13 March 24 Leverage
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching. I'm Ellie Scarf, an ex-lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in-house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutique startups.
And organizations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like-minded peers. I'm a traveler, a reader, a mom, wife, and dog parent. And I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses.
The executive coaching business is tough, and I've learned all the lessons through plenty of mistakes, and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. [00:01:00] You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable. And that supports your personal goals, whatever they are, I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context, as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors.
If you wanna level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you.
Hello and welcome back. So today I want to talk about leverage, specifically how we can be more strategic about certain activities in our business to get more bang for our time investment buck. So I've become a bit obsessed with certain types of efficiency over the last year and Not really in terms of, you know, minor things like saving small amounts of money or, or improving things in micro ways, but mostly about time.
And specifically I've been [00:02:00] thinking about what activities or uses of my time are giving me high leverage. , from the time I spend on them and what do I mean by that? So let's think firstly of everything that we do in business, right? So we do sales and marketing and within that there are so many different activities.
We do our admin, things like our paperwork and our finances. We do delivery, right? So our coaching and our facilitation and our prep work. We do our own training and development work. We baff about with our websites and our marketing materials to make, you know, Assets that are. That, you know, are impactful, but also look good.
, we overthink social media posting. We do things that we think we should be doing because others said we should. So you get my drift. There's a huge amount of stuff that we do in business. And within each of these categories, there are things that are high leverage. And there are things that are not so a high leverage activity is one that meets [00:03:00] one of the following criteria.
And by the way, I made these criteria up because they make sense to me. I did not do an empirical study, but to me, high level, a high leverage activity is something where the activity directly leads to client acquisition. Or, the activity contributes to the positive outcomes of my clients. It is something that I do once that can be reused or repurposed in the future.
It is something where investing time in this activity saves time being required in other areas. It could be something I find fun or inspiring, and this is really important too. I include that as a high leverage activity because when I'm inspired, it creates a bit of a virtuous cycle, right? For me of, of being more engaged, taking more strategic action and so on.
And then the other thing I think is a high leverage activity is rest because I think that restoring our energy is high leverage itself because it allows us to keep going. A low leverage activity, on the other hand, , could be, , you know, busy work. So something that I [00:04:00] know is not really that important, but I'm doing it anyway, because I'm not sure what else I should be doing.
, it could be another low leverage activity could be a repetitive task that I keep on doing because I don't have the energy to pause and to build a better system or to make one decision that will prevent me making these many decisions constantly. Another low leverage activity might be a task that seems important and everyone says it's important, but it doesn't make sense in my business.
Another one could be a task that is sort of shiny object syndrome that takes me off track from my stated priorities. It might be something that I'm doing instead of resting because I feel too guilty to really stop. And it could also be the avoidance. I think a low leverage task could be something we do to avoid a high leverage task.
The avoidance in itself being something that we are actively doing. And so to be really clear, I don't think we need to be radically obsessed with every minute of our work day being optimized. That's not really my style. I think [00:05:00] that's actually burnout fuel and certainly fuel for being frustrated. It's more that we are focusing on what really matters.
I think this is what we need to do. We need to focus on what really matters and what really turns the dial in a leveraged way and saying no to the things that don't serve us. So with that said, I want to share some very specific ways I've seen. That coaching business owners can leverage our time to get disproportionate benefits from the time that we have to invest in our businesses.
And you know, you may have like all the time in the world to invest in your business, or you might have a limited time in which case this becomes more relevant, but whatever position you're in. I think we could all be more effective with leveraging our time. So the first very specific way as a coaching business owner that I think you can leverage your time is thinking about what you do with your written content on social media and the time you spend preparing it.
And specifically, I'm thinking about the things you write for LinkedIn, your [00:06:00] website, your newsletter, all of that. And you may not have those yet, and that's fine. , , but in, any event, you're doing some work, you're putting things out there and you're trying to create a, , you know, a brand as a thought leader typically.
