Capacity & profit are like the brain & the gut.
More linked than you think, but rarely studied. Leaky profit, leaky capacity. Let's dig in..
If I had a penny for every time a creative service provider has told me their big vision is “working less and making more," I'd be living in the English countryside with a big garden and a fixed up cottage home by now. My retiree cottagecore Nancy Myer's dream retired life.
It's the most common, yet frustrating answer to “what's your big vision for your business?"
Which is something everyone who goes through my group program Grow Your Own Brand digs into on Day One. (PS - you can join the waitlist for the next live cohort now).
Whenever I hear it, I always probe a bit further. What does working less + making more actually mean to you?
You see, when people say they want to work less, they really mean they want to increase their capacity to do more of what they love in life — yoga, time with family, travel, you name it, and spend less time in the weeds of their business. A place way too many of us creative service providers live in 100% of the time & feel like we can't escape.
Good news, you can. It's actually a choice. Read on.
The challenge: service providers rarely define what “doing more of what they love” looks like, much less have they made an action plan to get there, so they choose to live in a constant state of overwhelm with the vague dream of “working less” one day.
When people say they want to make more, they mean they want their business to be profitable and support them working less (AKA support them doing more of what they love).
Fair enough, but the other challenge is that there hasn't been a lot of excavation into just how much more they desire to make to support that life. Many people don't even know if they are profitable.
The Capacity & Profit Connection
There's a big link between capacity (the time you have) and profit (the amount you actually make).
Low capacity leads to low profit. Low profit leads to low capacity. It's the circle of overwhelm / burnout life.
Let's take Jane She's an interior designer who does big custom projects that take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to complete. The rate of her timelines running over of these projects is 100%. And despite looking successful on paper, her capacity to do the things she loves — travel, go sailing, dinner with friends, spending time with her daughter — is pretty much nonexistent.
Because the projects drag on and on, the profit margins are low (even though when she signs them on they're in the high 5-figures). That keeps her on a hamster wheel where she has to sign another big custom interior design project for a big cash injection, but then she is left with low capacity & profit.
She never has time (capacity) to market her business because her capacity is tapped, and she stays generalist so she can get as many clients as possible — but they don't end up being profitable.
The vicious low capacity & profit connection continues.
Are you Jane, my budding entrepreneur?
I was too my first year of business. And despite hitting 6-figures that first year, nothing I was doing was leading to my own big brand vision. I wasn't growing my own way.
I created my own 9-5 in my business… the very thing I worked so hard to escape.
I was so desperate to sign another client. To be booked & busy. And I was following a set of rules (what money expert Ramit calls “Invisible scripts”) rather than doing the excavation work and planting the seeds for my future business. Growing my own brand, my own way.
A lot of us fall into this trap. But the good news is, there's a fairly easy way out. You just have to choose it.
Just as low capacity leads to low profit. Opening up your capacity leads to more profit.
There's a direct link to how much time you have not only to work on your business rather than in your business. But also to live your life outside of never-ending project timelines and to-do lists.
In Grow Your Own Brand, we first open up capacity in your business + life, and then we open up profit by refining your offers and building a personal brand that gets you off the service-based “whatever your clients want" disempowered hamster wheel.
We prune in order to bloom.
Here are a few ways you can start pruning to bloom today
💰 Run your numbers on your past 10 clients (here's our popular profitability calculator) and with the real numbers in front of you, analyze what offers are actually profitable. The results may shock you. But no shame. Now you know and can make the necessary changes (we do this together in GYOB).
🤠 Do an alignment audit. Are you calling in the clients you desire? Is your business supporting the life you want? What’s your big brand (and life) vision beyond “working less + making more”? Get specific. Are you on the right path? If can be super easy to lose sight of big picture when you’re just reacting and surviving.
⏱ Track your time using Toggl for at least 2 weeks. You'll be surprised where you're leaking capacity on things that simply don't matter at all (hint: stop redoing your processes and start putting your energy into marketing + sales).
✂️ With the results of the above, what can you prune out of your business? Be real with yourself. And with the additional time left after pruning, what can you start blooming?
Feeling lost, in need of support, and with actual frameworks to help you work through all of this and get to the other side of high capacity + profit? That's what we will work through in Grow Your Own Brand!
See you in the garden!
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