You don't have to replicate that old 40 to 60 hours work week. You don't have to overwork yourself to justify high prices. Hey, it's Samantha. Popping in to say that for many women, consultants working in their businesses is just not easy. One of the early requests for a topic to cover came from a listener who asked how to make delivery lighter. This episode was my response. I'm sharing it today as an encore because, well, you probably know why. It's just easier to continue those bad overwork habits than it is to simplify. Here's my ideas about how you can do that. If you have a colleague or a friend who is committed to going above and beyond, share this one with her. She's smart and talented enough not to have to do that. Welcome to profitable, joyful consulting, where you'll discover how to multiply your revenues without exhaustion, working with perfect clients on transformational engagements. I'm your host, Samantha Hartley. If you're a woman consultant ready to increase your profits and enjoy your business more, you're in the right place. First, this concept. You're familiar, I'm sure, with the genius zone. This is a term that's been popularized online. I think Dan Sullivan from strategic coach might have invented this term. I've always thought that the genius zone was a great concept. It's the thing that you do that you're best at in all the world. Like, it comes so easily to you, you don't even feel like you're working. But for a lot of people, the genius zone can be. They can be really amazing at something, but it can be kind of depleting for them to do it. So, for example, I'm a really strong writer. I would consider it one of the areas of my genius zone. But if I write for too long, as I write, it really depletes me. So it's an area that takes away energy rather than gives it to me. By contrast, working on strategy with a client is something I can do all day long. And in fact, I do all day long. When I'm on a vip date with a client, we just talk strategy, ideas, we plan out their business. So it's a genius zone, but it also gives me energy. I think that distinction is really key here. So I added, based on one of my values for my business, the idea of the joy zone. So the joy zone is where you're taking. You're looking at things that either deplete or give you energy as you do them. And, you know, I'm not saying that joy is exclusively energy but the thing that makes me joyful is I have fun doing it, and I feel expanded doing it. There's a lot more to say about the joy and genius zone than what we'll get into today. But if you think about the things that you're doing in business as things that are you're best at, and you should definitely be the one doing it, and also, it gives you energy as opposed to kind of draining you. If there's something like writing, I do write for my business. I just keep it to a minimum. And I do it at very strategic times when I have a lot of energy. And, for example, those strategy calls, I do them after I've done the writing because they give me the energy that the writing has taken away from me. So that's a way for you to begin to think about the joy and genius zone. And specifically, what is your joy and genius zone? What are the activities that you do in your business that you're like, I wouldn't give these away for anything. I can do them better, usually faster, more efficiently than anyone else in my business. And I really want to do these. I want to keep these, at least for right now. You might decide to let go of some of them later, but at least for right now, I definitely want to hang on to these activities and then think about the opposite. The things that are not your genius zone and are not joyful, what are those things that you feel like you should or could let go of? When people tell me that their work is too high effort, the client work that they're doing, or any work that they're doing in their business is too high effort. What it tells me is that too much of what they're doing is not in the their joy and genius zone. And this is what I'm going to unpack for you today in this episode is like, what should you be doing? What should you let go of? And how do you know some of the reasons that client delivery work is so onerous? You know, one of the big ones is having to travel. And I think the pandemic, which we're still in as of the recording of this episode, is, is showing us how much of our work can actually be done remotely. In many cases, yes, there have been businesses that collapsed because they couldn't deliver the work remotely. But for a lot of consultants who are in the advice business, we can even collaborate through video conferencing and tools like that. And even though in many cases, it's a pale limitation of what we would do together in person, it does show us how much we have been relying on face to face communication to do things that could have been done remotely. So I'm sure you've heard this expression, this meeting could have been an email or should have been an email. I've been plenty of times in a meeting where I feel like someone could have just sent an email and informed people. We didn't have to take all of that time to get together. And this is true of your work with your clients, all of that travel. So many of my clients are grounded from travel, and that has given them more time. And during that time, luckily, they didn't all fill that with more client work. It's given them time to kind of work on their businesses and think about how they want their businesses to be. You know, we almost had everything taken away from us with this pandemic. And so what do we want to create and how do we want the business to be? A lot of times, doing the client work, the actual client work, just takes too darn long. Like, what is taking so long with it? So let's look at four ways that you can reduce the amount of time that you're spending delivering the work to the clients and also make it more joyful. The first thing that I want you to look at, the first way that you can reduce effort, is by leading the client. Clients will very often default to either what they've done with someone else or how they think it should be. And that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with you. Right. It might not be your process, your way of doing things or whatever. And because you think that the client has a specific idea, you kind of fall in and just go along with that. What I would prefer you to is think about with intention, create the experience you want to have. Start the way you want to continue. So I've said many times, you begin to lead the client as soon as they fill out a form to talk to you, get on a call with you very early in the relationship, you begin to lead the client. So, hey, thanks for getting on today's call. Here's our agenda for this call. Take leadership on your very first call with them. Here's how the call is going to go. Or, hey, thanks for meeting with me. What I'd like to cover today is, and taking leadership on calls in meetings of the working relationship is going to help you to create the relationship and create the work