This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
It's a big day in my world. I am hosting an event called NeuroDiversion on Live in Austin, Texas. I'll be sharing a bit on my stories on Instagram, in case you are not live in Austin, Texas with us. So I've been working on this for months. It's great to see it come to life.
But of course we have the podcast as well and that's why you're tuning in. Today's question, how can I work fewer hours without losing income? That's right, we can do more than one thing at a time. And one way we can do that, well maybe we can actually do more than one thing at a time, but one way we can do more of what's important to us is by making critical decisions about our side hustle, our various projects. How can we perhaps reduce work hours while keeping income steady?
That's what we're gonna talk about in this episode. Again, live from Texas, freelancers and service-based entrepreneurs often hit a point where success leads to overwhelm. So we're gonna hear today from a web developer whose business is thriving, but at the cost of working way too much, 60 plus hours a week he says. And he wants to scale back without disappointing long-term clients. And of course, without losing his money.
So let's talk about some options for him. What might he do? I've got some ideas about that. I'm excited to bring them to you. Detailed question in my answer coming right up.
- Hey there, I'm Miles. I'm a web developer and I've been freelancing full-time for the past three years. Business has been good and I'm grateful for a consistent stream of clients, but I'm working way more hours than I ever expected. Between managing projects, client calls and troubleshooting unexpected issues, I'm regularly clocking 60 plus hours per week. I want to cut back on hours without losing income, but I'm not sure where to start.
Should I raise my rates, outsource certain tasks or restructure my service packages? How can I build a business model that allows me to work smarter, not harder while still maintaining steady income? - This situation comes up a good bit in the side hustle world. When people are starting to do projects that take off and they're excited, it's great, but then they get really busy, especially in the service world. If your business is good and you're getting more calls or your existing clients are asking for more work, as I said, at first you're happy about it, but then you're like, oh, I'm actually, like in Miles' case here, clocking 60 hours a week.
That's not a side hustle, right? That's an overburdening lifestyle. So what can we do? First of all, new clients raise your rates for them. Make sure anybody new coming into the pipeline, higher rate.
This typically means you take on fewer clients 'cause not everybody can pay the higher rate, but you keep the same income. So just, I mean, just do that right now. Update your pricing on your website or in your proposal, or if you have any kind of template that goes out, make it higher than you think it should be. Like, why not? You're already busy.
This is a good problem to have. And I always encourage people to start with their new clients first, then consider raising rates for returning clients, existing clients, and so on. But if you just start with new clients, you don't have to have any of those conversations at all. It's just kind of slowing down the pipeline a bit. Next, wherever you can outsource repetitive or specialized tasks, anything that you can do to delegate time-consuming tasks like troubleshooting, in this case, maybe it's plugin updates or basic coding fixes.
If you can get a reliable subcontractor doing some of this stuff, that frees up your time for the high value projects. And it's not so easy to just flip a switch and outsource. I often criticize this whole concept of like, just get a virtual assistant because your life is still, you still have to be responsible for the same things. Even if someone else is doing them, you're ultimately responsible. But I think when you're in the situation of working the 60 plus hours a week, you need to do something.
So you are gonna be better off when you focus on the parts of the business that you enjoy while ensuring other tasks still get done. So it is something you want to work towards. Next, streamline your service packages, like simplify your offerings as opposed to being just the developer who does everything, make it clear that this is a package with a fixed price, a defined deliverable. It just makes it simple to be like I'm building a starter site. The starter site has five pages in a contact form.
It has e-commerce integration. It has whatever it is you need to have, but just a standard package. It reduces the back and forth. It reduces scope creep where you agree to one thing, but then something else ends up happening. And then maybe long-term you want to shift toward retainer clients or recurring revenue, which will create predictable income while reducing the need to constantly secure new clients.
Okay, so that's something that a lot of people work toward over time as they get more expertise and experience. Retainer clients or recurring revenue can definitely help keep that income up while reducing the extreme workload. Miles, good work on getting your side hustle to this point. Let's try to take it further without you working more. In fact, let's hopefully allow you to work a bit less.
Everybody else, thank you for listening. Thanks for being out there. Hope you have a wonderful day wherever you are in the world. I'm gonna get back to the event that I'm working on, but I'll be back here again tomorrow with a new episode of the show. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
