The Key To Achieving Work-Life Balance

The Key To Achieving Work-Life Balance

Sean: One of the things that you mentioned earlier, step back, look up. I’m sure you’ve had those weeks where you feel like you’re gripped by your business or by your clients and your quality of life as an entrepreneur suffers. I’ve been there and it’s horrible because I am hot-headed, ill-tempered, and I feel stressed often.

What are some of your best pieces of advice? I’m happy to say I’m a little bit done with that right now. Just a little bit, but I have some ways to go. It’s clear for me what I have to do though, but there are some people that just don’t know where to start. They just think they can’t take that two weeks off. If they do the house is going to burn down.

What are some of your best pieces of advice to entrepreneurs who are in that rut?

Jennifer: Radically, you know, that’s been a lot over the past year and that’s a lot that I haven’t marketed on because it was just me, you know, now in the business had a business that completely changed.

You had so many of the things going on and really my life was chaos and it’s, you know, to say the least. So I think it’s looking and finding the flow. I think at first of all, it’s realizing that you need to build a business that suits you, that makes you happy. Now, happiness and hard work can go together. I think a lot of times people think, oh, it has to be easy.

No, we can work hard. You know, when we do need to work hard. Well, that doesn’t mean we aren’t happy in the business that we’re building. So I think first of all, it’s getting clear that the business that you’re building, isn’t modeled off some internet guru, you know, going, oh, put up the sales page and get, you know, 500 million pounds.

And it isn’t, it’s built for you. It’s built that works with your life, works with your schedule, works with the amount of time that you have available to put into it. So we’re not completely overloading ourselves and going right. I have to do 30 hours worth of work, but really I only have 15 hours.

You know, available on my schedule because of kids or whatever the case might be. So it’s fine. It’s, it’s being aware that yes, here’s what I have to put into the business and getting very clear on that and setting those boundaries. Now, then you may find, yes, you need to work an hour in the evenings, you know, or two hours in the evenings after the kids go to sleep.

And maybe that allows you to take dinner time off, you know, to spend with the family after school and things of that nature, you know. For instance, that’s something that I do. It’s getting clear on what you want your business to be, getting clear on what is going to make it, it makes you happy to be in your business when working.

And then also finding flow and finding, you know, and it’s hard for early entrepreneurs to kind of do this, but setting, setting boundaries, maybe theme days, you know, you can say right, getting rid of a lot of context switching, you know, when we do a lot of context switching, we’re bouncing from one thing to another. It’s completely wasting time.

I believe also, and again, this is something that I worked very hard to sort of weed out is working on their own things of their own time. So it’s, it’s finding right, what is it that I need to work on right now? What’s, you know, what’s the major thing. Do I really need to do five podcasts?

Do I need to have a YouTube channel and do a need to, you know, be on Facebook for three hours, scrolling endlessly and you know, part about in canva for two hours. No, keep it. We need to keep our time lane. We need to find flow. We need to find our focus on what are the main things that are going to move the needle in our business.

And when you’re in sort of the startup stage. Most of that is usually product, product sales and marketing are kind of the three – three kind of key things. Now underlying, all of those is your brand because your brand is key, you know, in working with your, you know, creating your products and obviously your sales and your marketing.

But like we talked about, you can create stuff quickly and put it out there, right. It doesn’t have to take and shouldn’t take. Forever. It shouldn’t take a long time, create that stuff that we want to test with. So get clear on those focuses, like I said, ideally within those areas, try and find flow within your day. Group, you can create theme days and group themes together. You can block out time and say, this day is just for calls, or meetings, or client calls, or things of that nature.

In this day, I’m doing sales calls with this time. So there’s loads a way that you can balance your calendar to work with your life on your business and find that flow a bit better.

Sean: That’s awesome. More of design and make sure the systems work for you and your life after all, you started this business for you to find measure of success and live life better you know, if it’s doing the opposite, it doesn’t make sense for you to continue doing it.

And I learned that the hard way, but I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs kind of learned that the hard way. Somewhere along the way –

Jennifer: I think we have to do that Sean. We have to, I guess this is the other thing I would say to people is when – it’s those hard lessons. It’s kind of like when you’re a toddler and you’re learning to walk, and your parents, only you want to do is grab them. Right?

And go, no don’t fall. You want to pad everything, but what do we have to do? We have to let them fall and scrape a knee and things of that nature. And that’s how they learn. That’s how they’re going to learn the most is through those experiences. And when you’re an entrepreneur, you know, it’s the same thing.

So when you are going through a really tough time, it’s those times that you really learn a lesson and go right now, I’ve learned that I’ve lived through it. It’s one thing, reading in a book. It’s another thing being able to live it, and have that experience. And I would be very rest assured that you would make that same mistake again, or make, you know, go down that same road again, that you would do things differently.

