Categories
Business Blogging Entrepreneurship

3 Ways Being Too Busy Hurts Your Business—And What You Can Do About It

Being super busy is still a woefully outdated badge of honor for so many business owners. We equate busy with successful.

Why do we do this? Because we also have an outdated viewpoint of what success looks like.

We all need clients to be in business—the word itself reads like busy-ness. But being too busy will actually make your business suffer.

It’s understandable that you don’t want your business to be slow or have to worry about where you’ll get your next client. But that doesn’t mean we need to glorify being busy.

Here are three ways being overly busy hurts your business.

1. Being Too Busy Shortchanges Your Clients

When you’re busy, you tend to forget all the superior service details that set you apart from your competitors, and you end up shortchanging your clients. When your clients don’t get the attention they’ve come to expect from you, you risk losing them entirely.

2. Being Too Busy Isn’t Sustainable

Your business is reliant on your health and well-being, and, even if you have a team in place and can delegate tasks, you’re still ultimately in charge of it all. Studies show that we’re not using all our vacation days and are working longer hours. The stress to perform at top capacity is not sustainable physically or mentally.

3. Busy Leads to Burnout

When you’re in a place where you’re starting to hate your job and it’s a job you created for yourself, you’re in burnout or close to it. If you’re too deep in the day-to-day, you lose sight of the big picture and why you started your business in the first place.

Tips to Be Less Busy and More Successful

So how do you climb out of the burden of busy? Here are a few tips that can keep your business moving forward, but not buried in busy.

Stop Running Away

This tip may sting a little. Some of the time, being too busy is a symptom of low self-esteem. We can inflate our own importance and make ourselves unreachable by simply being “too busy”.

If you’re finding yourself overwhelmed and too busy to engage in the things you want to do, you need to do some soul searching and ask yourself why. Maybe you’re a people pleasing person or maybe you want your competitors or frenemies to think you’re important.

Spoiler alert: You already are. Sit with this for a while and ask yourself what being too busy satisfies in you.

Watch Your Mouth

Stop saying, “I don’t have time.” You do have time, but just not for everything. When you use your language to prioritize the things in your life, your perspective changes. When you reframe time by priority and not by activity, the game changes.

Try switching out the phrase, “I don’t have time to go to the doctor” with, “Going to the doctor isn’t my priority.” It changes the game, right? You’ll start to notice how “not having time” has been your go-to for everything. Only then will you be able to separate the things that are unproductive and useless from that which matters.

Raise Your Prices

If everyone wants what you do, that is fabulous. However, that does not mean they are entitled to it. If you offer different kinds of services that serve different needs for your clients, you need tiered pricing. What’s more is that, if you’re sought after to the point where you can’t take on new business, you’ll never scale. Growth is one thing; scaling is another. Your pricing should always focus on scalability.

Find Out How We Can Help

Being busy can be a symptom of a good business and a significant shift in the market. That said, busy should never be a substitute for running your business correctly. As business owners, we create our futures. Prioritize your time before you fill it! 

GoBeyond SEO can help you automate some of your marketing processes and create a better way to sustain your business without jeopardizing the quality you offer your clients. Schedule a free strategy session with us for more information.

Categories
Marketing Small Business Marketing

Provide a First-Class Client Experience — Even on a Budget

Are you familiar with Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—”? This poem hits on a concept here; one so often lost in our post-pandemic digital world. What does it mean to walk with kings? What does it mean to lose the common touch, or in this case, not lose the common touch?

At its core, Kipling is talking about effective communication. Kings are faced with issues that are different from the issues faced by the common folk. Does it make sense to speak to the masses the same way you’d speak to a king? In most cases, it depends on the topic, right?

There’s a lesson to be taken from this concept when it comes to digital marketing: treat all your clients like kings, but from different kingdoms.

The concept of “the client is always right” has been lauded for decades, but to be clear, that’s NOT what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about giving your clients a first class client experience whenever they’re dealing with you and your company.

So how can you possibly give your clients first-class treatment? It’s unrealistic to make yourself available to every medium out there, and your time is limited. Here’s how you can impress your clients even on a budget!

Make Yourself Accessible to Your Clients

In keeping with the theme of kings versus the common folk, the key difference is access. The kings have access to you right away, or at least it feels that way. The common folk are those who are kept waiting on hold. 

Just because we’ve all become more comfortable making purchases or buying services online doesn’t mean that your clients aren’t looking for human connections. Here are a few tools to give all of your clients, and potential prospects, the king’s treatment without costing you a king’s ransom.

  • Website Chat. Many have seen the website chat feature on websites, but it does seem to fall short when the chat bot is really just a robot with an auto generated message. There are several tools available to give you the ease of automated chat and give your clients/prospects the personal touch they deserve.
  • Virtual Receptionist. There’s an endless supply of talented people who can help you fill in the blanks. BUT, that’s not what we mean here. How cool would it be if every time you missed a call from the office, your cell phone was pinged with a message from that prospect or client? If you’re in a highly competitive field, missing out on a call could cost you.
  • Google Reviews. Even if no one reads your reviews, having enough reviews to prove that it’s not just your mom saying nice things about you (thanks mom) is enough to show that you’re a player in your industry. But how do you get them? Do you go crawling to your clients, hat in hand, and humbly ask for a review? Sure, that’s one way to go. But wouldn’t it be just FABULOUS to have an entire streamlined process that will not only get reviews, but manage and promote them?

When you take the time to understand your client, but also make your marketing work at its most efficient, you can easily give your clients a white-glove client experience without taking a second mortgage on your castle. 

“If I had 6 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first 4 hours sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

How sharp is your axe? Find out about these tools and more by scheduling a free, no-obligation call with us at GoBeyond SEO!

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Kristy is an Assistant & Coordinator of Awesome. She has worked extensively in academic administration and brings a varied wealth of knowledge. As a self-starter, she is ready to take on news projects and see them through to completion. Always curious, Kristy is an avid researcher and delights in the challenge of learning new skills.

When Kristy isn’t organizing or researching something, you can find her listening to a true crime podcast, re-watching How I Met Your Mother or The Big Bang Theory and coming up with some crazy shenanigan for her family’s next adventure.

5 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT KRISTY

  1. Kristy prefers the Harry Potter books over the movies. Her favorite book is The Prisoner of Azkaban and her favorite character is Luna Lovegood. Ravenclaw house. She just started her 8-year-old son on listening to the books.
  2. Kristy has a nail technician license, esthetician license, medical assisting certification, associate degree, and bachelor’s degree. She didn’t get her full cosmetology license because she can barely do her own hair, she shouldn’t be trusted with someone else’s.
  3. She doesn’t know how to gamble but is originally from Las Vegas, Nevada. She moved to Colorado three months before her 21st birthday.
  4. Her high school graduating class consisted of only 20 people.
  5. Kristy loves gift giving. One of her great joys in life is finding the “perfect” gift.
Kristy Elias