 I've coached hundreds of small business owners by this point and I find that there is one recurring problem. People are not spending enough time doing the right things in their business and that's why their business isn't growing. Maybe you're spending a lot of time watching videos about how to grow a business, watching marketing trainings, being part of online groups and things like that, but you're not spending the actual time doing the actions that grow your business and that's why your business isn't growing. It's actually kind of simple with this one single problem. Now of course the question is, well, what should you be spending your time doing and how much time should you be spending on those things? So that's what I'm going to talk about in this video. I have written a blog post that's associated with this and that kind of goes into all this stuff in more detail. So you might want to read the blog post, the link is in the description of this video. But let me just kind of talk through these things and then hopefully it'll inspire you and motivate you to spend more time on this. So first of all, there's one trade-off that you need to make with regards to your time. I find that people usually don't spend enough time in their business for two reasons. One is that, you know, this is fewer people, but it's still true. One is that they just have such a great lifestyle and they're not willing to spend less time with friends or with hobbies or with whatever else they're doing to spend time on their business, okay, three situations. So one, that might not be your situation, but it might be true for some of you. Secondly, some people might be in, you know, they have a full-time job. So they already spend a lot of their energies working and then they only have an extra time in the evenings or weekends for their business. And so it's not surprising that they don't spend enough time on their business because they're tired and I get it or they need to spend time with family after work or on their hobbies or with their friends and I get it, that makes sense, you know. But still, I really recommend that you carve out at least 10 hours per week, at least 40 hours per month, okay, at least 40 hours per month for your business that's high quality hours. It's not just, oh God, I'm so tired, I'm just going to do the minimum in my business now because that doesn't create a good business, but it's got to be 40 hours per month or 10 hours per week of quality energy time on your business, doing the right things. Those 10 hours a week is not watching my videos, that doesn't count as doing the right things in your business. It's supplemental, it's educational, but it's not the actions that grow your business. Okay, so the third situation, the first situation is you have too good of a lifestyle, you're spending too much time there and therefore you're not even carving out the 10 to 20 hours a week that you need to do the right things in the business. When I say 10 hours a week, I mean the 10 hours of George Cowell productive time in your business, you may not be as productive as me, so you might need to spend 15 to 20 hours a week on the kind of stuff I spend 10 hours a week on, okay. All right, so your lifestyle might be too good and you're not spending enough time, you might just have a job and you need to really be more careful about how you set boundaries with your family and with your friends and with your hobbies to have 10 quality hours in the evenings and weekends for your business, okay, per week. And then the third situation is many of you actually are spending a lot of time like watching my videos, watching other people's videos, reading books, taking trainings about business, and just on social media and you're just spending a lot of time consuming business content and not doing business because you are, here's the weird, here's the weird dynamic of all this, right. The more time you spend learning business, the more intimidated you are about doing business, and so in some ways ignorance is bliss, okay, in some ways you just need to read my blog post about this and then get your butt to work. Like you need to spend less time consuming content because it just gets you more and more intimidated and gets you more and more anxious about doing things perfectly when you really should just be spending time experimenting and trying stuff and then but really doing the right kinds of experimentations so that you'll just get, you'll get better and better through practice rather than trying to get better and better through learning. Learning is as a double-ledged sword. Learning is fun because you feel like you're filling your head with useful ideas and when inspiration, but the other side of it is that the more you fill your head of ideas the more intimidated and perfectionistic you get about taking action, which is really where the real learning happens. The real learning doesn't happen by watching videos, taking trainings, going on group calls, and reading blog posts, and reading books and reading articles. That's not where the real learning happens. You need to learn just enough to take imperfect action that makes, allows you to make mistakes, which is a part of the learning process. You have to make enough mistakes before you get enough of the right things done in business, okay? So let me now walk you through the seven areas of business spend, business time, okay, in your