How Business-Owning Moms Can Save 10+ Hours Every Week

I promise that if you’re a business-owning mom, you can absolutely save at least 10 hours every week and have the time & flexibility you want and face it, really need. In fact, by refining how you structure your business, you can replace your feast or famine income with steady recurring revenue you can count on at the same time.

Mom and daughter giggling on the grass. This mom saves 10 hours every week to spend with her family.

Most of you already know that I’m also a business-owning mom, and it’s taken me a while to figure out some of the mindset shifts, strategies, and tactics needed to open up that extra time. I just knew I needed (and wanted!) free afternoons to spend with my son.

Why Do You Need More Time?

If you’re anything like me, you left a corporate job to build your own business so that you can have more flexibility, more freedom, and more time with your family. Then you discovered that oh my goodness, you’re working through dinners and having challenges planning because you don’t know when your income is coming in. And it’s worse than the job you left!

So I’ve done some figuring out and I would like to show you exactly how you can save 10 hours every week. I’ve built an entirely new course and coaching program, the Done by 3:00 Workday for Business-Owning Moms. And I am going to give you all the big secrets right here, right now.

Do you need to save 10+ hours each week just to get a little time with your kids? Learn about the Done by 3:00 Workday coaching program – I’m inviting you (100% no sales pitch) to chat with me for a few minutes to find your next best step to saving time in your business. Click here to schedule!

Business-Owning Moms Are The BOM(B)!

If you are a business-owning mom, then you know that you are the center of everything. And one of your biggest problems is that you just don’t feel like you have the time to be both effective in your business and a good mom to your family. You certainly don’t have much time for yourself or a lunch with friends. The whole “running your own business” -thing didn’t work out like you thought. You believed you would end up with the flexibility and freedom you wanted. Plus a little time to go to lunch!

The good news is that you CAN get back two hours every day, which is 10 hours every week, or 40 hours every month!

Seriously, wouldn’t that be outrageously helpful?

And while doing that you can also create a nice steady income that you’ll be able to count on and plan on.

What’s Stopping You Now?

Now there are three big things that tend to stop business-owning moms.

It is pretty common to try to be everything to everyone and end up losing who you really are, what you want for your life, and what you want for your business. What happens? Elli Johnson says it well, “I ended up not knowing who I was anymore.”

The second problem is that many moms face a tremendous amount of guilt that is paralyzing. You feel that guilt when you’re working because you think you really ought to be spending time with your kids. And then when you’re doing family things you feel guilty because you’re not working and building your business to support your family.

And those guilty feelings cycle around and around and prevent you from being able to do much of anything.

The third problem is when your income is unpredictable – feast or famine. And that’s really frustrating because even if you make a decent amount in a year’s time, you cannot ever plan on it! You don’t know when your money is actually going to come into your own hands. And so you don’t know if you can put deposits down on things you don’t know if you can plan on purchasing uniforms for sports.

Sure there are budgeting tricks you can use and complicated bank account tricks. But if you had a nice steady cash flow each month that you could rely on, wouldn’t that really change how you operate?

The Done by 3:00 Workday model – save 10+ hours every week & gain steady, recurring revenue

How to Combat the Problems of BOMs

Clarify

The solution to being everything to everyone is focus – getting really clear. When I’ve helped my clients clarify what they want and need out of their lives and their businesses, they’ve found they can better see a path to flexibility and freedom.

Clock & Control

The solution to your guilt is actually manufacturing more hours in the day and making them flexible by clocking and controlling your time.

Craft

The solution to your feast or famine income problem is a steady monthly recurring revenue. You can create that by crafting systems to guarantee you have income flowing.

9 Steps to a Done by 3:00 Workday

So, if you want to take this model and work it for yourself, here are the nine steps to work through.

Discover Your Dreams

First, you’re going to work on discovering your dreams. For some reason, for business-owning moms, that’s harder than it sounds like. Again, we try to be everything to everyone and we put everyone else first. The key is doing a little self discovery, figuring out what you ultimately want.