experience that you want to have and that you know, will benefit the client most. Listen, you're the expert. You know how things should go and so very often I find that people will say, well, the client said, you know, send me a proposal. So I just had to send them a proposal. No, you don't. The client said, well, we should meet on this, about this. And I just had to do it. No, you didn't. You should say, here's how this is going to go. We're going to have these meetings and it's going to work this way. I'm not saying that for you to be bossy of the client. I'm saying that because you should craft the experience that is in the highest good of all concerned. You should create an experience, a work experience that benefits everyone. And a lot of times people have work habits that don't benefit everyone. So one of the first things is strategic presence. One person in the Facebook group mentioned the idea of weaning his clients off of him having to be in person all the time. And I've shared this with so many of my own clients who seem to be addicted to the travel. There's so much travel that they're doing, whether it's local travel to be with the client in person, or worse. When you're having to travel across the country to be on site with a client, you do not need to be on site for so much of the work. That's old school. We have new ways of doing things now, and I don't think it serves you. I'll tell you, one image I have is when you come in to a project or an engagement to work with them, and they go, hey, we cleared up this little office for you, or you have this little cubicle and this will be your place to sit here as a consultant. One of the huge advantages that we have is this objectivity and this outsider ness. There's a cache for you in being the one who still is. You know, it's coming from outside to advise you, and as soon as they give you a desk, you become part of the system and part of the problem, and you lose a lot of that, the prestige factor, the specialness of you being on site with them. So I want you to use what I call strategic presence. Only be on site in person when you need to be. When do you need to be on site and in person? At the kickoff, probably at the signing of a contract, but not necessarily at the kickoff meeting, definitely to get everybody on board at any of the specific interactive meetings, you know, a swot analysis, an assessment phase or something like that. Possibly doing interviews, but only if you're doing group interviews or something like that. So you're hearing the examples. I'm saying is times when it would be incredibly detrimental to try to do this remotely. Otherwise you can be remote and get the same effects. So strategic presence is the kickoff meeting milestones along the way, the triumphant finale, presentation of results or presentation of information, and the plan and deciding of what the next steps are. Those kinds of meetings, these pivotal, important milestone meetings is when you definitely need to be on site. Now, if something goes wrong, I would fly there, right. You want to pull something out of the fire if it needs to be pulled out of the fire. So that's a time when strategic presence is actually in your favor. Definitely. Things can be solved in person better and more effectively than they can be done remotely. Don't try to do that by email, please. At least do a phone call if things go wrong. A lot of times you get pushback of like, well, so I'm. So I'll assume that you'll be here for these six weeks and then you'll do this thing and this thing. If you have to do that, that's fine. But we're trying to get to ease and delivery. So we're looking for any opportunity that you don't have to be on site. And there's an expression that I've taught my clients when someone says, but, oh, I thought you would be here, or I thought you would do this, or I thought you billed by the hour, or I thought, you can just say. We don't work that way. That's simple. We don't work that way. That's not how we work. Here's how we work. It doesn't have to be cranky. It doesn't have to be conflict. You can just be saying, that's not how we work. Here's how we work. Leading the client in the way that you work and using strategic presence and teaching them how you're going to work with them from the very beginning is going to help you to have a low effort delivery because you know what's best for the client and how to best deliver that better than they know. You're the expert. Use it. The second thing that I want you to look at is delegating. If it's not in your joy and genius zone, it's depleting you, so you should not do it. Many times I'll have clients who are like, they're thrilled by invoicing. Like, here's. This is money coming in. This is the. Sending these invoices out is the funnest thing I do in my job. Okay, awesome. Keep that. Keep that. If it's rejuvenating for you or the opposite is they'll be three months behind on receivables because they hate invoicing and they don't do it. What I want you to do is go through and make a list of the things that you're like. This gives me energy and I love to do it and I'm great at doing it. And if that needs to be three lists, fine. Then I want you to make a list of things that I would pay really good money to never have to do again. And pay attention to what that is because you, there are people who will do these jobs for you. You can bring in team members, they don't have to be full time employees. You can bring in team members who will do these jobs for you. Even if it's something like strategic planning, you can bring someone in who really wants to do that. And it doesn't diminish you as a consultant. This is your cadre of experts that you bring in. So make sure that you are doing the things that fuel you and the things that you're best at. So you can delegate to other team members, whether they're admin people who are helping you keep the business running, other experts who can help you to create what you're doing. For example, if you're doing elearning or workshops and things like that, there are curriculum experts whose whole job it is to figure out how do we structure this thing and how do we break this down for maximum learning. If that's not your gift, that your gift is the content of it, but not the structuring of that content, then for goodness sake, bring in an expert who can do that with you, help you, who can lift you up and keep you in your own joy and genius zone, you can also, and I think this is super key. So we're delegating to our team, to peer experts that we bring in and you can delegate to the client. So often what is happening, and this is about leadership, so often what is happening is that you're taking on too much responsibility and you're not allowing the clients to own the process. As we go through this process, whether it is marketing, planning, leadership development, it, every single one of these processes should involve people on their team. And in some cases, you can give the whole thing to people on their team. Back in my early days as a consultant, I would swoop in, I would do a brand plan, I would