Business By Design – Creating a business that fits your life, not runs it!

I’m going to be real with you…. finding true work-life balance is hard.  Making my business fit into my life, instead of making my life fit around my business has ALWAYS been a struggle for me.  I’m an enneagram 3 and achievements are, for better or for worse, super important to people who are wired this way.  So we tend to become workaholics, sometimes by accident.

Thankfully Beth, from Starboard Editing, has some fabulous tricks for helping us maximize our time and putting first things first!  Can’t wait to hear with you think!  xoxo, C

Does your work-life balance go something like this?

If you’ve been in business for a few years, there’s a good chance that a few things are true.

First, you have a somewhat-steady client flow. You’re not scrambling to get people in the door as much as you used to, and your calendar is booked out with at least some consistency.

Second, you’ve figured out this sales stuff, and have a pretty decent regular sales. You have goals to increase your averages, but for now, you’re happy with consistently hitting a certain amount with every sale.

Third, you have an established aesthetic and style. You’ve mostly moved past the style experimentation stage {and left sepia, selective color, and heavy vignettes behind}, and the majority of your images look pretty consistent.

Fourth….. you’re working 60+ hours a week.

Sure, you’re making a living at photography and hit some important milestones, but to do that, you’re working 6, 7 days a week and 10 or more hours a day.  Your friends and family are pretty certain you live at your computer now, and you have no problem wearing the same clothes for 3 days in a row. {Share this post with them so they know how to love a photographer – thank me later}!

A bag of chips also count as a meal in between tasks, and you haven’t used that gym membership you keep paying for in 6 months.…. ok if we’re being real, closer to a year. #TruthBomb

Most importantly, you’re starting to get tired.

REAL tired.

You could even describe yourself as burnt out.

By this point, you’re not sure what has to change, but you know something’s gotta or you will actually lose your sh*t if you have to spend another minute editing out someone’s bra strap, snot, or food in their teeth.

So, now what?  Where do you go from here?  Great question.

It’s Time To Reassess and Develop Real Work-Life Balance

You’ve successfully leveled up your business this far, but before you can level up again, you need to take a hot minute to assess where you’re at and where you want to be.

Here’s how we’re gonna do it:

1. Grab a blank calendar.

You’ll want one that’s broken down hourly each day of the week.

Google calendar would even work fine for this.

2. Block off some time.

Go through the calendar and block off the time you generally spend on various tasks: editing, customer service, shooting, travel to locations, etc.

Add in personal stuff as well, like time with friends, family, errands, and chores, etc.

Every hour you’re awake should be accounted for somehow.

When you’re done, you should have a relatively accurate representation of your average week.

3. Grab another blank calendar.

Same as before – you want something broken up into hourly time blocks.

4. Add your top priorities to your calendar.

This could be time with friends and family, going to the gym, or even just lazy days or afternoons spent at home relaxing.

5. Add in work {notice this is one of the LAST steps}.

Now block off the amount of time you wished you spent on each task necessary to run your business.

For example.

Don’t like editing? Don’t include it.

Want to spend more time shooting? Block off more shooting time.

Only want to work 5 hours a day total? Make sure your calendar reflects that.

As with the first exercise, every hour you’re awake should be accounted for.

This is your ideal work week calendar.

6. Compare.

What are some of the major differences and discrepancies?

How much time do you spend working on one calendar vs the other?

How much time do you spend with friends and family on one calendar vs the other?

Write down any major discrepancies you have, and be specific.

For example. If you spend 12 hours a week editing on one calendar and 2 on the other, note that you spend, on average, 10 hours less editing.

Once you’re done with that, it’s time to figure out how to work towards your ideal work week.

How To Get From Point A To Point B

Go over the list you made detailing the major differences between each week.

What are some of the largest discrepancies in tasks you perform for your business?

What’s something you want to drastically cut down on the amount of time you spend doing?  Can you:

1. Eliminate this task altogether?

2. Rework your workflow for this item to cut out any unnecessary, timely steps and make it more efficient?

3. Outsource it?

How can you decide? Let’s break each of those down.

Eliminate unnecessary tasks.

Ever heard about the 80/20 rule? Where 80% of the results are driven by 20% of your effort?

That means that there are a lot of tasks that you do that don’t really produce that many results.

What are those?

Think critically about your business.

What produces the best, most consistent results for you? What brings in the best and most clients?

Similarly, what tasks do you do that don’t seem to produce any results?

Can they be eliminated?

As business owners, we like to lie to ourselves. We like to tell ourselves that everything we do is SUPER IMPORTANT and necessary for business success.

In reality, that’s usually BS and completely prevents us from finding healthy work-life balance!

Oftentimes we spend our time on things that don’t yield results because we a) think we have to do them because We Are Business Owners And That’s What Business Owners Do, or 2) we have no idea if they actually produce results so we keep doing them anyway just in case.

Or, because we’ve convinced ourselves that we always need to be busy to be successful and deserve the success that we have.