business. One, I'll start, I'll, I'll frame this based on the seven disciplines of authentic business, which is another video I made and another article you might want to read from me. I, of course, I'm biased and I want to tell you to just read my, my stuff and watch my stuff. Obviously, I'm biased and I try to give you everything that I can. At least at the surface level, I give you everything I can in my articles. If you want to get all the step-by-step, deep stuff, that's in my courses. But anyway, so let me just walk you through the surface level of what you should be spending time on in the business. One is your, your, your, your, your, I call it joy for your productivity that I have a whole succession course on that. But anyway, let me just give you some of the surface level stuff. You need to spend time on your self-care and you need to spend time on the maintenance and administration in your business. So your self-care time is that the self-care time is what I plan in first. When I'm planning my business time, I planning self-care time first. So you'll notice in my schedule, if you, if you take my intro to authentic business course, I share my schedule, my complete schedule there. So you might want to take that course. If you, if you, or if you've taken any of my courses, you can come to my bonus Q and A calls and I can kind of walk you through my current schedule on any of those bonus Q and A calls. But basically, if you look at my schedule, I don't work more than 90 to 120 minutes at a time. So more, I don't work more than hour and a half to two hours at any one chunk. After an hour and a half to two hours, I'm taking a long break and my long breaks are usually at least an hour long and they might be like eating a meal and taking a nap or going on a dog walk. Those are basically my, how I take my breaks. And so you got to planning your self-care and chunked in with, you know, separate, separating your work hours with, with your self-care. And the second thing is your administrative, your business administrative time, like clearing your email inbox, clearing your miscellaneous to-do lists, and kind of other miscellaneous things. And I spend an hour and a half every day doing that Monday through Friday. So that's seven and a half. What is it? Yeah, so it's 1.5 times five is, is seven and a half hours a week on that stuff. So I probably spend more time than I recommended, but, but I recommend at least one hour a week, at least one hour a week in your, sorry, one hour a day. So that's at least five hours a week in email clearing, miscellaneous tasks, administration, that kind of stuff. Okay. So that's the first area is drill for productivity. The second area is consistent content creation. I recommend at least one hour a week for your consistent content creation. That's really the minimum. I spend, get this, seven and a half hours a week, seven and a half hours a week on content creation. For example, making this video, writing my articles for you, you know, basically writing articles or making videos and running Facebook ads for my content. That's the time I spend, seven and a half hours a week. I recommend you spend one hour a week. So I'm being really gentle with how much time you should be spending in your business. One hour a week will give you enough time to write an article and run a Facebook ad to get that article out there. That's it. Very simple. And I assume you only spend half hour writing the article. So I spend about, you know, in my side, in my side project, Soul Gym, I spend half an hour a week writing the article. So then I can spend half hour a week doing the Facebook ads. And that's the third part. The third area is content distribution using paid ads. If you're not running paid ads, if you're not running Facebook ads, I can almost guarantee that you are not, your content is not seen by enough people to grow your business. You're saying, George, I don't have enough clients. I don't have enough sales in my business because you're not running Facebook ads. I mean, that's one of the main reasons why you're not, your business is not growing. You've got to be running ads. I mean, how can a business grow without paid advertisements? I don't get it. Please help me understand. For those of you who are growing your business without running paid advertisements, how the hell are you doing it? Yes, you might be lucky and have some search engine traffic. That's, that's, it's really hard to do your SEO. I promise you I've done this for 10 years. I've done online marketing for 10 years. The SEO gain is really hard to do consciously. You sometimes get lucky. What I usually hear from people who get search engine traffic, it's more by luck. It's like, oh my God, I got lucky. I just happened to be working on a particular, yeah. And some people say, well, George, I consciously optimized my website with keywords. I really don't think they know what they're talking about because I've gone into the SEO gain and it's harder than people think it is. It's usually by luck that people get search engine traffic. And people say, well, I get, I get, I get this, I grow my business through word of mouth. Yes, but that's a word of mouth isn't something you really consciously do. You do good work, right? You put content out there. You follow up with your clients and with your referral sources and you get word of mouth, but it's not really scalable. It's not, it's not