Work Less, Make More

Stop Hustling Your Way to Broke

I used to wear busy like a badge of honor.

14, 16 hour days. Four jobs at once. Starting at 5:30am and going until I had nothing left. I genuinely believed that if I just did MORE, I would finally make more money. And I took that exact same mindset into my business in 2017.

It almost broke me.

Here's what nobody talks about when they're selling you the hustle: busy is not the same as profitable. You can stay completely consumed by your business and still be dead broke. I've seen it. I've lived it. And I work with women every single day who are doing all the things and still not seeing it in their bank account.

So let's talk about what's actually going on.

You've capped your income without realizing it

If you charge per hour, per session, or per call, you have a ceiling. There are only so many hours in a day. You hit your max hours, you hit your max income. That's it. You didn't leave your 9-5 to build yourself a different cage, but that's exactly what most of us do. We take the same trading time for money mindset and just replicate it into our own business.

The shift happens when you stop asking "how do I work more?" and start asking "how do I leverage what I already know?"

Your expertise has value beyond the hour you spend delivering it. Charge accordingly.

The 80/20 rule most people have backwards

Most entrepreneurs spend 80% of their time on busy work and 20% on revenue generating activities. It needs to be the opposite.

Revenue generating activities are the things that actually move money. Real conversations with real potential clients. Following up. Closing. Showing up where your people are and talking to them like a human being. That's it. Everything else is support work, and a lot of it can be batched, automated, or delegated.

When I stopped filling my day with tasks that felt productive but weren't generating income, everything changed. I now work 9 to 2 most days. I close my laptop, I go be a mom, I ride my horses, I reset. And my business makes more money now than it did when I was working twice the hours.

That's not luck. That's strategy.

Why we stay stuck

We were conditioned from the time we were little to put our heads down, work hard, don't take up too much space, and just do more. Then we get into corporate and get ignored or talked over and told to sit down. And we carry all of that into our businesses.

So when things feel slow or scary, we default to busy. We rebrand. We rewrite the website. We post more content. We check our inbox for the fifth time. Because staying busy feels safe. It feels like we're doing something.

But it's not the same as being profitable.

The fear underneath all of it is real. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of being seen. Fear of what people will say. And as long as we let that fear run the show, we will keep ourselves small and exhausted at the same time.

What to do instead

First, detach your income from your hours. Start thinking about how you can teach once and sell repeatedly. Group programs, courses, memberships, tiered offers. What is the thing you say to every single client? That's your first scalable offer.

Second, reverse engineer your goal. Decide how many hours you actually want to work. Then figure out what you need to charge and how many clients you need to hit your income goal within that container. Work backwards from the number, not forward from the hustle.

Third, track your time for one week. Write down everything you do and then look at your actual dollar per hour number. Most people are shocked. That number will tell you everything about where your time is really going.

You did not start this business to be chained to it. You started it for freedom. Financial freedom, time freedom, the ability to be present with your kids without guilt. That's available to you, but not through more hours. Through smarter strategy.

Your next step

Book a Revenue Audit at salesmama.biz/revenue-audit. It's a 15 minute call, no pitch, and I will give you at least one action step to plug the gap in your business right now. If it makes sense to go deeper together from there, we will. But start there.

You already have the knowledge. You're just not delivering it in the most profitable way yet. Let's fix that.

-Sausha