, and so you will have some written content that you either are already building or you would like to build. So, showing up on social media can feel a lot like a hamster wheel. It just wants to keep being fed, right? More and more. Social media requires more and more and more, certainly some types of social media.
We post, we have to post again, we have to post again just to stay on top of the feed, to feel like people are seeing what we're saying. And the good news is that if we have a great strategy, , to help us figure out what we need to say. Then we can use the things that we do right in much more efficient ways than many of us do.
So, , you know, one idea I teach inside the corporate coach accelerator is this idea, and certainly it's [00:07:00] not mine. It's come from many places I've learned it from is this idea of hero content, where we spend our time, our content development time investment in preparing one longer form piece of content.
And it might be each month or it might be each week or each fortnight. And from that, we can then, , see it, we can redistribute it to different formats. We can break it down to get more posts from that same content. And so I call this redistributing and repurposing. Redistributing, , is for example, an article on LinkedIn can also very easily be redistributed as the base of a newsletter, which can also be redistributed as a blog, you know, in largely similar content with some tweaks.
Then there is repurposing where I say, okay, well, I've spent this time, , writing this article and I'm not going to leave it there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to then break it down into several short pieces of content. , and then I'm going to post those on LinkedIn over a period of [00:08:00] time. And some you might do straight away.
Some you might put in the bank for later because another secret that you might know in another way, you can, you know, leverage this investment. of time in developing content is that your content doesn't have a big lifespan on social media. And generally only about 10 percent of your audience at most are seeing what you post.
So just think about that. Only 10 percent of all of those connections that you have. Built up over the years are seeing what you post. And this means, , , this is great. And it's also terrible. So, I mean, firstly, it's like you do all this work and, you know, maybe, maybe a hundred people see it, maybe, maybe less, maybe more.
But the real upside is that, you know, if you create content consistently over a few months, there's a point at which you can go back. And you can update those pieces of content, add your new thoughts and post it all again. And no one will notice, right? So if your content pillars are [00:09:00] clear, if they're important to your audience, then you can guarantee that the content will still be relevant and that different people are going to see it.
So what I would suggest is if you want to repurpose it in that way. Add your new ideas, your new thinking onto the base, and then voila, your content is repurposed in a fraction of the time. I would also say that AI can be your friend here as well, because if you have written the original content, it's your voice, it's your thoughts, then AI can really help you to break it into smaller pieces or adapt it from different mediums.
I think that's a really good and sensible use of AI as a writing assistant. So the second area of time in a business where I think we can be more, , leveraged, , is by creating what I'm going to call our guardrails. And at the heart of this idea is that we are going to be so much more efficient and remove so much overthinking and procrastination.
If we commit to [00:10:00] making key decisions once and then putting in place strategies and disciplines to stick to those decisions. Sounds easy, right? Well, it's not entirely. It is effective, but there are some steps that you have to work through to get there and some disciplines that are involved in saying no, particularly if we find that difficult.
But the first step in, you know, implementing this guardrail strategy is. To have a good overarching business strategy, that means getting really clear on your business goals and knowing what are the levers you can pull that actually help you get clear, get towards your business goals, right? And it also means committing to those and saying no to almost everything else.
And I know this sounds a bit scary, but it is really quite liberating. So let me give you an example , from my business. So I know that my goal for 2025 is to fill up , my group coaching program, the corporate to coach accelerator, which I think we would do, you know, , in the coming months with brilliant coaches [00:11:00] who want to grow their businesses with high paying corporate clients.
Right. So that is my goal. , and it is my singular priority to start the year. And in fact, That's mostly because I know that's where I can have the most impact right now, working with coaches in this capacity. And so as part of my strategy, I had to figure out, well. Where do my members actually come from?
And when I did that research into my data, I found out that it was actually really clear. So my brilliant members come from, , you know, four key places, this podcast, LinkedIn, both inbound and outreach, Facebook advertising to master classes that I've run and referrals, right? So once I knew this, what I was able to do was say.