interview the clients, I would go away into my workshop and I would put together a brand plan. I would talk to them about a few more things, go away into my workshop and come up with a marketing plan, and then I would give it to the clients. And no wonder they had trouble implementing, you know, I would teach them, I would coach them and things like that. But I had still secretly away from them, created the thing rather than, you know, even as much as I had incorporated them in that process. That still wasn't enough to get the results. So an engagement might be $60,000. I'd go away, do my thing, come back, present the thing, and then, you know, the results would be mixed because they hadn't had enough of a participation or a stake in the creation of this. Then later I had an epiphany which was, how about I have, instead of, I go away and do all the homework, the clients do the homework. So I would interact with them. And in the same stage, when I would normally go and do a hidden thing, I taught them the process that I was using. They did that. So they developed the brand, they developed the marketing plan, and then the results were completely different. They were transformationally different for the client because they had, even the person who was remote, most remote from the marketing department felt ownership of the marketing plan because he or she had had a part in developing it. And from my side, it was among the most profitable work that I ever did, because instead of working 6600 hours for $60,000, I worked about 60 hours for $60,000. And that's a much better use of my time. It allowed me to better be a better version of myself and bring more of my genius to my clients. So think about of the things that you're doing. Which of those can you delegate to the client? All the scheduling, you can say, well, here's what I'd like to do, is have someone from your team handle all the scheduling so they can connect with your people and connect with me and get that done. So a lot of the admin can go away. And then as far as the expertise that you're doing, what part of your process can you not just involve the client in, but empower them to do themselves? This is knowledge transfer, and a lot of consultants fear doing this. If they fear if I teach them how to do it, then they will never need me again. But that's not the case. Usually if you teach them how to do it and they get a beneficial result, they want you back when they're ready for the next level of work. So I think that's much more exciting than doing the same thing with clients over and over again. It's like, where are you evolving to? So think about what you can delegate to clients. Many people will tell you if you're, if everything is too high effort, very often it's that you need more systems in your business. So the core system that I'll just talk about today is to have a signature system. When people tell me that I have to find out what the client needs and I have to come up with this process, and I have to design a workshop and I have to do these things, what that tells me is they're doing way too much custom work. It really behooves you to find your groove as far as the problems you solve and the solutions you deliver to create a system around that you have a signature system or signature process, and then do the same work over and over again so that the system stays the same. You're basically doing the same work. But the thing that varies and makes it fun and exciting and new every time is you're applying this to different clients. When I first started as a consultant, everybody said, oh, it's a cookie cutter process if you do this. We don't do a cookie cutter. We do a custom process. It's custom every time for every client. And at the time, that was in vogue and very popular to do that. But what I realized as a consultant myself over the years, Washington, a cookie cutter is called like, what it's known for is getting the same result every single time. It gets a consistent cookie that looks like a gingerbread man every single time. If I'm doing a custom thing, I'm cutting that thing out with a knife or something, you know, you're going to get a mangled cookie because you can't create a consistent result every time if you're constantly meeting new challenges and doing something new. I know if I come in and do this brand problem and this marketing problem, then I'm going to be able to, I can promise them what's going to happen for them. When I work with my business growth partners, I can pretty much promise what the outcome will be. If I do my part and you do your part, then this is what you can expect because there's a signature system behind it. So if your work, delivering your work is too difficult right now, it's likely that you're doing too much custom, and your opportunity is to say, for whom have I gotten the best results and what did I do when I was working with them? And can I put together a program? It doesn't have to be an e learning, but it can be an e learning. This is the beauty of it. What's my seven step process? Or ten or twelve or whatever? What am I doing every time that gets those results and then find who needs that and keep doing that over and over again. That's where you're going to thrive and get really amazing results. The last thing I'll tell you is that if effort is too high when you're delivering results to these clients, when you're delivering work to the clients, it's probably because you're undercharging. If you were being paid twice what you're charging to do the work, would it still be too high? Effort might not be. So a way to feel that you are not overworking is to feel that you're being honored for the work that you are doing. And that happens when you charge what you think is the right amount for the transformation and the results that you're giving. So a thing I want you to consider is, if I were being paid twice this, would I feel differently about this work? And if the answer is yes, then you know what you need to do. Those are four ways that you can deliver amazing work to your clients with ease. And I hope you do continue to do that cause your clients need you and we don't want you to get burned out. My promise to my clients and to you is that you can grow your business, even double your revenues, and you don't have to exhaust yourself in the process. And a great way to do that is going to be to pay attention to your work in your joy and genius zone and then lead the clients. Use your presence strategically. Delegate anything that you shouldn't be doing. Systemize your work into signature systems, signature approaches, proprietary approaches, and last of all, take a look at your prices. And with that, I am wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business. Thanks for listening. As a thank you for being part of my community, I'm sharing free, exclusive resources to help expand your consulting business. Head to samanthahartley.com super to access bonus content and tools from the show. For a complete transcript of this episode and all profitable joyful consulting episodes, visit samanthahartley.com dot.