Working IN vs ON your business: How I 3x'd my revenue in 1/2 the time

Dearest, fierce business owner & heart-centres human, 

Today, we’ll be exploring the difference between working ON vs IN your business & how I used working ON my business to triple my annual revenue and cut my work hours in half.

If you read to the end, you’ll learn:

•  The difference between working in and on your business
• What tasks are considered working IN your business
• What tasks are considered working ON your business
• Why you can't seem to bust through that income or impact plateau
• How to spend 30 minutes a week working IN your business to increase results in less time 

If you’re new to the space, hello! I’m Cora-Lynn Hazelwood, and this blog aims to help coaches and course creators help more people, make more money, and do that in less time. We cover the tactical HOW-TO side of scaling a multiple six-figure coaching business without burnout or doing 1:1 coaching work (unless you love it), so if that sounds like you, hit the subscribe button and stay a while.

First let’s clarify the difference between working on vs working IN your business.

Working IN your Business as a Coach or Course Creator

I want you to imagine the star performer in a movie or maybe your favourite play if that’s your thing. They spend the majority of their time perfecting their craft. They’re rehearsing lines. They’re trying on costumes. They’re showing up on stage or the screen to perform. They’re not planning the movie. They’re not organizing the team. They’re not estimating what the film or play will make at the box office - they show up, do their work & get paid for it.

When you work in your business, you play the lead actor role. You're focused on the task ahead of you for that day and nothing else. 

In most online coaching or course-based business, working IN your business looks like this:

•  Running coaching sessions
•  Creating content
•  Interacting with clients and customers
•  Recording course videos
•  Creating checkouts/landing pages/sales pages
•  Sending emails
•  Following up on payment plans (if you have to do this manually, get Kajabi)

It’s all the day-to-day tasks that need to be done to keep the business floating. In some people’s eyes, it's where your passion for what you do actually meets the real world, where your expertise directly touches and impacts your clients.

This work is important. Without it, the business would not run, and it can help you generate a lot of cash and impact as an online business owner. When I was solely focused on working IN our business, we were able to generate $128,000 with all organic marketing (via Instagram) in our first year.

But here’s the kicker…

Everything changed when I switched gears from solely working IN the business to working ON the business. That $128,000 I made in my first year of business sounds GREAT, right? Well, I didn’t tell you that I was working 60-80 hours a week to make that happen (yikes). I constantly felt overwhelmed, overworked and honestly underpaid.

Today, it’s a different story. Our business generates between $300,000 and $350,000 yearly—three times the revenue year over year—and I’m only working 15-25 hours a week on average.

I tripled my annual revenue and cut my work hours in half, not by doing more but by working on my business more than I worked IN it, so let’s dive into what it means to work on your business.

Working ON your Business as Coach or Course Creator

Working ON your business is the strategic, visionary work that propels your business forward. This is where you take a step back from all the work being done while you work IN your business, evaluate the results of that doing & use it to REFINE your business strategy so you can make more money & do so in less time.

Working ON your business includes things like:

•  Planning & optimizing your marketing strategy to find new customers
•  Planning & optimizing your offer strategy to serve those customers
•  Planning & optimizing your sales processes & launches to help your clients purchase your offers with less friction
•  Planning & optimizing your business financials to increase profitability
•  Planning & building out systems so you can outsource or automate work

This work will help you see clearly what is currently working in your business and what is not working.

With that information, you can then prioritize tasks that drive the most revenue and impact and let go of the tasks that aren’t moving the needle forward. When this is done repeatedly and consistently, you’ll end up with fewer day-to-day tasks to manage, freeing up your time to enjoy your life and the fruits of your labour.

Only working IN your business is a deadly trap.

And look, I get it; if you’re reading this, you’re likely doing everything in your business at this moment to bring revenue in. The thought of stepping away from the doing to plan and think about the future of the business seems less important because the work you’re doing is brining in revenue - but this is the DEADLY trap that causes more coaches and course creators to BURN out and quit before the going gets really really good.

I’m going to say this as clearly as possible.

DOING more work is NOT the answer to scaling to 10,20 or even 50k months.

Doing LESS of the work that’s not driving sales & MORE of the work that IS driving sales & building systems around that work is how you scale.

So how do we balance the working IN the business & ON the business without impacting our revenue negatively while we do it?

Striking the Perfect Balance of Working IN vs ON your business

You start slowly. In this community we believe that intentional, steady effort is the way to create lasting change & results.

This might involve setting aside 30 minutes each week at first to work on your business. You could use those 30 minutes each week to optimize a different area of your business.

A month of working on your business could look like this:

Week One: Analyze social media analytics for top performing posts, topics etc & adjusting your content plan for the following weeks to emphasize those topics.

Week Two: Review the number of sales of each of your offers. This data will allow you to focus more of your efforts on selling the products that people are already loving & can help you strategize what products to sell & when to sell them.

Week Three: Review your business expenses & look for any overlapping features. For example, you might be paying for zoom & kajabi but with Kajabi’s new video calling feature paying for Zoom becomes an unnecessary expense saving you money & increasing your profitability.

Week Four: Create an offer upsell & downsell strategy. If you have more than one offer that you’re selling it’s likely that you could be making more money with every sale by strategically offering related products to your customers as they checkout. This could be the difference of having an average order value of $197 or $497 & wouldn’t require you to create any additional products increasing your profitability & getting your courses in the hands of more people.

Once you see how much more money you can make & how much time you can save by working ON your business vs IN it you’ll want to spend even more time in the strategizing work.

Both are required for longevity, growth and sustainability.

A successful online course or coaching business requires you to find balance between both types of work. Too much time IN your business can lead to burnout and stagnation, while too much time ON your business without implementation can result in missed opportunities.

If you know that working more ON your business could be the key to solving some of the challenges you're currently facing as you grow from six-figures to multiple six figures - our Designed to Scale Program could be the solution you need. We'll teach you how to blend these two together to help more people, make more money & do it in less time.