Hi, I'm Samantha Hartley. Welcome back to the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This is season two. In season one, we covered what I consider to be the fundamentals.

And in this season, I plan to cover what I call Business Growth Strategies. People think that you grow your business with sales and marketing, but there are many, many different ways to grow your business. And a lot of them are unexpected or unusual. And so those are the things that I want to take a look at in this season.

And the first one is for today I want to talk about habits. I don't know that a lot of people would consider it to be an obvious thing to say that the way you're going to grow your business is with habits. But this is one of the things that I've seen make a big difference in my client's businesses and in mine as well.

A couple of years ago, I saw a presentation by BJ Fogg, who is the author of the book Tiny Habits. And at the time he was just talking about the concept of habits that he was working with at Stanford University. And what they basically looked at was that you form a new habit by having a trigger, something that prompts a habit, and then you do the habit and then you have a little celebration. And he talked about that as the recipe for creating new habits. And I was very intrigued by that. And one of the habits that I wanted to create was a consistent workout habit. So I'd been very streaky, I might do them for a while and then fall off the wagon.

So I wanted to create, using his model, a consistent workout habit. And so what I did was basically the trigger. When I get up in the morning first thing, I would do something, do my workout and then when I did it after I did it, I would celebrate. Now, his example is he goes like this, "I am awesome!" Which I loved, and thought was very cute and charming. And it's a really fun and simple way to kind of celebrate and also acknowledge the thing that you've just done.

What is really interesting about the way that he wants you to form a habit is that he wants to do it with a tiny thing. So tiny habits so, for example, if my goal was to eventually work out for 45 minutes or an hour, he wanted you to begin with the smallest increment of that possible. So what I did was I invited myself to hop on the elliptical that I have here at home for five minutes. And so on the days when I was really reluctant to workout or I'd get up and I just didn't feel like it, I'd say, listen, it's just five minutes. It's just five minutes.

Well, the beginning of forming a habit is usually the hardest part. And so what I did was I'd get up, I would do my five minutes. Some days I kept strictly to the five minutes, but most days, you know, I'd do 10 or so, and then I'd hop off and go about my day with a celebration, of course. And then what happened next was really interesting. By a few months into it, I was already working out for twenty-five minutes, even though I promised myself, you only have to do five minutes, I'd do it for twenty-five minutes and it was just fine, really easy. And then eventually I was doing 45 minutes per session and working out very consistently. And that was how I created this workout habit and I was really, really amazed, first of all, by how easy it had been, because definitely doing anything for five minutes is really easy, but also I surprised myself and that this wasn't a thing that I thought that I could do consistently because my pattern in the past had been to be so streaky with it. So I really saw the impact of his incredibly simple recipe for creating a habit and making change. Now, what on earth does this have to do with your business? Well, one of the most important things that I see happen with clients is that they drop their marketing when they get too busy with other things.

Usually what they're busy with is client work. And what I need to remind them is your number one client is you. Put your own oxygen mask on first, your number one client is you and so the marketing that you need to do, the business efforts that you need to make are for your own business. We all know client work gets done right, but our work tends to fall to the bottom of the pile. So I wanted to bring a way that you can begin to make doing work in your own business and not just a priority, but a possibility by introducing it as a habit.

So what do you need in order to do this? First of all, I think accepting the belief that you are your number one client. Why? Because if your business isn't getting taken care of. If the lifeblood of your business, which is revenues, starts to fall by the wayside, then you can't serve all those other clients. Right. We need you to be successful and profitable in order to stay in business. So there's a very good reason to prioritize you as your own number one client.