There. I said it.

What work are you doing in your business that’s just busy work? Tasks that you do just for the sake of doing them?

Get rid of them. All of them. Marie Kondo the sh*t out of them.

And don’t look back.

Rework your Workflows to achieve work-life balance!

Go through each of the tasks you perform for your business and detail out each step you need to take to complete it.

If it helps, grab yourself a pad of sticky notes and a blank wall.

Put each little subtask on a sticky note.

Then, put them on the wall in the order in which each step needs to occur to complete the task.

What do you notice? Are there any redundancies? Are there any unnecessary or extra steps?

Work on weeding those out of each of your tasks, and eliminate sticky notes along the way.

Once you’re done and you’ve re-engineered your workflow, copy down the new workflow and use that moving forward.

This also includes editing.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen the most convoluted, complicated, and needlessly time-consuming editing workflows.

If it takes you longer than 2 hours to edit and retouch 25 images, you either need to become more efficient at editing or cut out the bajillion and 5 actions you use on each and every photo.

I won’t get into this in too much detail because frankly, it deserves its own blog post. Which, in fact, is convenient, because I’ve already written it. You can read it here.

Outsource It.

Are there any tasks that you would just rather not do, but that do actually need to be done to make the business work?

This could be things like editing, customer service, packaging and shipping orders, etc.

Can you hire someone in-house to take care of it for you, or outsource it to a specialized company?  If you’re not sure which, this will help you determine which option may be best for you.

Think about delegating those tasks to someone else.

This will allow you to not only work less, but also focus on the parts of the business you enjoy doing most.

“But I can’t outsource or eliminate or rework any of my workflows!”

Ok sweetheart.  It’s time for some tough love.

Denial Won’t Help You Grow Your Business {or find balance}!

You need to be super real with yourself.  If you find yourself saying that you can’t eliminate it or rework it because it has to be this way, blah blah blah, I got news for you:

Nothing in your business will change.

You will continue working 60+ hours a week until you burn out, close your doors, and get a job.  That sounds super rough, but it’s true.  Change is hard, and I know exactly how you feel.  I’ve had to do the exact same thing in my business.  I took my business from working 60-80 hours a week, to now working only about 25-30.  I also only work 4 days a week. I have a 3-day weekend every single week.

And guess what? My clients are still happy, and I’m even making the same amount of money as I was before.

Even better?  I have a work-life balance that keeps me sane.

You can’t continue working that many hours a week or it’s not only going to negatively affect your personal relationships, but also your health.  If you want the business you dreamed of having when you first started, you need to approach your business extremely critically.

And honestly.

Set your ego aside and focus on the end-goal: being in control of your business, and not letting your business be in control of you.

You’re going to have to focus.

How many Facebook breaks do you take when you’re working at your computer? How many message windows do you have open?

Are your text message threads keeping you distracted?

Do you frequently stop one task to do another, and then stop that task to do something else again?

This is going to kill your productivity.

When you do set aside time to work, you have to focus on actually working.

Limit the amount of email, Facebook, and message breaks you take.

If you think of something else that needs to get done, don’t stop immediately and do it; make a note for yourself to come back to it once you’ve finished the task you’re on.

Set work hours for yourself, but do so realistically.

For example: if you usually work 10 hours a day, set your goal to 8 or 9 hours.  Once you’re regularly working 8 or 9 hours, decrease it again. And so on.  Small changes like this will make huge differences in the end.

It took me 2 years to cut down working 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, to 4-6 hours a day, 4 days a week.  And I did it by making incremental changes and really focusing on work when I was at my desk.

I also set rules for myself. Such as, ‘anything that isn’t done by 5pm doesn’t actually need to be completed today and can wait another day.’  And, ‘anything that isn’t done by Thursday at 5pm can wait til Monday to complete.’

You have to be strict with yourself to achieve work-life balance!

For me, I gave myself a penalty. If I found myself just ‘putting in a few hours’ on Friday, then I was responsible for donating $20 to a certain someone’s presidential campaign… which, needless to say, is really not something I wanted to do. So it was the perfect motivator.

Once I set that rule for myself, how often do you think I put in hours on Friday?

If you guessed ’never,’ you would be correct.

This isn’t easy.  So if you have a hard time holding yourself accountable, get an accountability partner that will do it for you.

You’re So Very Close to a Healthy Work-Life Balance….

You’re at an exciting place in your business right now. You’re on the cusp of creating the business you always wanted when you started this whole crazy venture.

I hope this post has given you some insight on what you need to take control of your business so you can take your business – and your life – to the next level.

DEUCES, YO.”

Beth Teutschmann is a professional photo editor, owner of Starboard Editing, and has helped dozens of photographers not only create the business they imagined, but also add thousands of dollars to their bottom line.  In her spare time, she is actually a unicorn, and enjoys whiskey, Fallout, yeti hunting, underwater basket-weaving, and the color purple.  Connect with her on Facebook and Instagram.