Ask Steph: How many hours do you really work?

Today I’m answering a question from a listener who is curious about work-life balance and whether it’s possible to run a business that’s profitable without working 60+ hours a week.

In this episode, I’m sharing a snapshot of my journey, including:
– Getting clarity on the factors that affect your work hours, beyond business demand
– Why assessing the next phase of my business is critical to laying the foundations for what's to come
– The very real value of not trading time for money…plotting your own path
– Why freeing up space to focus on your ‘Queen Bee' role is super important
– What the ever-changing landscape of work hours looks like in a growing business
– The key difference between working ON the business versus IN the business

Have a question you’d like me to answer on the show? Write in with your question at https://stephtaylor.co/asksteph

 

Today is another episode of ask Steph and I'm answering a listener question that was submitted asking about how many hours I really work. Today's question is from Finn Bout. 

Hi there, Steph, thank you for your great podcast. I started listening to Socialette a few years ago and then got busy with my business. Which is a law firm that provides lawyers to other firms on contract. And now I'm going through the process of really thinking about what I want to be doing with my time. And so I recently have come back to you via Imperfect Action. I'd like to know how much time you spend on the business. You sound like you aren't spending 60 or 70 hours and more like 30 or so because you seem happy.

And you are doing all the things you want to do, but I'd like to know if that's true and, or realistic. I am a hard worker, but I'm looking for ways to bring more balance into my life. So I often find myself wondering about all your coaching calls and private classes and so on. How many hours do you really work? Could you also give a snapshot of the time it's taken you at various business points? I'm sure some periods were much more intensive than others. I'd find this very helpful and interesting, and I'm sure others would as well. 

 

How much time do I spend on the business?

I guess let's answer this in a few parts. So first of all, the first question was how much time do I spend on the business? How many hours a week do I spend on it? At the moment. I'm currently, recording this episode on holiday because for some reason, the original file disappeared and if you're noticing a difference in sound quality, that's why it's different because I'm not recording with my usual microphone. 

So when I had planned to record this episode a couple of weeks ago, I had a very full plate because we had just launched Offer Less, Sell More. We were wrapping up this round of Launch Magic and I was prepping to take a few weeks pretty much offline. I mean, I'll be offline in about a week or so. 

But because it's summer, right? I'm usually at my desk around 6, 6 30 in the morning. And then I finished my day around lunchtime. So, you know, six hours a day, maybe 30 hours. Around 30 hours a week. While I'm in this busy up period, when I'm not in a busier period, then you know, sometimes it's three hours. Sometimes it's four hours. 

And I do like to take bigger chunks of time off. I really enjoy working. And I think one of my biggest challenges, when I'm on holiday, is actually saying, no, I'm going to put the laptop away and I'm not going to do any work today. Because there's always things I can do to continue to grow the business. They're not busy tasks. 

But I can explore new ideas or I can brainstorm things. There's always a strategy that can be done. Tasks where I'm working on the business. And I find it very hard to switch off from those. Now the hours that I work fluctuate a lot. It really depends on my energy that day, my focus that day and over time, I've become quite mindful of not trying to force myself beyond what I can realistically get done. 

I do also have ADHD and getting that formal diagnosis this year has helped me to be a little more self-compassionate on the days when I really can't focus on the task. You know, there are some days when I want to do something. I want to get it done and I just cannot focus on it. And it is so frustrating. 

But I also know now that I can make up for it on the days when I do have a little bit more focus. Now most of the time, I also physically can only focus for up to five or six hours a day. It's been like this, my entire career. When I worked in corporate, I was useless after lunch. And then I hated how everybody else in my team would work late into the evening. But because I started really early in the mornings, they all thought that I was just clocking off at 5:00 PM and being lazy. But I'd been there since 6:00 AM or 7:00 AM. 

So I've had to get really smart about how I work, because I know I've only got a limited time that I can really be productive. And yeah, I used to think I was lazy, but I've discovered I'm not. 

Now, right now, I'm very much in the building phase of my business and I'm thinking, what do I want the next phase of my life to look like, what do I want the next stage of my business to look like? And I know that at some stage I would like to have kids. So that means that I need to put in a bit of extra time now to set up the foundations for a business where I can have both. 

I can have the fulfillment and the mental stimulation and the financial freedom that my business affords me. And I can have the flexibility and the time freedom to spend outside of just working. But my business as is could run probably with less than 20 hours of my time each week. If I wanted it to, it kept running. When I took two weeks off to hike through the Outback, it kept running. So I'm definitely not spending that much time. And I don't know if I really ever have. And sometimes I do squeeze in client consults for past students and past clients, but not really that many. 

 

The biggest area where my time goes

The other areas where most of my time goes, I think content creation is probably the biggest one. I have these podcast episodes, writing emails to my list, creating social posts, and recording videos. Writing notes to my community, writing my daily biz boosters. I do all of that. And I love it. I haven't outsourced it because I love it. And you know, I think that is my main role in the business. 

So I don't want to outsource that yet. And I don't know if I ever want to outsource that. The next area where I spend a lot of my time is marketing. I manage all that. I create and manage all of our own Facebook ads because I'm really good at them. And I haven't wanted to bring in an agency or somebody to do them yet. 

