Work smarter
Have you ever got to the end of the day and wondered what you’ve achieved? Have you ever found yourself staring at your screen with tons to tabs open on your web browser? Have you ever been halfway through a task and found yourself with your phone in your hand looking up something completely unrelated?
I’ve just jumped off a Live with Small Business Saturday with the amazing Michelle Ovens and we were mostly there to talk about top tips to working at home with children. However, we ended up talking about people feeling like they couldn’t offer their services at the moment, or that they couldn’t charge.
Does it sometimes feel that you’re not getting anywhere? That you can take 2 steps forward and 3 back? That when you check out your bank balance it’s not really where you want it to be?
Could it be that no matter how hard you try, how many experts you listen to, how many webinars you sign up to, you’re still left in the same place?
If you provide a service to people, one of the things you’ll be spending most of your time focusing on is how to get more clients. Especially when you’re at the start of your journey and haven’t yet built up your reputation.
Not having enough clients and feeling like you’re constantly hustling to get them is the main thing that gives my clients anxiety. After all if you’re not bringing in money, your business isn’t really working and anxiety about where next months money is coming in breaks even the best of us.
So LinkedIn! Are you loving it? Hating it? Trying to make sense of it? Or just not sure it’s for you?
It’s had a bit of a transformation of late. LinkedIn is literally trying to reinvent itself. From the corporate bore in the blue colours of Microsoft, IBM and Dell (yawn) to the pale, male and stale stereotype of its users. I’ve heard of people being told in the comments their posts aren’t welcome there, no fluff, no cats, no what did you eat for lunch and certainly no personality.
The word hustle is a little tarnished these days. The hashtag #hustlehard has been used 2,308, 093 times and counting on Instagram. And it’s filled with pictures of men, with a black and white feel, with slogans like ‘You can’t have a million dollar dream with a minimum-wage work ethic’ or ‘If you’re not gaining knowledge, connections or money, you’re wasting your time’.
Last week I attended the fabulous Social Day Conference and one of the things that emerged from the talks is that likes don’t pay the bills. Those vanity metrics that we love so much, likes on our posts, comments and shares essentially don’t pay our bills. It’s clients and customer that pay our bills.
So how do we turn those likers in payers? How do we convert people who love us on Facebook and Instagram into people who help us put food on the table and pay our bills?
My beloved Great nan Ruby once told me that you never stop learning no matter how old you are. To me, she seemed very old, and that idea amazed me.
I thought we went to school, college and maybe university, and then phew stopped. ‘That’s it I’ve stopped learning’, on with the real business of being alive.
I never knew that the real business of being alive was learning and ostensibly growing.
As seen in:
Top 40 Female Business Coach for 2022 | UK’s Digital Woman of the Year 2020
MarketEd Live Top 30 Marketers that Inspire 2020, 2021 & 2022 | Digital Women’s Top 40 Women to Watch 2020
Top 100 Female Entrepreneur 2019 | Top 100 Influencer for Gender, Equality & Diversity 2019 & 2020
Winner of Ingenuity19 for My Business My Way Toolkit | HSBC’s Top 5 podcast for Women in Business in UK 2019