something that really grows a business. You kind of let it happen organically, word of mouth. Of course, I get a lot of word of mouth traffic, but organic. But I'm talking about stuff you actually consciously do to grow your business. And there's really two ways of doing it. There's paid advertisements and there's collaborations. Those are the two ways you grow your business. All the other ways, word of mouth, search engine traffic and luck. You know, those are really by luck. Those are really by luck. You do two things, paid advertisements and collaborations and that results in word of mouth and search engine traffic. Got it? Okay. So with paid ads, I recommend you spend 30 to 60 minutes a week working on your paid advertisements. Most of your paid advertisements should be promoting your content, not trying to sell anything. That's right. You heard me right. At least 50%, if not 80% of your paid advertising dollars should be just getting your content out there to bless people. I call it content as ministry, content as a cause, content to just make a difference in people's lives, whether or not they ever buy from you. And I apologize when windows open, so you might hear some sounds from outdoors. So I recommend at least 30 to 60 minutes a week working on your paid ads, mostly about your content. And then when it comes to collaborations, I recommend four hours a month on collaborations. And the four hours a month is split between researching and contacting potential collaborators, working it out with them to schedule things with them and the actual collaboration itself. Read my blog post about this topic to get some more details on that. So paid ads and collaborations are the two ways to consciously grow your business, letting the word of mouth, letting the search engine traffic be organically growing based on these two things. So I talked about joint productivity. I talked about your consistent content. I talked about paid advertisements. I talked about collaborations. The fifth thing you need to spend time doing in your business is audience research. This is something that is missing in just about everybody who starts to work with me as a client. Like you're not doing any audience research. How can you understand your market if you don't do audience research? And if you don't understand your market super, super well, you can't create really good content. And you can't really create offerings, product and services that you can just whisper and have lots of people buy. This is what I've been able to achieve in my business. Even a lot of my peers have not achieved this, but I've achieved this, meaning I can, I'm very gentle with my selling. When I do my selling, as you notice on Wednesdays on my Facebook page, I don't, it's not, it's not loud. It's not, you know, scarcity driven. It's not, I mean, I have a pre-launch price, which, which is, you know, is a little bit of scarcity in that there's a deadline to get the early bird price, which makes sense because it helps me to know whether or not I need to pull the plug on a course. If there's not enough early bird sales, I pull the plug and I do, I market a different course instead. So the early bird pre-launch price is important for me to understand if I want to keep going with, with a product. But anyway, audience research is about talking one to one with the people in your audience to find out what are they buying right now? What are they buying so that you can create product and services similar to what they're buying? That is also what you can deliver. I'll just leave it at that. But audience research, you need to spend at least four hours a month. So at least one hour a week doing, but the four hours a month is basically content. Sorry, not four hours a month, two hours a month, I think, doing. Read my blog post, you can get all the details there. But basically it involves contacting at least 10 of your audience members to get one person to say yes. You might get more than one person to be contact 10, but I just assume I contact 10, you get one, one yes. And then doing the actual conversation with that person maybe 30 minutes and then doing the analysis of that conversation to understand, oh, that's what they're buying in my realm of expertise. And so maybe I should offer that kind of thing as well. Okay. Audience research is number five. Number six is are you spending enough time letting your audience know about your offerings, letting your audience know about your product and services? Some people do it too often. Most of you are not doing it often enough. So you might be creating content, putting content out there, but then your audience doesn't know what you're doing. I mean, the audience doesn't know what you're selling. You just don't let them know often enough. So you got to give the time to make announcements. I recommend at least one offer, one announcement about your product or service every two weeks. That's the minimum one announcement about your product service every two weeks. I do one announcement every, every Wednesday, as you might know on my Facebook page, every Wednesday you get some announcement about what I'm selling next. So that's what I do. So you got to spend enough time doing that. And I don't know how long it spends. You spend doing that, but probably at least 30 minutes a week, something like that. Or sorry, at least one hour a month doing that. Okay. Because 30 minutes every two