I speak to people's audiences. I do podcast interviews on other people's podcasts. I do partnerships. I write guest articles. So there is a lot of time that I spend there on marketing as well. I spend a little bit of time on sales. So, you know, when we're doing a live launch, for example, when I do a Launch Magic, the Launch Magic launch twice a year, I'm doing the strategy still. I'm liaising with our copywriter to make sure that the copy she's writing is aligned with the strategy. It feels good. I'm the person creating the webinar, and delivering the webinar. If we have any new bonuses, then I'm creating those with Launch Magic. The actual course content is already created. So I don't have to spend any time doing that. 

But if it's a new offer, then obviously I need to spend time also creating the content for the product. And then there's delivery. That's the other last part of where my time goes and for Launch Magic, you know, I do the live Q and A calls and the get-it-done sessions one or two times a week for 12 weeks. 

For my new 12-month program, there will be more live sessions that I'll need to deliver. For my launch strategy, I need to shop for the kickoff call with the client and then it's six or seven hours of my time on their work. And then it's seven days of email support that they have with me. 

So there is a little bit of hands-on delivery stuff. But now I no longer spend my time on things like customer support. Most of the admin tasks. I don't liaise with affiliates for Launch Magic. I don't schedule podcast episodes. I don't schedule social media content. I don't write the show notes. All of that. That is off my plate now, which means that I can focus on the things that I need to do and the things that I want to do. 

 

Snapshot of the time I use at various points in my business now

So if I think back to 2016, when I first launched my very first business, which was a completely different business, it was a physical product e-commerce business. And I was working a full-time job. So I was working maybe four hours a day on my business, plus another 8, 9, 10 hours a day in the office as well. And I found it so easy to make the most of those four hours because I was really focusing. It was new, and it was exciting. And I just really had this end goal where I thought, I'm going to create a business where I can get out of my job. 

And look, it got me out of my job, but not how I intended. I actually got really sick and I was in the hospital for a week, with a really bad kidney infection. And then when I got back to work two weeks later, so a week in the hospital and then a week extra of sick leave. And on the first day out of the hospital, my boss called me and asked if he could drop my laptop off. And I was like, I've just come out of seven days in the hospital. I can barely stay awake for an entire episode of a show. 

There's no way I'm going to be able to do any work. And he didn't take that very well and then when I got back to the office here, I turned up and on my first day back, there was just this mountain of work on my desk and I actually cried. And that was the only time I've ever cried in a job at work. 

And I handed in my resignation, I think three or four weeks later because I just knew that this was not where I wanted to be. My business at the time was nowhere near the point where it could sustain me.

I ended up having to take a part-time job, which was the best thing that could've happened. Because it was a part-time job in marketing for a startup. And at that part-time job, I was with them through the process of a rebrand. I was with them through the process of launching a podcast through the process of launching a course. And it taught me so much of what I know now came from that part-time job. 

But I'd quit my part-time job at this point because I was earning enough from clients that I could sustain my lifestyle, but I wasn't quite at that financial freedom goal. And I was still working a little bit too much, maybe a little bit more than six hours a day at this point. 

Then I started shifting more into the Steph Taylor brand. So I launched the podcast. I had launched my first course, I'd started letting go of clients. I actually launched a membership, which I was running for a while. And this was the point, I think, where I was working more than maybe six or seven hours a day because I was essentially running two businesses. 

Then as I started letting go of clients that decreased to about maybe five hours a day. And then 2020 when my business really took off. It was a very tough year for me, mindset-wise. And I think I was only working about three or four hours a day. And those three or four hours were not very focused. I was very scattered. 

I then also started taking Wednesdays off. I had every Wednesday off, which was great. It was exactly what I needed at that point in time because I was feeling very burnt out like that kind of quick business growth without the foundations and the structure to support it. That was a recipe for burnout. And it's no wonder that I just couldn't focus and couldn't work. 

 

The key difference between working ON the business versus IN the business

But there is a trade-off because the more time that you spend building it now, the sooner it will get to that point where it's sustainable and it runs, and it keeps growing when you're offline. Or you can spend less time on it now, and you can enjoy that lifestyle from day one. But it will take longer to get to the point where it's that financial freedom right there is always going to be that time. But then when you get to the point where it is set up and it's running, that is a really great place to be. 

Now when I talk about the time that I'm spending on the business, I mean time that I'm spending on the business, not time that I'm spending, working with clients. Because if you're working 40 hours a week on your business, but all of that is spent on client projects or admin, you're not actually moving any closer to the business that you want. 

Whereas, if you decide to let go of one client, and that gives you an extra three hours per week, great. Now you can spend that three hours per week putting in place the foundations for a business that doesn't rely on your time. You can create the structure and the systems and the processes for a business that runs itself when you are not there. 

And that's what I'm really focusing on in my 12-month program. You're creating that sustainable online business that gives you the time freedom that you're craving so that your business can be profitable when you're off the grid. It can keep growing when you're not at your laptop. 

I think that's really where a lot of the education in the online space, the online business space is lacking, is everywhere focusing on one component they're focusing on just launches. That's been me so far, right? Focusing on just launches or they're focusing on just Instagram reels or they're focusing on just running paid ads and all of these components are so important.

But there's nothing that's been holistic. Hey, this is how you get all of your foundations together because honestly, a lot of those foundations are really unsexy, you know, if somebody sold you a course on like, Hey, here's how to manage your cash flow. 

It's really unsexy because it's just spreadsheets and looking at like, how can we manipulate the cash flow a little bit so that we've always got cash in the bank? And that isn't very sexy. It's less sexy than how to launch or run Instagram reels and grow your audience. 

But when you put it all together, the outcome is exactly what we as business owners have all or what we all started our businesses for that freedom, that business that stays profitable when you're offline. 

 

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