Okay, I'm going to do more of those and I'm going to stop putting effort into other sources of, of bringing people in. Right. It doesn't mean that I won't accept people if they come from a different platform, but it means that's not where I put my energy and [00:12:00] attention. So for you as a coach, you might know that, , you get to, you get the most people coming to have sales conversations with you from, let's say referrals.
Warm outreach to your existing network and people reaching out to you because of the thoughtful content that you post on LinkedIn, that those are the sort of the three that I most commonly hear, but you need to figure out what it is for yourself. And once we get clear on those things, our pathways clear, let's do more of what works and less of what doesn't.
, so we then have to make the decision to say no to the things that don't work and that aren't on the strategy. So that's one example of using guardrails. The other guardrails we have are, you know, for example, you might decide to set in place some guardrails for what work you're willing to do and what work you don't want to do.
or your boundaries on social media, for example, about what you will and won't talk about. But making these decisions and documenting them is a tremendous source of leverage [00:13:00] because we then get this, , clarity. That any time a maybe comes up right where we have to think about it, we know what is in scope and what's out of scope and when to say yes and when to say no.
, it's so interesting that a lot of the time our guardrails aren't really about what we will do, but they're much more important for knowing what we won't do and helping us. You know, stop the time we're spending in overthinking these decisions that come up again and again. , and particularly like if you're a recovering people pleaser or a novelty seeker who wants to say yes to everything.
And, you know, I consider myself guilty as charged on both those counts. , having those guardrails, having that. Clear decision already made means that when people come and ask you things, when people, you know, even when good things come up, right, things , that would be , really cool. We know when to say yes.
And we know, we know when to say no, and we don't have to go into a spiral of [00:14:00] stress about, Oh God, you know, should I, shouldn't I? Because we are clear and we've got those, I guess the boundaries as well, God rails boundaries, they're put in place. And so in this category, I also love this idea of making one decision that will save 100 subsequent decisions.
And I learned this from someone that , I read a book and for the life of me, I cannot remember who it was. So if you can remember who Has come up with that idea, please let me know and I will include them in the references. But the theory is that we should be really vigilant and keep an eye out for opportunities to make a firm decision once.
That will save us from having to make ongoing decisions. And that you know, you might say, the next hundred decisions. And so, for example, , A decision I have made or I made when I was doing more, , active work in my coaching and facilitation business is that I decided that I don't facilitate content or workshops that I haven't written myself.
[00:15:00] And that meant that every time someone asked me to run a program for them that they had already developed. I could easily say, Oh no, I don't do that work. I'm sorry. And it was not, you know, no one was ever upset because it was just, a hard boundary that I had and it went, you know, it was always very well accepted.
I think because of my clarity. So think about where you could apply this in your business. Is there a decision you could make that could save you making a hundred other decisions and think about like, what are the decisions you're making on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? What could you decide? To make that process easier.
An example, another example that might not be directionally business related, but it could be that I make a decision that I just eat a salad for lunch every day. Then I don't need to make that decision about what to have for lunch every day. And honestly. Working from home, this takes up more of my mental space than I feel , is, you know, helpful.
So I think I might need to make [00:16:00] that very decision. I have a salad for lunch every day. Maybe, I'm just going to do that. Anyway, I'll experiment. So. I love the idea because I think that the leverage when we do this is not just the time it takes to make the decision itself again and again, but it's also the leverage that comes with reducing this psychological friction between having to make a decision and then taking action.
So. When we are clear and we can simply execute and we know what we're doing, we remove a lot of opportunities for overthinking, , procrastination and so on, which means that we can take more positive action and we get more positive outcomes. You know, I think we also don't fully appreciate how significant decision fatigue is in modern work and life.
So, you know, managing the impact of that is also an added bonus that I think has leverage in life and business. The third category. I think that good process is a fundamental contributor to using [00:17:00] our time in a highly leveraged way. And it might speak for itself, but what I mean by this is that time spent building really good processes is a high leverage activity.
