[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:06] Hey there and welcome back to the Confessions in the Home Office podcast. I'm Wendy Hill and today I'm talking about something that doesn't get enough credit. The invisible work of running a business. You know what I'm talking about. If you have a business, the endless to do list. They never stop. The back end administration task, all the marketing updates, all the tech stuff that breaks at the worst possible time, usually right before you're getting ready to get on a teams or a zoom meeting.
[00:00:33] The parts of business ownership that aren't flashy, they're not really worth putting on Instagram and they usually don't get a round of applause. But without them, your business would completely fall apart.
[00:00:44] So if you're wondering what I'm talking about with invisible work, it's everything people don't see when they look at your business from the outside. It's all the emails, it's the CRM updates of putting all the new contacts in that you've met at different networking events. It's scheduling social media posts when you're really, really tired. It's planning your launch when no one's even talking about buying yet. It's updating your website because you realize there's something out of date. It doesn't even say the current year or there's a change that you need to make. Cleaning up your QuickBooks or I use Wave apps for all my accounting and just setting boundaries with clients, keeping them up to date. And this is pretty relevant, Filing your taxes. So it's all the stuff that isn't billable, but it's really critical if you want your business to survive and grow.
[00:01:35] So why are all these tasks so draining but so important? The hardest part about invisible work is it just feels endless. There's no real check mark. There's always something else to do. I was talking to a client last Thursday and he's out in Kansas City and we've known each other forever. And he was. At first I thought he was trying to tell me that his business wasn't doing well and he was just kind of drowning. But what I realized is that he had so many emails and he had so many requests for projects, he was having trouble getting through everything. So we talked about how that's a really good thing. But by the time you reach Thursday, you're tired and you're just like, I don't want this to go away. I'm so grateful for this, but holy smokes, when's it going to stop? And you think, well, if I were better at this, it wouldn't feel so heavy if I were successful. This will be easier. Or I would have a whole staff working on this for me. Or if I could manage my time better, I would be time blocking and getting this done and this wouldn't even be an issue. All that's a lie. Every single business owner deals with this, no matter how polished they look online or outside.
[00:02:42] So, you know, I would say that everybody's struggling with this at my office is a disaster right now because I haven't had 20 minutes to throw things away, straighten up the desk. For some reason, I keep makeup on my desk just in case I'm headed out to a meeting. There's makeup all over my desk.
[00:03:01] Sometimes you just have to stop and do it. But I try not to beat myself up and say, I know there's going to be a day soon where I'm going to have 30 minutes or a friend's going to call and I'm going to have time to actually straighten up and do something mindless on my desk while I'm listening and talking to her.
[00:03:19] I remember one time early on in my business, I was really just focused on client work and I wasn't thinking about all the other things that needed to be updated. And I got behind on billing and, oh, I'll have a weekend to figure that out soon. And one client called and said, we're having some financial problems. We've got to scale back on our contract and we have to scale back now. Like, we can't do the, we're going to keep working with you, but it can't be the 30 day or 60 day clause like we, we've got to start. And I realized I really needed to have everything set up and up to date so building the business back up wouldn't be so tough. So that moment taught me the invisible work matters because it protects you. It's not a distraction from your real business, it is your business.
[00:04:01] Now one thing that some people may say is we should hire people to do all that. Well, I do have team members that help me with some social media and with some programming. I have someone that generates all my invoices. They don't send them, but they get them ready for me to approve and then I send them out with a note.
[00:04:19] But you know, at the same time, I don't want to turn loose of everything. With me just having a small business and have all these other people running it, what if they start making mistakes? Or I had somebody work for me once who quit doing certain tasks, they were supposed to do and I wasn't paying attention because I trust them. And three months went by and certain tasks weren't being done. This was seven, eight years ago.