So if you can say to yourself, right, I’m going to learn a lot from this. I am going to be set, you know, a much better entrepreneur, a much better leader, a much better, you know, a sales person, if it hadn’t you, that you had to do a sale or a product creator or whatever it is. But I’m going to be much better because of this experience that I’m going through, because this is only going to enhance my skillset and enhance my knowledge and, and everything else.

So that’s kind of a good point as well.

Sean: 100 percent agree and as you mentioned earlier, grit is so important because when you don’t have the resiliency to get back up again, after making the mistake. Then you paid the tuition cause you made the mistake, but you didn’t learn from it because you didn’t get it back. Great.

Jennifer: That’s great analogy, I guess.

Sean: So let’s go to one of the descriptions that I mentioned at the onset of the podcast. Micro-brandologist, you mentioned in the pre-show, is taking big lessons from big brands or brands that work and trying to break them down and make them understandable for entrepreneurs and inject them, hopefully in the processes and systems.

Correct me if I’m wrong. I mean, you’re, you’re the micro-brandologist not me, but how does that look like? And how does that help a certain business that you are consulting with whenever you do that? Tell us a story about that.

Jennifer: One. Yeah. So no, that’s pretty spot on. So microbrandologist, basically what I do is I take big brand, big brand concepts and strategies, and try to break them down like you said into nuggets that are, action-based, more digestible, things that they can plug into their business, and run with pretty quickly, right?

So the whole kind of gist of it is they should be able to have something, they go through it, they go through the kit, and they have something in their hands that they can implement, within four hours or less.

Does that mean they don’t need to do more work in that, refine it and everything else? Of course, yes. But they’ve got something. The way that I would sort of go about doing that is yeah, it’s taking, so if you take it even concepts like with, for instance, with visual branding. So kind of our first micro kit that we have out right now is branding and flash.

So typically now when I would be doing, when we would have done consulting before we had the consultancy on a big project, you know, your visual branding and your verbal branding we’re always last, because you have to build all the infrastructure, but that would have been us working with the client from scratch, doing everything, you know, for them or with them.

So in this case, if people are trying to plug and play, you know, and as we talked about cohesion so much, running a flash is all about giving them that cohesion. So it’s giving them that nugget. Now, is that them building a whole entire brand in four hours or less? No. But it’s giving them clarity and cohesion with their visual branding with some layers, like digging into the branding, and the personality, value system.

Aligning, trying to align it a little, getting them to start to think about their audience, you know, more and not just what they want in their brand, but they can plug and play that and run with it.

And if that’s all they ever do, it’ll help them immensely because at least they have that cohesion. You know, even if they don’t go and build the deeper layers at the stage. So it’s taking concepts like that, or like, you know, things like with positioning, you know, brand positioning is complicated, it’s it is, you know, a bit, it can be a bit tricky.

So it’s actually even made, made me push myself or how can I teach these concepts in a way that’s easy and digestible and things of this nature. So rather than me getting out sheets of paper and whiteboard and us spending days doing axis and all of this kind of stuff, I’ve created like an interactive spreadsheet where they can plug and play the information and it gives them that snapshot then.

It’s thinking of right, how can they take this information? Yes. Give them the know-how. Teach them the skills, but how can they take action on it? And for us, that’s really sort of critical. You know, we have kind of five sort of principles with our learning and it needs to be empowering and needs to be enjoyable as well and needs to be actionable. It needs to be real, and it needs to be accessible.

So it’s making sure that they can take that easily, digest it and run with it because they need those strategies. You know, they need, they need to know these things, but again, if I was to hand them, here’s how you build a brand, you know, here’s brown development on a plate and here’s, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They would be so overwhelmed with it because it’s very hard to run a business, especially at those early stages. It’s hard to run a business, and learn the things that you need to do to run your business at the same time. So if they can take it chunk by chunk, that’s kind of our philosophy.

Sean: Yeah. I imagine otherwise that outright projected, like they’d be thinking I’m already doing too much and –

Jennifer: Well, I think there’s a, there, you know, they think of either doing too much or what they do is they take so much on, you know, they take so much on again, kind of like using myself as an example, oh, I needed to learn this and I need to learn that. And I need to know how to do this. Or when one day I might want to do that.

And all of a sudden you’re doing, you know, all of these big, heavy courses that are eight modules and, you know, 45 minute videos and all this stuff. And it’s overwhelming because you have to get to the end of it. You have to do the eight, the eight modules to really figure out, right.

So that’s how it all works. So it’s kind of, it’s keeping it lean and main really, you know, here you go, plug and play and go and really kind of having that lean principle with it.