We’ve all heard the phrase, “work smarter, not harder” right? Why, then, do we often seem to try to work harder, not smarter?
So many times musicians come to me with a notion of thinking that they just need to add more students into their studio, or they need to add more gigs into their calendar – to continue to work hard and work on the wrong things rather than elevating their perspective, elevating the type of work that they do, and increasing their activities from a standpoint of perceived value. But one of the things that can really help avoid burnout, and can help musicians better serve their clients is to be smart with your time and energy.
Maximizing Effort & Minimizing Extraneous Work
What are some of the ways that us musicians can really elevate our perspective and explore how to maximize our efforts? We want to offer a lot, but sometimes we can be limited geographically or by time or by other physical limitations. So it’s up to us to work smartly around those. You need to work better, not necessarily harder, but still be getting better results that will actually impact your time.
To start: how are you right now packaging your skills? Are you giving away everything in exchange for time for money? Are you selling your time vs. your product? Are you telling people this is how much you charge per hour? Are you working in a way where people pay you for the amount of time they spend with you vs. the result that you can provide? The number one starting point where musicians can start working smarter, not harder, is by immediately shifting to a model where they’re no longer selling their time and instead, they are packaging their skills to sell a result.
How Do You Take The First Steps?
What you’re now going to be doing is sharing with your potential clients the fact that your services produce a specific result, and allow your clients to go from here to there.
Not only is it important that you can articulate the outcome of what your services will do for them so that they can focus on that result vs. focus on how much time you’re going to spend, but you also need to have some sort of a process, a framework that gives people that journey to get those results. You don’t want people to only focus on the result – you also want to be able to showcase how you uniquely get them there. What is your unique framework? What is your unique methodology that helps people go from point A to point B? It does not have to be very extensive, but it has to be communicated. That’s how you prove value in the quality of your result rather than the quantity of your personal time.
Explore Various Avenues To Work Smarter, Not Harder
Maximizing your time in a way that works for you, your business and your clients isn’t going to be a “one size fits all” game. What works best for someone else might not be your choice of options. But it’s good to explore all your available avenues so you can structure yourself in an informed way.
You can, for example, separate your duties into not just service delivery, but business building activities. Perhaps you can allocate certain days of the week for certain things and get specific in deciding when you are going to be focusing on internal processes, internal mechanisms, creating better systems, driving sales, etc.
Your job as a musician-entrepreneur, as you’re building and expanding on your organization is to be flexible and explore. Create what you need to in order to sell and adjust your strategy as you find ways that work better. Perhaps you can best maximize your time by teaching a large online class. Perhaps it’s better for you to build online courses. You’ll never know until you get comfortable with exploring how to work smarter.
I want to get your music business running at peak efficiency. On June 16th from 9am-1pm eastern, I am hosting a free half-day interactive strategy workshop for established musician-entrepreneurs who are serious about scaling their business without sacrificing their quality of life. If you are ready to be in the room with established musician-entrepreneurs and creatives who are ready to create a self-sustaining business, then make sure to register HERE before we kick off.
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