The other thing is, as I said, client work will get done, But if we neglect our own work, what you're going to find is you're going to struggle to have a consistent revenue flow. When people come to me and they don't have enough clients, what I will always tell them is the number reason for not enough clients is not enough marketing. Why do you not do enough marketing again? Because you get busy with client work, I've had people come to me who had seven-figure businesses, but they have huge peaks and valleys in the revenue flow because they've been embedded. So a guy came to me recently, he's been embedded with a client, a single client, for years. And so now he's actually out of work and searching that basically. Now it's not that bad. But the point is, had he been consistently marketing throughout the time that he was embedded with that other client, he would have a pool of clients waiting for him or potential clients at least waiting for him. So you want to be consistently marketing your business. And a great way to create consistency is to focus on your marketing for a set amount of time each day. Now, what I love is a 50 minute hour. It's an academic hour, when we teach school, a lot of times you'll notice that it goes 50 minutes because it's about the point where your attention span cuts off and you need to kind of take a rest and think about something else. I think all you need to market your business effectively and work on it well is to build this 50 minute a day habit.

So how do you build a 50 minute a day habit? I think you start with the five minutes just promising five minutes. My goal would be that you would get eventually to 50 minutes working on your business but for me, in the beginning, when I was writing or doing work on my business, I would find that it was incredibly hard to focus for really long periods of time. And eventually I got to the point where a lot of my day is spent working on my own business way more than 50 minutes. There's client work as well, but a lot of the days spent working on my business and it's no longer as painful and difficult as it was back in the beginning.

Now, one mistake that people will make is instead of spending an hour a day, they'll think I'm just going to do everything I can set aside Fridays, that'll be my day for my business and I'll just do everything on that day. Well, I think two things happen, one is that Fridays feel like the beginning of the weekend and I don't think it feels like a very studious time to sit down and do things. But also, James Clear, who is the author of Atomic Habits, has another point of view on the whole habits thing. He has studied the B.J. Fogg stuff, and he's taking it to another level, an interesting level in his work I would say. And he writes about the idea of intensity versus consistency. So it really takes consistency to build a habit and that's really the thing that you're looking for. So in his book, when he talks about intensity, he says, you know, examples of intensity are run a marathon, write a book in 30 days, a meditation retreat. Those are examples of intensity. But the thing that gets us to be able to do those things are the things that we do consistently, and that is don't miss a workout for two years, write every week and participate in daily silence. If you do that daily, then you're ready for a meditation retreat.

So I want you to build up to days when you might have a day when you would go away and have a whole workday but I want you to build up to that with these 50 minute increments. And as I said, if you can't do 50 immediately, just do five or 10 just start with where you are. So you want to say, first thing in the morning when I sit down at my desk, for example, or whenever you're able to do that, maybe it's first thing after lunch, maybe it's when the clock hits four whatever is your trigger for when you start your new habit. And then for five minutes, I'm just going to work on my marketing or for 10 or 20 or 50 maybe can start from 50 right away. I'm going to work on my marketing and then when the timer goes off, you can say, I'm awesome and then you can go and do something else.

And I actually encourage you in the beginning to not work past the 50 minute hour, because then you kind of set up a thing that you're abusing your promise to yourself. I really want you to say I'm going to work this long and then I'm gonna take a break. And if you choose to come back later and do that, that's fine. But I want you to get yourself used to a 50-minute session.

And as far as what you do in those 50-minute sessions, we've talked in the first season about all kinds of different marketing techniques that you can do. And during those 50 minute hours, you can study marketing techniques. You can make outreach calls. You can write emails. You can create content. There's all kinds of things that you can do with that hour and yes, studying counts that's still working on your business during that time.

So what I'd love for you to commit to is this next week. Can you start a daily marketing habit? Can you make it formal so that you're honoring that time and honoring your business? And if so, then I would love to see you figure out what your trigger is going to be, whether it's the first thing in the morning or at 4pm or whatever is the trigger. Then decide it's really helpful at the end of one session, write down what you want to do tomorrow in your planning session, that way when you sit down, you already have an idea of what you're going to be doing with your time and then work as long as you decide to work somewhere between 5 and 50 minutes and then when the timer goes off congratulate yourself, celebrate yourself, and then move on to the next thing.

So I would love it if you would do that. And I also want to hear about how that goes for you. You're always welcome to get in touch with me, and one way to do that is in the Facebook group for consultants, called Profitable Joyful Consulting or you can contact me through any of the media where you find this podcast. For today, I'm Samantha Hartley and I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consultancy.