051 | 3 Essential Strategies for Expanding Your Business without Sacrificing Your Time

Have you ever felt like growing your business means sacrificing your sanity? 

In this episode, I'm serving up a triple scoop of business wisdom. I'm delving into the art of expanding your business without losing your sanity, sharing essential strategies to clarify your vision and goals, master the magic of delegation and outsourcing, and set rock-solid boundaries for a harmonious work-life tango. 

Plus, I've got a juicy invite for you to join the Female Founder Society on Facebook—a vibrant community where we can get real-time support and cheer each other on. Grab your earbuds and get ready to transform your business and life with a side of lady-boss vibes!

In this episode,

• You’ll learn a powerful three-part strategy to expand your business without sacrificing personal growth.
• Discover how to align your business growth with your personal values through vision and goals clarity.
• Master the art of delegation and outsourcing to focus on high-level strategic work.

This episode at a glance:

[02:02] If you are feeling overwhelmed at the thought of expanding your business, it is part of the entrepreneurial journey.

[04:20] If you love what you're doing, you'll be successful. So what would it take for you to love what you're doing in your business? 

[06:50] Don't try to compete with people that are 4 or 5 times your size.

[08:02] Establish clear boundaries between work and personal time, like specific work hours.

[09:41] Stop driving yourself so hard. Don't be the overachiever. Give yourself a little bit of grace.

Resources and Links mentioned in this episode

• Free Range Thinking
• Dawn Andrews
• Female Founder Society
• Check out our FREE RESOURCES!

You might also like

• How to Not Fail in Your First Year in Business
•  5 High-Value Launch Business Strategies 
• 3 Ways To Set Focused Goals 

More about the “My Good Woman” podcast

My Good Woman is a podcast for new and future female leaders, hosted by me, Dawn Andrews.

I’m a happily married hockey mom, proud female leader, and founder and CEO of Free Range Thinking, where we turn founders into confident CEOs with strategic consulting and leadership training.

Grab a seat at the table with me each week for candid conversations with culture-shifting, glass ceiling-busting, trailblazing women, who are leading enterprises that are making a change in the world. 

We discuss what makes them tick and how they get it all done. And we share actionable strategies to help you and your team get organized - so you can focus on your company’s growth, profit and impact. 

If you liked what you heard, don’t forget to follow along, so you never miss an episode. And before you go, leave us a review - it would mean a lot to us!

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “My Good Woman” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

My Good Woman
Ep. 51 |  3 Essential Strategies for Expanding Your Business without Sacrificing Your Time

Dawn Andrews:

You may have to slow it down. It may be a slow and steady pace, or you can decide that you don't need as much personal time and you really want to put it back into the business. And you can adjust this at any point. That is your gift as the founder of your company. So stop driving yourself so hard.

Don't be the overachiever. Give yourself a little bit of grace.

Welcome to the My Good Woman podcast, where we help female founders break past plateaus and get to the next level of business growth by refining their strategy, Building systems and streamlining operations. I'm Dawn Andrews, the founder and CEO of free range thinking business strategy consulting.

Join me each week for candid conversations with culture shifting glass ceiling, busting trailblazing women who are leading impactful enterprises and grab their strategies to help your business reach extraordinary levels of growth. 

Hey, Hey, Hey, are you a service based business owner constantly juggling the challenges of building and maintaining your business?

and building and maintaining your personal life, then you are in exactly the right place. Welcome to My Good Woman. I'm Dawn Andrews, and today's episode is Think Like a Strategist, where I give strategic answers to my listeners business questions. So this is like your free moment of coaching advice. You get some insight and some help for you in building your own business.

So today's question is from Christina, and her question is, How do I properly expand my business without sacrificing personal growth and time? First of all, thank you for listening, Christina. And thank you for asking your question. You are not alone. I know there are lots of other business owners that struggle with this.

I struggle with this. I don't think there's anybody that owns a business that doesn't struggle with maintaining some sort of, you know, I don't like the word balance, but some sort of tango between running and building and growing and scaling their business. And maintaining a rich, healthy, lovely personal life.

So, if you are feeling overwhelmed at the thought of expanding your business, it is part of the entrepreneurial journey. We are consistently pushing boundaries and comfort zones to grow, to grow as leaders, to grow as entrepreneurs. What we knew about running a business today is not the information that's necessary for the business we have tomorrow, so we constantly have to shift and change.

And when you shift, change, and stretch, overwhelm is just part of the ride. What if you could streamline that process and have a repeatable set of three strategies that could help you continue your business growth and your entrepreneurial journey while you still maintained a personal life? Let's get into it.

So first, I want to repeat your question. How do I properly expand my business without sacrificing personal growth and time? The first part of this three part repeatable strategy is actually in your question. The answer's in your question. I notice that you use the words properly expand my business, which indicates to me that even without knowing the details of your business, that you probably think there is a right answer and a wrong answer.

And to some degree, there are business best practices for every type of business. And there's also what's right for you. So the first step in this three step strategy It's to continually clarify your vision and your goals. And right now we're in the middle of the year, we're almost at the end of Q2, I'm dating this episode a little bit, but now is a perfect time to revisit your vision and your goals for your business.

And depending upon the type of business that you have and where you are in your growth cycle, it's always important to define success for you. What does it mean to be successful? What does business growth mean? What is proper expansion to you? You need to understand what that means from a revenue standpoint, from a team standpoint, and a broader impact, like your business exists, who are you helping and why.

And those business goals need to be aligned with your personal values so that you can have that harmonious path that you're looking for when you move forward. There's a quote by Albert Schweitzer, pulling out and dusting off some of the golden oldies. Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.

