The Weekly Glow Up: July 5, 2023

Jul 5

Welcome back to the Weekly Glow Up, where I share tips and resources that you should know about as a creative who wants to make money from their art.

Here’s what I’ve got this week:

1. ⚙️ Systems for Success: One Rule to Skyrocket Your Productivity

The golden rule to getting more productive in your business is:

If you do it more than once, turn it into a system.

Any task that you repeat multiple times needs to be optimized to be as efficient as possible.

Things like onboarding clients, posting on social media, scheduling meetings, setting reminders for recurring tasks, sending invoices—these are all prime candidates for systems.

By “systems,” I mean things like:

📝 Writing an SOP. An SOP, or standard operating procedure, is essentially a set of instructions that outlines how to do a task. Having an SOP means you don’t have to re-think through something when you do it again: you have the step by step process ready to go.

📑 Creating a template. You can create templates for emails in Gmail, tasks in your project management app, captions for social media posts, etc, to take less time creating things you do over and over.

⚙️ Adding an automation. Tools like Zapier can connect your different apps and accounts to automate actions between them. For example, when someone purchases a product, you could automate a welcome email sequence to send to them afterwards.

🎁 Delegating. Outsourcing certain tasks to other freelancers or employees frees you up to work on things ONLY you can do, or things that are at a higher strategic level for your biz. Other systems like templates and SOPs can make delegating a breeze.

What could you systematize in your business today?

2. 🧠 How Much Does It Cost to Focus on the Wrong Priority?

Figuring out the RIGHT thing to focus on is half the battle as an entrepreneur.

You don’t have anyone handing down directives to you anymore. It’s up to you to make sure you’re making the most out of the time you have to work on your business.

When I ran my hand lettering business, I spent a LOT of time on my Instagram account.

The internet business gurus I was following at the time made me think if I posted on IG, clients would magically just come to me.

It took me a little while to realize that wasn’t quite the case 😅

But at the time, I was spending hours on artwork for a single social media post. I didn’t even have plans to use that artwork for anything else—it was JUST for social media.

Looking back now, with the income data I have from my lettering biz, I have a clearer picture of how much that wrong priority cost.

My biggest lettering clients came from sales outreach I was doing. Just emailing people and pitching myself.

One of those clients had a lifetime value of around $11k in the couple of years I was working with them.

I probably spent an hour or two researching the client and reaching out via email to start the conversation around working together.

Which means each of those 2 hours were worth around $5.5k for my business (I’m oversimplifying a bit, but you get the idea).

Meanwhile, I was over here spending 4+ hours on a social media post that probably wouldn’t be seen by that many people, and wouldn’t directly drive revenue.

🤦🏼‍♀️

It’s easy to get caught up in what you see other people doing, or think you have to do what you see on the outside of everyone’s business (i.e. social media).

But being a successful business owner is largely about knowing how to avoid the shiny objects and the things that feel exciting but don’t actually help your business.

What are you spending the most time on in your business today? Do you feel confident that it’s directly bringing you closer to your goals?

3. 🍵 Client Tea: Know Where to Aim

I have a client I’ve been working with for over a year, and they just shared new goals with me and my team last week.

The client has been happy, we’ve been creating great content for them, and we were just going along with the rhythm we’d established working together.

But then they told us that their biggest issue was closing sales.

The thing is, we’ve been focused for months on lead generation, and had no idea there was another priority.

Generating more leads is a little useless if we don’t have the systems and tools in place to turn those leads into customers, right?

This kind of disconnect has pretty big implications for the results we can help the client achieve—the strategies and initiatives we would use to help them close more sales are wayyyy different from the ones we use to generate leads.

That’s why aligning on goals is so important before taking action.

You have to know where you’re aiming if you want to get anywhere close to the target.

That target will determine exactly what kind of action you need to take.

And clearly, it’s important to check in and make sure everyone’s still on the same page—I’ve learned not to assume that nothing’s changed just because no one has shared an update with me 😅

We’ve just started the second half of 2023—do you have clearly defined goals for the rest of the year? I’d love to hear them—hit reply on this email and share them with me, and I’d be happy to provide any pointers to help you get there!

4. 📙 Good Readin’: Systems Over Goals

Speaking of goals, thought this was an interesting take by James Clear:

“Goals are good for planning your progress and systems are good for actually making progress.”

He suggests shifting your focus from setting goals to creating systems.

He argues that goals are one small snapshot in time, and achieving them only provides a momentary change, while building good habits and systems sets you up for long-term success.

Give his post a read here.