Build Your Brand by Working Less with Rich Webster

And that's around the same time that I started my entrepreneurial journey. And from 21 to say, I guess 32, 33, I would probably be most known for running this, creative agency design business, that. Originally started out as just a standard agency, worked with clients. probably started more as a freelancer actually, and then became an agency.

so I built all of this before I was like even a public person. I really designed all the stuff just for myself, not for anyone else. And, yeah, that, That was great. I ran that for a while and at a certain point, I was working with, with a mentor, Chris Doe, and he helped me with some stuff in my agency

I'm gonna post every day online for a year. And just see what happens. And my expectation was like, okay, this would be cool if at the end of that year I had a thousand followers or something that's I really had no expectations of greatness and I. I was just sharing honestly about like how my business worked, how I was thinking about business, like what was going on behind the scenes, and it resonated with people.

And then, yeah, the first year was a lot more than a thousand. and I, saw that as some signal to continue pursuing and then kind of everything, grew organically from that. I ended up taking all of those insights, processes, systems, from my business, my agency, and really In some ways, like culminating that journey with this, this program called How to Work Less, which, hundreds and hundreds of people have taken at this point. And, yeah, that was how to work less since then. how to Work Less has been around for maybe three,

How did you find that process? was the decision to close your agency difficult? Did it just be, or did it just feel like, yeah, this is a natural next step? So for me personally, the title of designer, entrepreneur, like writer, mentor, or like these are all very loosely held because of this foundation that I have. so it wasn't very painful for me to hold on to the, to let go of that title. Ironically, maybe it also has something to do with the fact that I'm fully self-taught.

last thing I'll say on this point, and I, this is really important. As I was transitioning the agency down and the way that worked was, step one was don't take on any new clients.

but people are always like, oh, why don't you just sell it? I really can't. Okay. So I ended up handing over clients that I worked with to freelancers that I worked with for a long time. People that I've known. Some of the contracts just ended, but I'm getting to my point here, which is at the very end I had maybe one or two clients left and the business was still doing, over six figures and really wasn't.

so just having that tab open in my brain of I run this business. There are these clients, there's this team. Things are happening even though it's like super, super systemized and like really easy. That final leap from like tiny bit on to off really made a huge difference in me being able to focus on this business.

Everyone was like, don't have one income stream, have, 10. And I spent a lot of time in my business diversifying. But having done your course, having learned from you all this kind of stuff, I can't remember how you put it, but you were basically like, no, don't diversify, narrow down. And that's exactly what you've just described. like you have narrowed down your business to this one thing.

And, I work with entrepreneurs like most of the people that take how to work less, tend to be anywhere from just signing their first clients to like. It's a hundred KA year-ish. but then I work with clients from a hundred K to half a million, 2 million, seven figures and beyond.

There's nothing wrong with that. But what I see is one of the main exercises I do with my clients, is, it's I call it the 80 20 audit. And it's basically looking at your entire business, all of your revenue streams, all of your clients, everything that you're focused on. and generally speaking, what I see is if someone has their hands in a lot of pies, there's probably only one or two things that are accounting for the highest leverage in their business.

like there is no space to do anything different because every kind of nook and cranny of time has already been accounted for. So a lot of times the first thing that I do with people is we take a look at this. Like we see the reality on paper or on the screen, and it makes sense to subtract some things in order to grow.

Like you have to sit down and you have to, like I hate doing the time tracking and I hate doing the auditing and I hate all of that stuff, but at the same time, I know that I need that data to make smart decisions. If growth is my goal, I guess what depends what your goal is, right? If growth and earning more, and working less is my goal, then it totally makes sense, to do all of those things.

Sure. I think for the majority, I'll, I guess I'll caveat this, I'm really like a, kind of an advocate for a very, focused, leveraged business. I think there's tremendous power right now and I'm really excited about, One, one person businesses. And what I mean by that is, the founder, the C, the CEO, the solopreneur person.

and then around the six figure mark, something interesting happens. and this is where focus starts to become really important. and I feel as a solopreneur, there are two. Really great paths that you can go down if you wanna grow your business, and do it in a way that's like sustainable and doesn't burn you out.

Subtracting and letting go of some stuff. the big inflection point is when you have to make a bit of a decision around whether you want to run, and I call these, an expert business and a marketing business. And I'll explain a little bit about what both of those mean. And everyone I talk to wants to be like, can I just be a little bit of both?

what are we optimizing for? And when people are thinking through that, I generally ask them like, okay, what, what do you like most in your business? Like, where do you, like to spend your time? do you want to go, let's say you're a designer. do you want to go deeper into your craft with your clients?

So if you want to go, we'll, talk about both. If you want to go the, Expert business route. Basically the path the TLDR on that is scale with price. Okay? That is the mantra that you'll follow. And what that means is you're going to be constantly testing the limits of how much you can charge.

that's the difference. And one is, in the perception of the client creates a ton more value and there's a lot more trust there. So that transition is important. but we're gonna just scale with price. We're gonna continue to grow the business, not by taking on more clients, not by doing more volume, but by working with, quote unquote better clients.