Why? Because processes allow us to reduce the psychological effort that is required of us when we complete a repetitive task, or they reduce the need for us to go through a learning curve. Every time we do something that is complex or that has lots of moving parts, right? It stops us having to. You know, remember and review and figure it out again and again and again.
And as a bonus, , good processes make it easier for us to outsource tasks as well. So my suggestion here is just take some time to record the main tasks or things that you do in your business, , on an ongoing basis. And then you can just pick one, pick one every month, every week, whenever you want to, or, you know, or when it comes up and ask yourself just a few things.
[00:18:00] Firstly, do you really need to do this task or is it a habit or something you thought you should do? If you don't need to do it, eliminate the task entirely, eliminate the process. You can even experiment with this. You can do it and then you might find out, you know, in a few weeks, Oh, would have been better if I had done that.
Or you might not. Now don't eliminate important things like getting your insurance or, you know, communicating with your clients or doing your outreach on LinkedIn. No, but there might be, , you know, a step in the process, , you know, additional documentation that you don't really need to do because it's duplication, right?
What can you eliminate entirely? And then second, , when you've, you know, picked this particular process, if it's a really important task, Start to record the process, and there are a few ways you can do it. One is a really simple list of the steps. And I sometimes do that just a spreadsheet where I just actually step by step, what's involved and who does it and how long does it take?
You don't even have to use those last two columns. , [00:19:00] the next level up though. Which I prefer, and this is where I try and capture most of our processes as I go through them is to create a process flow in a task management tool. So we use monday. com I'll put our affiliate link in the show notes. If you're interested in that, I think you get a longer free trial.
And so you could do that. And then the next stage up is if you think this is a task that you might outsource one day, or you would like to have a good record of, , you could record a video of you completing the task on a tool called loom, , which is a great tool that shows you and your screen records, your screen.
With a little circular video of you while you commentate the steps that you're taking and show exactly what gets clicked where. So when you have the process documented or at least mapped out, then ask yourself, right, this is the final step. What could you automate or what could you outsource? And this could be infinite in scope really, but it could, just be simple things like having template emails that are [00:20:00] sent automatically upon certain triggers.
Or it could be linking certain tools to talk together, like your, invoicing software with, your accounting software, right. Making sure we'll have them be the same. , the sky's the limit when it comes to automation and outsourcing and, you know, the opportunities for automation grow and grow constantly.
So outsourcing. Is a valid and high leverage way to spend your time also. So if the time, , that you take to develop a process and to train someone, if that might open up swathes of time where you could focus more on high leverage activities like sales or business development, then it may be that it is a worthwhile endeavor, not just for the leverage of time.
But also for the return on investment, but you have to do that, have to think that through. Okay. I hope that has helped to spur some thinking for you about what you can do as a coaching business owner to get the most leverage for your investment of time in the things that are not directly [00:21:00] coaching or facilitation or consulting or whatever your offers are.
If you have any questions about this, as always, please get in touch. I'm always happy to answer them. You can hit me up on LinkedIn is probably the easiest option. , and I was really pleased last week. I've got three messages, , from people who wanted to connect and give some feedback and ask some questions.
So I really appreciate it. Please. Do you will make my day or my week or my month or even my year? I really love hearing from you. And also, if you would like to talk about your business, the other place that listeners from the podcast can connect with me is that I have opened up times in the coming weeks to connect with you.
And it could be for a chat, but most likely it'll be because I can't help myself. To dive into your business and your priorities for growing your business, , to whatever the next step is for you. So if you'd like my eyes on your business, I'd love to have a conversation and you can book in directly in the link in the show notes.
, I'm also of course, always really [00:22:00] happy to share more about what is involved in the corporate to coach accelerator and whether it would be a good fit for your goals. , yeah, so have a great week and I will see you next week.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us.
This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective, where executive coaches grow their businesses in a community of peers, with business education, mentoring, deal clinics, and more. If you'd like to contact me or work with me further, all my free resources, courses, and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found at elliescarf.com.
Have a brilliant week, and I look forward to talking to you again [00:23:00] soon.
