work on our business when we don't, right, when we don't create the things that we want to create for ourselves, that's when we become unhappy. And then we start choosing alternatives, or we look at alternatives to say, oh, maybe it's better on the other side, you know, the green grass is greener on that side, let's go try that out.
Burhaan Pattel 10:38
And it's not necessarily the case that we what we're doing is not working, it's a case of changing or switching up the way that we are doing things. And the only way, the only way that we can communicate, or one of the ways that we can communicate that to people is to actually tell them, and to have it written down on our websites. And to write it in email copy when we're prospecting for clients. All of these messages that we send out, is not designed to to chase people away. It's designed to filter the people who we don't want, right? It's designed to, to, to allow the to allow you to choose or to allow the clients to choose and select you. Because no, they don't see themselves as the client is the cheapest as cheapos, they don't. They don't want to pay the low value pricing, because they've maybe realized that the lower value freelancers are not that good, or they haven't delivered on what they've they're expecting. Right? There's lots of people that have disappointed that have made this. So So yeah, so that's so that's the crux of the episode.
Burhaan Pattel 11:54
I'm very curious to know sort of what your take on this concept of working on your business is, and how you end up managing your time. How do you end up balancing the client work versus your own work, and perhaps your own work could mean you know, creating a course for yourself or writing your own book, or whatever the thing is that you're working on. Like, could even be passion projects could even be hobbies, that are that sustain you? What are you doing to position yourself and what are you doing to make time for those type of things? I'd love to hear from you. Of course, you can. You know, send me a message on my contact us page bridgeight.com/contact. or hit me up on Instagram at Bridgeight, or Facebook at the same domain facebook.com/bridgeight. And yeah, once again, my name is Burhaan. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. And yeah, I'd love to hear what you what you have to say. If you're listening to this audio on my blog, comment below. I'd like, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much. We look forward to look forward look forward to new episodes every single week and thank you for for listening. Bye bye.