And if you love what you're doing, you'll be successful. So what would it take for you to love what you're doing in your business? And I say this with like a little bit of a flutter in my heart because I have to ask myself that question frequently. I'm a very driven person, I tend to be very type A, and I will throw myself under the bus on the regular and forget what would make me happy, and I forget to put that first.

So, I'm speaking to you from the heart. Think about what makes you happy. and what's absolutely essential for you on a personal level first as you continue to grow your business. I think we oftentimes get this backwards and that's what starts to make us ineffective at minimum and useless or burnt out at worst when it comes to running our business.

So what are your goals? How much money do you want to make with the business? How many people do you want to serve? What do you want to achieve this year? And those goals may or may not be realistic. You don't know until you start living into them. But then check in with yourself quarterly and give yourself the time to do that.

Most of us don't put time on our schedules to actually revisit what our plans and goals are. And if we don't check in, then we overwork. Step one. What do you want? How do you define success? How do you define happiness? How do you define? a proper expansion for your business. Its strategy is delegation and outsourcing.

So there are things that you are great at and gifted at, and there are things that you are not. There's always some way to offload some of what you're doing and to simplify. Sometimes once you identify your core competencies, if you don't have the resources yet to be able to put some people on it or put some digital tools on it, you may just have to drop it.

And just make things really simple. And what I mean by the simplest is usually one product or service, one target customer and one channel. And if you can keep hitting one target customer and one channel with that same service over and over, and then develop the systems and the sales process and the marketing process to support that, then you can start adding on from there.

But we often feel like we have to show up like bigger competitors out there in the marketplace. Have a reality check. Where are you right now in your own business? And build that business. Keep your eye on your own paper. You're just starting to make sales. Don't try to compete with people that are 4 or 5 times your size, that may have 10 times your revenue, and 10 times your team.

It's a recipe for disaster and you will lose your personal life in a hot minute. So here's what to do. Create a not to do list to identify tasks that you should delegate, streamline, or even remove completely from your workflow. And then you can hire, trade, or work with people who have skills that are outside your core competencies, like administrative tasks.

Marketing or sales processes, social media, automations. And just to help you out, I will flag you on it. I'm going to create another episode about using AI to replace a team member. And for all of you listening, nobody freak out. Nobody's losing their jobs. That episode is just for business owners that don't have the monetary resources yet to hire an actual person to do some of these more administrative tasks.

And they can use AI as a tool to help them get their work done so they can raise their revenue and get that team member. So delegating and outsourcing, step two. And then the third step in this repeatable strategy to expand your business and still maintain your personal life is setting boundaries.

Establish clear boundaries between work and personal time, like specific work hours. Taking regular breaks and unplugging from work after hours. I have an executive schedule tool that I'll add in the show notes to help you break down some of the core time blocks that you might need in your schedule to be able to build your business, and then the core time blocks that you need to take care of yourself.

And to give you a personal example, there's an hour each day for me to exercise. And I will tell you I came kicking and screaming to it, but now you cannot take it away from me. I will drop other things. I will drop work to go exercise, because if I don't, I'm not taking care of myself and my brain and my heart.

And another thing that I do is schedule out all of our family vacations and days off from school, since I'm a mom of two. That's one of the first things I do every October, as I plan for the next year, is block out our vacation times or days off. And business trips or business conferences that I want to attend, not only because they're business, but because they give me joy to attend them.

So my schedule, I put all the good stuff in first and then fill in around it. So what this can mean for you as you're trying to grow and expand your business is it might slow your timeline a little bit. If you're taking a lot of time out for personal time because that's what you require, then your timing of how fast you grow may shift a little bit.

You may have to slow it down. It may be a slow and steady pace. Or you can decide that you don't need as much personal time and you really want to put it back into the business. And you can adjust this at any point. That is your gift as the founder of your company. So stop driving yourself so hard. Don't be the overachiever.

Give yourself a little bit of grace and put things in the calendar that you know would be fun. To sum up, These are the three areas that are repeatable so that you can properly expand your business. Clarify your vision and goals, delegate and outsource, and then prioritize your work life tango. Put all the good stuff in there first.

And by honing in on these strategies, you're building a foundation not only for where you are right now in your business, you're also creating a foundation for how you will handle the eventual growth and expansion of your business and still be able to take care of yourself. Here is my request to you.

Reflect on your current business practices. Is there one change that you can make today that would create more space for personal growth and personal well being? And I would love for you to share your thoughts with us on social media. Use the hashtag MyGoodWomanTango. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review and share this episode with fellow female founders and business leaders.

Christina, thank you again for your question today. And hey, before you go, I've got something special for all of you amazing female founders out there. If you're looking to connect with a community of like minded women who are all about scaling their service based businesses, then you have got to join us in the Female Founder Society on Facebook.

In the group, we share valuable tips, host live Q and A's, and support each other through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. It is the perfect place to get the guidance and camaraderie you need to take your business to the next level. I know, I know Facebook, most of us are on LinkedIn. Why are we headed over there?

Well, let me just tell you that Facebook offers more group functionality to help you learn, grow and interact with each other than the typical LinkedIn group. So head over to Facebook and search for female founder society, or click the link in the show notes to join us today. I can't wait to see you there.

Until next time, keep growing, keep thriving, and remember you have the power to make a lasting impact. Thank you for joining me, my good woman. If you loved today's episode, make sure to subscribe. Consider it like getting a front row seat at the premiere of the year's biggest blockbuster every episode.

You wouldn't want to miss the opening scene of a cinema classic, right? So hit subscribe to ensure you're in the audience, popcorn in hand for our next episode. Don't let the credits roll without you. See you soon.