weeks. Okay. And then number seven is are you spending the time requesting and getting client feedback, requesting and getting client feedback? If you're not getting client feedback about how you're doing in your services and your programs and your products, how do you know how to improve? You don't know, right? And so I am obsessive as those of you who have bought my courses and work with me as a client. No, I am obsessive about getting client feedback. And I spend time doing that. And I spend time analyzing my client feedback to see how I can improve my products and services to keep making it better and better and better. Because ultimately, like I said, word of mouth traffic, word of mouth is important in business, but that happens because you make great products and services. And you do the paid advertising, you do the collaborations. And that's how word of mouth happens. Great product and services, which is done by client feedback. And then advertising your content and doing collaborations. That's really how you grow your business in a conscious way. Anyway, you spend your time doing these seven things. And if you spend your time doing it, you will be growing your business doing the spending. You'll be doing business productively rather than just playing. But so many of you, I find, are basically just playing business. You're making pretend that you're growing your business. You're not really growing your business. You're watching my videos. You're taking my courses. Great. I'm grateful for that. You're learning how to do things, but you're not spending the time doing stuff. You're just consuming a lot of content. You're spending time on social media. You're spending time reading your emails or whatever. You're not spending the time on the seven things that I just talked about. So how are you growing your business? You're not spending time doing this stuff. At least 10 hours a week is what you need to be spending of quality hours, focused hours doing these things. You probably mean, you probably need 15 to 20 hours of focused time doing stuff. I need 10 hours a week. Of course, I spend way more than that because I care about this stuff so much, but you need to spend 15 to 20 hours a week. And I'm not even talking about time with clients. The 15 to 20 hours of focus time on your business a week is not even about clients. You need to add additional hours for your clients. And you may need to add additional hours to create your course or on product development or on program development. So ideally, you have 30 to 40 hours a week to spend on your business, quality focused time. If you're having a full-time job, then you need to really, really spend 10 hours of focused quality time on your business plus another five hours a week working with clients or whatever. Now, if you're working a full-time job, you probably honestly don't have time to see clients. So if you have a full-time job, you need to spend 15 hours of quality time every single week, 10 of those hours on the stuff I talked about in this video, and five of those hours on course development, product development. You don't have time as a full-time job person. You don't have time to see one-on-one clients. You just don't have time. How the hell are you going to grow your business by seeing one-on-one clients when you have a full-time job and still have all the time that I'm talking about? No, you don't. A full-time job means you have 10 focused hours on the stuff I talked about plus five hours of course development. You have to spend five hours of anyway. So I hope this helps. And let me go ahead and see if, go ahead and put your comments and your questions below. And I'm going to go ahead and see if there are any comments and questions from those who are watching this live video right now. And thank you to Maryam for your comments and says, where do I find what you teach? So you can either read my blog post about this video, which is in the link. The link is in the description of the video. That's probably where I would recommend going as a supplement to what I'm talking about here. And Lorna says, I just had a fantastic collaboration conversation today, making progress. I love it. Lorna is in my collaborations course. She's taking action on doing the collaborations, which is one of the things I talk about in productive business time. So thank you for your comments. Those are the comments I'm able to see here. There may be more and I'll check it out later. And anyway, I hope you will take this advice to heart. And not just to heart, take this advice into your calendar. Really schedule in the time that I'm talking about and do the things that you schedule in. And I have a whole other video about how you can be creative and focused on demand. You might want to look at that blog post in that video on how to be creative and focused on demand. And if you schedule this stuff in and you get creative and focused during the time you scheduled in, you'll grow your business. There's just almost certainly you'll grow your business. And if you don't do it, almost certainly you won't grow your business unless it's just by luck, which is not really the most reliable way to operate in this world. Just simply by luck. Okay. So live consciously and work on your business consciously. Okay. I hope this is helpful. I wish you well. Ask me your questions and give me your comments below. I look forward to it. All right. Take care.