[00:04:40] But it scared me when that happened. So I think you have to be really careful and if you're going to own a business, know that you're going to have to take on a lot of that work too. The other thing is I see a lot of people out there promoting that you should use AI for everything. I disagree with that. I think there are so many great things that AI can do. You're looking for ideas, you're. You're tired, you're looking for steps with a plan. You feel like you've missed something, you have some copy that you've written and you just feel like it's not flowing. But I put in a prompt probably three weeks ago on chat GPT1 Monday morning and got up and walked away from the computer. And when I came back, it was on a completely different subject. It. It was wrong. If I had just been relying on AI and wanted to do a copy paste, I would have probably lost a client. So I took the exact same prompt and put it in another AI program and it gave me the right answer. So AI is not always 100% accurate. If you're looking for something to help you with repetitive task. If you're looking for something to help you with new content ideas, I think that's great. But you have to read everything. Don't take AI results and just copy paste and use them. You need to read through them. And a lot of times people can spot a copy. And I would go do some research, research on that and make sure that what you're putting out there doesn't look like AI content.
[00:06:05] So here's how I manage without burning out. So how do I handle the invisible work now without feeling like it's just eating my soul, which I've been working on taxes because we have an extension till May 1st in South Carolina because of the hurricane. So I'm wrapping all that up and, and I'm tired. It's been a busy weekend.
[00:06:23] So I try to build systems wherever I can, like if I can, batch content, spend an hour doing that, set a timer, work on something, work on one client for an hour, hour and a half, get a lot done.
[00:06:35] And I schedule a lot of emails instead of clients thinking that I'm up all hours of the night working or up at 4 in the morning, which sometimes I am, if I need to get something done, I go and get Things written and scheduled. Um, I set a lot of reminders so I don't have to remember every little thing. I have Trello, my project management software set up so when emails come in from certain clients, they go into a certain Trello board as task. That way I don't miss an email. I have to go back and look through all those cards in Trello and sometimes I can just trash them right away if it's something that's already been handled or sometimes it'll give me an idea of something else that we need to talk about.
[00:07:13] So I also just schedule time just for backend work. I will usually take a little bit of time on a Sunday to do that, and then usually once or twice during the week I will work on admin work cleanup, and one of my team members that helps me with accounting. We work together about twice a month on invoices. And so, you know, if it gets a spot on the calendar, like it's just like if a client meeting would, then I don't push it off till later. And then third, I really just changed my mindset instead of feeling annoyed about all the things. And I. I feel like when you get to the point where you're running your business really well, your to do list never does end. You never tear up the paper and throw it away. If you do, you already have another list started on another piece of paper.
[00:07:59] I have to remind myself this is what a business owner does. If I want to go back to punching a clock or working for someone else, I might not have all this, but the freedom that I have and being able to do stuff with my husband, sometimes with my children who are off in college and my parents that seem to need a little more help these days, that's. That's just the price that I pay. And I'm okay with that. I'm not failing because I have to deal with boring stuff. Everybody has to deal with boring stuff. I really feel like I'm building something bigger for me than just getting a paycheck. So I'm not really afraid to ask for help when I need it.
[00:08:34] I've bought templates, I've bought courses. I've created stuff in AI. I've created stuff just from scratch. I save all that out of my Google Drive and I use things over and over again. There's no need to reinvent the wheel or I may pass more work off to a contractor on my team if I need some help for a while. If there's something going on and it just keeps me from having to stay in front of the computer so much and getting drained. So if you feel like you're getting bogged down right now by the invisible work of running your business, you're not broken. You're not failing. You're actually doing exactly what it takes to build something sustainable. So I want you to give yourself credit for all the things that no one else sees. And they may never will. So that's it for this week's episode. So please make sure that you subscribe, like, Follow Share Comment these episodes are on YouTube and all major podcast platforms like Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Audible, that type of thing. And if there's something that you want to hear about, send me an
[email protected] that's Wendy with an I. And I'll be back next week, and I hope everybody has a great week. Take care.
