The Desert of Arizona
Partly Sunny 53 Degrees
There’s only one thing worse than not having clients. It’s having too many and being so busy that your work runs over its boundaries and consumes your life.
You’re the only one that lets this happen, by the way. It’s entirely under your control. But I’ve been there. I still go there from time to time. It’s “raining clients” and you start drinking as much as you can.
While it’s exciting for like a second, you quickly realize, this is not a sustainable path.
What’s the solution? Using your head to engage in some critical, strategic and creative thinking.
The goal is to figure out ways to deliver MORE value, in LESS time.
It’s entirely possible. But we’re all so wired with the lie that you only get value with effort, that it’s hard to see. More value requires more effort right? No. It doesn’t.
And it pays to figure out how it doesn’t unless you want to be a well paid rat the rest of your life. That’s what it feels like if you’re not working smart.
You put together a client attraction system. You get it to work (Hallelujah!). Then… congratulations! You now have more work than any sane person should attempt to handle.
Now what?
As you might know, I don’t really view “busy” as a badge of success. A rat is busy. Hamsters are busy. That is not my goal. I might have to pass over busy avenue every now and again, but it’s not somewhere I want to live.
We think we want busy because busy leads to income. We like income. But do we have to pass through “busy” to get there?
One way to deliver more value in less time is to find the people who are in the greatest amount of “pain” that you can help. In other words, aim what you do at smart targets. By that, I mean bigger problems.
Let’s say you’re an electrician. You can invest an hour trying to find a faulty wire in a single family home, or you can invest that same hour trying to find the faulty wire screwing up the traffic lights of an entire city.
Which hour creates more value for more people?
You can do this through the sifting and sorting systems you create. Over time, you develop ways to get the people with bigger and more serious issues to raise their hands.
By definition, dealing with those bigger problems delivers MORE value than dealing with small problems.
Just ask yourself, is “busy” really your goal? If it’s not, then why not move directly towards the real goal?