Chart a Path

The second step you’re going to need to take is to chart a pathway to those dreams. And the way you can do that is to really dig deep and figure out your personal values and what your vision is for the world and for yourself and your business. And then from all of that information you need to distill a very concrete, jargon-free mission statement. Post that mission statement somewhere visible to keep you motivated on those days where you don’t want to do the task that you’re scheduled to do, or when you just don’t feel like you’re making any progress. That mission statement will be your motivation.

Find Your People

The third step is to get really clear on the people you serve. Which people are they? What problems do they have? Where would you find them?

So if you clarify those three things first, then you can move on to the second solution – clock and control.

Take Stock

Step four is taking stock of where you are – of your time, of your energy, and how you actually spend both of those. This is wildly eye-opening if you’ve never done it. We do so many things that are not truly on purpose and we need to find out what those things are in our lives so we can either do them on purpose or take them off our calendar.

And for some folks it can be (and when I say some folks I mean me) a little embarrassing. I had to ask myself, did I really spend that much time reading fluff novels? Did I really spend that much time scrolling through Instagram? Yes, I did. The good news is that this exercise is just for you only. You don’t have to share your results with anybody else!

Protect Your Time

The fifth step is to protect the time that you do have. To do that you have set up barriers and boundaries to make sure that your time is your time. And that when you want to be spending time with clients you spend time with clients, but when you want to be working on your own things, you’re working on your own things.

Unfortunately, it’s people who really take time away from you. Your leads & clients, your family, and you do it to yourself too. Protecting time is super-challenging for the people pleasers! Having firm “rules” in place, and processes to enforce those rules is key to overcoming the temptation to give in.

Map Out Your Time

Once you have taken stock and set up those protections, then and only then you can take your goals and map them out on your calendar.

The key to achieving big goals is incremental progress. You just do a little bit each day. You need to know your template for the day and how to break your goals down into the kinds of milestones that will fit onto your calendar. You will also have to schedule around distractions if you’re going to get a day’s worth of work by 3:00.

Some days, you’ll only an hour to work, and other days you’ll have family vacations or school plays or calls from the school. You have to be disciplined enough to use the time you do have and mapping out your time this way will help you do that.

This map out section has honestly been the very most helpful to me in my own business. I still (of course!) think I need more time, but I get a tremendous amount of work done in about 4 hours of work each day.

These previous six steps are going to give you the foundation you need to create products and systems that are actually going to work for you in the way that you want them to. Don’t skip or hurry through them.

Product Plan

Step seven is to create a product plan that serves the same people you identified in step 3 above. Different products and services will serve them in various ways at various price points and various effort levels.

Business-owning moms have such scarce time resources that scalable products need to be the backbone of their product plan. If you do want to offer services that you deliver yourself, you are going to have to charge a premium price or they will never be worth the time it will take away from other things.

Hands-Free Monthly Recurring Revenue

Once you have that product plan in place, you will need to build out your product suite, starting with your core product and moving higher and lower on a price scale. I recommend starting with creating a hands-free monthly recurring revenue product.

A lot of business only moms could do this directly from their core product. And once you do that you can be sure that you are going to have money coming in every month like clockwork.

Knowing you can have your business expenses paid for each month and knowing what you’re going to have to spend on things like uniforms, scouting trip deposits, on the yearbook ads ahead of time is going to save your life. The peace of mind this brings will reflect in your business decisions and more relaxed time with your family.

Create Systems

The final step once you’ve done all these other steps, is to create systems around them so they can be repeated and scale. You can do the same thing over and over again. You can automate things, you can train others to do them.

Too many business-owning moms try to create the systems before they build their foundation (steps 1 – 6). But if you do have that foundation, systems will ensure your business runs smoothly. You can have those afternoons off and you can have a nice steady recurring revenue.

Pin to remember where to read the plan for saving 10+ hours every week!

Cycle Back Through Again

When you finish up the 9 steps, you might want to sit back and admire your work! Take a minute, then dive back in. The more work you do, the more your dreams and desires will change. You might find that the people you wanted to serve are changing their ideas, and you need to re-evaluate. Once you add a new product, your calendar tasks will change. And with every season, there are new kid activities to plan around.

When these things happen, just cycle back through again and make adjustments.

Take back your afternoons!

Posted in HelloKateSmith