Yeah, I've thought a lot about this. okay, so marketing business, other side of the coin. There's nothing wrong with either there. No value judgment with, either. I think they're both great. what I don't like is the middle on the marketing side of things, basically. You wanna spend all of your time, marketing and essentially you're going to scale by growing your influence, growing your audience, and building a large platform. riverside_liz_mosley_raw-synced-video-cfr_liz_solo studio_0032: Mm.

and that works until people realize that there's no depth. and then it stops, right? With all of this stuff, like table stakes is like, yeah, you have to be good at what you do. and a lot of times that's gonna mean that the product behind the marketing is actually good, impactful, helpful.

Now there are other skills aside from that design, taste, blah, blah, blah. but we won't get into that. We'll just talk about, the main two and my goal when I'm building a system is to try to isolate. Only those, like people use the phrase zone of genius a lot, only the things that are in my zone of genius.

So in this instance, like that's writing basically. and then I have to ask myself, okay, what can I create that supports me just doing that? and I, think that this is the big hack when it comes to building systems. This is where people mess up, is for delegation as well. If you don't build the process and do it yourself first, it is going to be really hard to delegate or automate later.

That's really useful. You gotta take a step back and do everything yourself for a season so that then you can build the system. so right now I am building this again, and the way that it will work, I'll just walk you through what the system looks like, and what I'm implementing and like how my team fits into this.

And those are like the two things where I'm like, if I just have these two things, I basically have a business. I. So one of the big insights that I've had is, I work with clients like I, I do some like high level one-on-one consulting, and then I work with clients in a group setting and I speak with my clients for anywhere from I don't know, it's four to six hours a week, like a minimum.

To extract insights, which then become my notes for writing. So I'm not in there spit out a fully finished Instagram post. I still, I feel, like that is not, The approach that is going, to work for me and resonate with people, but it does something for me that would take me a ton of time on my own if I didn't have this technology right, which is essentially like I could personally go back and listen to six hours of my self talking every single week and take notes and do this, but I found a shortcut and it works pretty well.

None of this at this point. After I built the system, I do anymore, right? It all just comes to me ready to look at and to review, and then I'm like, great, I have all this, I have some ideas about what I wanna write about. Then I sit down at my keyboard and I write pop, That's the core of what I do. the two things that are not systemized are basically writing and working with clients. but everything else, like I'm trying to remove from my plate.

So I think it's really interesting hearing, like it makes so much sense how you're using it, how, you're help using it to help you organize like your thoughts so you're not starting from a blank page, but it's still like your content, your ideas that it's working from.

And, I made this kind of pact with myself and, a couple of friends and, clients, and I was like, okay, you need to tell me, at what point it will become actively stupid for me to not be paying attention to this. And, at the beginning of this year, I had a client basically share with me like how he was using it in his business.

The same, if not better quality. And this was someone I trust, like I don't want to hear from some random person on the street. yeah, I wrote much faster. 'cause I don't trust that the output is quality, which is what I care about more than anything else. I'm not interested in AI if it's sacrifices quality.

And the more that you can, imbue the AI with. Inputs that are of high quality, of unique like Providence or unique origin, the better stuff you can get out of it. Like I just could not care less about asking chat GPT for generic information. But I find that like when I'm out in the real world doing my thing, staying close to the craft, working closely with my clients, and I can bring those insights into a tool that allows me to move faster.

One of the things that's really struck me hearing you talk. Is how you talk about writing. And I was talking to, a friend recently who was, basically, I can't remember how he worded it, but basically was making the point that even as, someone like me who is like a visual designer and it's all about the visuals, like writing is still the most important thing in terms of getting across an idea, like communicating concepts.

But yeah, I'd love to hear your perspective on that. As someone who's worked with lots of different businesses, would you say that writing. Is important for every business, how do you think that looks and how does it look for someone like me who may, obviously you love writing and are, very good at it.

Okay? If you're not doing anything, this is not your problem. I don't want to give you a, pass to, to not do anything. Okay? Like obviously we we need to take action. but I'm a big advocate for spending more time. Than most, thinking about my business and thinking about working on my business and asking myself like, is this a good use of my time?

so part of that is like actually, a bit of a mindfulness and like awareness practice of being checked into how are things going? Do I like where things are headed? et cetera. But to loop back to your point about writing, the thing that I recommend most if you are just getting started writing that is extremely low stakes.

because I find, I've been on periods of doing this every single day. Sometimes, I stop for a little bit. But it's been a pretty constant companion throughout, the time. And I find that when I do it, a lot comes out that maybe I wasn't aware of consciously. And, When I don't do it, then I'm able to reflect back and be like, oh.

you can't just keep adding things in and think you're gonna able to fit that into the time. So yeah, that's a great question. Okay. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna start my morning pages journaling on that, what I'm gonna get rid of to do the morning pages. But yeah, I think that's, that is something, yeah, really important to think about. Amazing. Thank you so much. yeah, I, if I would massively recommend going to listen to Rich's podcast because I have learned so much, even from that free resource, which is amazing. if people have listened to this and they're like, okay. We need Rich to help us out. Where can people find you?

So if you're, doing like under six figures, like that's a perfect place to start. And if you are in that phase we talked about earlier in the journey where you're making six figures but stuck, I work with people at a kind of higher level, more closely. information on both of those things are found on my website, which is Rich webster.co.