One of the interesting things that I've noticed, the longer I've been
in marketing and doing advisory services, but also agency work.
Is that the, the more clients I work with, the more work that I do.
The more.
My work quality sort of spreads out.
It's almost as if there's only so much say.
Juice or frozen concentrate, concentrate.
And the more clients I disperse.
My, my work ground, the.
The more, the more clients I take on the more work that I have to do.
It's sort of the same amount of juice that I can.
That I can use and it really just kind of waters down the experience.
For the rest of my clients.
And as much as I like to believe that I can do my best work for
an unlimited amount of clients.
I do notice that.
Particularly with the kind of clients that require a lot of your tactical execution
and really in the weeds kind of work.
Not only does it have.
An element of cognitive load, but it also has.
There's there's just a matter of time.
You run out of time and the day you run out of energy in the day.
And even if you think you're doing everything you can
to meet your expectations.
To meet the needs of your clients too.
Exceed the needs, ideally would be your goal.
It's not just about meeting the needs these days.
It's always about exceeding them.
But if you take on too many clients, It's not that you're just going to work harder.
And yes, that's true.
And I'm not scared of hard work.
The problem is that.
There's really only so much juice to squeeze from every piece of root.
From every day that you work.
And with that juice, maybe this is a better analogy than
the fruit fruit concentrate.
But with that, with that juice, there's only so much for it to go around.
So the fewer projects and people you work with.
The the more concentrated that experience is going to be.
Because of those things like cognitive load.
And the ability to think about the work you're doing.
The clients who work with and their projects.
When you're not working with them.
So even having that downtime allows you to kind of process the things
that they're working on, that you're working through to prepare for phone
calls, to follow up with things, to take care of those small details, the
followup stuff, the little things that, that, you know, you need to do, but
keep getting put off and keep getting.
Put to next week or the, you know, the, the, the tail end of the communications
that you never really finished a wrapped up or tied up, you know, there's
little things that kind of don't get.
Quite fully done.
When you work with too many clients and there's there sort of a fine balance,
and that balance may change for you.
That may change based on whether you are.
Getting great sleep.
You know, uh, the last couple of years I've had a, uh, A new kid and.
And I've got another one on the way in the next few months.
And.
Sleeve is definitely a factor so that I know for a fact that there's just less.
Energy and hours in the day to do all these things.
Plus get distracted by someone gets a cold or the side of the other.
You lose a quarter of a day, half a day here.
So you need a bit of slack in your room just to account for those kinds of things.
And you may, you know, in my case, get tired at 4:00 PM
rather than a five or six.
And, you know, you don't have as many good, good, good hours in the day.
So it took up about kind of being realistic about what's right for
you in this phase of your life.
Based on everything that's going on.
And how much you can put into your work.
But the real thing is there's always a only so much juicy can squeeze.
It's not like you can crank out more and more.
High quality work.
In a day.
You know, short of working more hours.
Even then I think you're still sort of spreading out the amount of
juice in the squeeze, if you will.
So that's something I've just noticed and I've been, always trying to
play the balance of when COVID hit.
I took on as many clients as I could because.
Frankly they needed, they were coming to me.
Uh, fairly in droves and, you know, times are hard for a lot of businesses.
And I took it all on, but at the same time, I had a brand new baby who wasn't
sleeping and it was a simultaneous.
Most difficult.
Uh, physically and.
Um, mentally.
Um, as well as the most challenging time in my business, because there's a lot of
new clients, new work and new clients are more expensive in terms of onboarding and
getting up to speed and getting results.
And they kind of get a little bit projects, get a
bit easier as time goes on.
So, all that is to say is, you know, based on your energy levels and everything else.
Are you maximizing the amount of time in your calendar?
And other, and even.
You know, even if, whether you're an advisor or otherwise, you always
want to have room to handle the unforeseen work, to handle the
unforeseen calls that come up.
Okay.
Finally, there's going to be a client that needs you to go above and beyond
your scope or have a difficult patch or they're launching a new website
and you get, there's going to be more required of you than your typical week.
And you're going to want that slack in the system to be able to.
Pick that up.
So I think at the end of the day, the mission is to produce the best
quality work you can not necessarily to earn the most money that you
can cause that's shortsighted.
You're always going to be, I mean, The ethics of shipping poor quality work
consistently and charging premium prices.
Is one thing.
And then the other thing is just generally.
You're going to feel burned out and you're not going to do great work.
And your client's not going to be happy.
So, what do you think that's going to do for your personal life?
And so how's that going to affect everything else?
So these are just areas that I've, I've been playing with, especially
for the last few years, as I've been teetering around the top.
End of.
As busy as I want to be.
I've been at max capacity.
And right now I just had my, currently my best.
A month of all time.
And, uh, as I prepare to have baby, number two, I'm thinking about.
Well, what is it?
That I need to trade off.
What is it that I have to say no to.
In order to continue doing the best work that I can for all my clients.
Luckily, a lot of them are in a mature stage of working with me.
They've worked with me for maybe a year or more, many of them.
And therefore the work is pretty steady and smooth.
That being said, you know, it's all about balance.
So I just kind of wanted to share this.
Idea with you, you know, at some point you're going to earn as much as you
can, but then when you get really busy,
Stuff starts falling off and it creates a bad experience.
I had an experience once with the freelancer that I
hired to do work for me and.
It was like pulling teeth.
Everything took significantly longer than I'd hoped for.
And that was not fun for me.
And it wasn't fun for anyone.
And as a result, they'll never get business from me.
Again, and I won't recommend them.
And so there's downstream negative effects to getting too busy.
So it's, it's kind of better, you know, there's a, there's
actually a running analogy where.
That I can kind of relate to that.
And I think I saw this in a movie or something, but basically you'd
never want a really red line.
You always want to be at a certain level of like pushing it until the very end.
And then you can, you can red line.
They cause.
Once you go past that red line.
Your body can't recover quick enough to allow you to sustain
and run a, a good long race.
In the case of say like a marathon.
So it's all about finding that balance, that right.
Heart rate.
That allows you to sustain for longterm.
And if you're in this for the longterm, you're going to want
to build a sustainable business.
Yes, there are going to be sprints, but you know, finding those times
to exert yourself and then having the recovery is really key.
Otherwise you'll burn out and I see it time and time again.
You know, people take on more and more and more.
And the work software is, and they know it.
And then that creates stress.
And then that creates cognitive load and that further reduces
their ability to produce good work.
And the end of the day, you're hard to do good work.
That's a reputation and you want to do the best he can.
So I just wanted to share this with you.
Uh, I've been enjoying doing a little bit of audio lately.
So if you're enjoying these, let me know if you prefer me to just write.
Articles.
I'm happy to do that as well.
Then.
I'll.
We'll continue to bounce around and do both.
But yeah, this idea of how much work.
Uh, is the right amount of work to do.
And that's what I've been thinking about lately.
I hope this helps.