Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Tell me if you've heard this one before. Business is not a sprint, it's a marathon. What if I told you though that it's actually both? What if I told you that you need both To grow without hiring? You need to both sprint and rest. You need to adapt more. To the rhythms and cycles of the year, seasonality, macro conditions, and your specific market.
[00:00:29] Ken: Now, at the time of this recording, we are entering into the summer season and July specifically, and I know by saying that in some ways I ruined the longevity of this conversation. But I want to use it specifically to instruct us on this concept of sprinting and resting in the business, because I believe that this is one of the few times in the year that you actually have an opportunity to slow down.
[00:00:59] Ken: Also, slowed [00:01:00] down there. Do you like that? But you have that opportunity to slow down in your business because if you are based. In the Northern Hemisphere, and I understand that not everyone is, it is the summertime, it is the time of out of offices, it is the time of vacation. And I have a lot of clients in Europe especially, and Europeans, you all still really just understand how to really rest.
[00:01:25] Ken: And I know oftentimes you're taking off multiple months or there's really a multi-month slowdown as opposed to. Us Americans especially, who maybe take, you know, a day, but really, you know, take off a week. And most of the time they're still emailing their clients, staying on Slack and so forth.
[00:01:42] Ken: Let's not digress though,
[00:01:43] Ken: because especially over the last number of years, I think July has been a lot harder for people. I know that people, independent of how long you've had the business who. Question themselves who question if they actually have a business. I remember things like people [00:02:00] saying, I don't know if I have a business anymore, no one is replying.
[00:02:04] Ken: Or things like, worst revenue month in the year by far. Or How about I got another out of office notice and it was through August itself. And I can tell you that my own data, even though this business is newer, it's not quite three years old. Would also support seeing a slowdown. And last summer I was kind of not in my happy place entirely and I made some decisions that put me into that spot.
[00:02:29] Ken: And we wanna talk about those decisions that I made last year and what I've done to change this this year as it relates to sprinting and resting. But really the point in coming into this time and season is to say if that is the way the world generally operates. Why aren't we embracing that more? Just like when it comes down to the end of the year holidays, you're not trying to sell on Christmas Day as an example.
[00:02:54] Ken: I understand even if you don't celebrate Christmas, but you're not trying to do things on Christmas itself. [00:03:00] So here is the first kind of broader consideration before I give you some tactical pieces. Is that coming into a time like July, You need to plan much more in advance for this time of the year, and that planning actually begins all the way back in the fall. It actually goes back to how to plan your next best year in business, which really is something that we do in October and November, and this is actually. A system and a workshop that I lead my clients through.
[00:03:32] Ken: When you plan in advance, a great July is gonna look like having that MRR, the recurring revenue retainers and so forth over cash collection, which will absolutely drop off a cliff if you do that approach coming into the summer. It's also knowing that you should push a lot harder prior to. Coming into this time of the year, so the first two quarters push harder to account for the fact that [00:04:00] July and August and maybe even June are slower.
[00:04:02] Ken: It's also installing things like async client delivery so that you can legitimately be serving clients while you're sitting at a pool, and I don't mean the pool when you're on vacation. As an example, last week. During the second half of the day on Monday, I went and did a bunch of stuff at the pool, and I do that a lot during this time of the year.
[00:04:21] Ken: I actually have a very popular video that I did last year talking about how to even close deals from the pool. Not boasting, not bragging. It's a system.
[00:04:30] Ken: Some of you get it. I don't want to keep going through this longer list here, but just generally saying that it takes work to make July a rest month so that you can actually plan for that fun in the sun. And if you have not done that yet to also realize that July would be harder for you, your numbers might be more in the red, you will have less time for your family and friends and.
[00:04:55] Ken: Transparently, you're gonna feel more stressed. But even if those were the cases, I'm just gonna [00:05:00] ask you to change the way that you're thinking about the next month. If you are listening to this and you're coming into the summer yourself, if not, just also embracing this idea of seasonality and rhythms in the business relative to sprinting and resting.
[00:05:14] Ken: ' cause I don't want you to go hard on marketing and sales in this time. You can work on offers, you can work on backend systems. But I want you to really understand that this is one of the rest periods of the year because business is not life. I'm gonna stop there and I want that to sink in. Business is not life.
[00:05:36] Ken: Life is life. You've probably heard me talk about more life work integration versus work-life balance. You've heard me talk about trying to end the nine to five workday. You may or may not have a family. You may or may not have kids, but kids grow up fast. Relationships die if not invested into, you can't just catch up on your physical and mental health.
[00:05:59] Ken: [00:06:00] So I wanna talk through a few things to kind of set you up for a better July, even if you didn't actually do the planning to set yourself up to have a better July, because this one for me. As an example is so much better than last July because listen here, I've been working and working and working and preparing for this July.
[00:06:22] Ken: I felt like last year it was stolen a little bit from me. I made some decisions in my business that made me feel a lot more stressed out, so I've been working towards this moment.
[00:06:33] Ken: To have a more restful July, to feel less stressed, to feel more excited for the second half of the year. So let me kind of walk you through three really key elements in terms of preparing yourself for this rest period so that when the rest period is over again, you're ready to sprint hard, which I'm highly recommend that you think about going into, let's say the middle of August and then September itself.
[00:06:58] Ken: Usually people are ready [00:07:00] and back from whatever they were doing, and they often do buy a lot more from what I've seen in the market, not just from my client base, but just across the board. So the first thing that you need to do is really get everything out of your head, and it's what I call record what's in progress.
[00:07:17] Ken: You're gonna see another alliteration today. The first one is recording. What's in progress. I don't care if you have employees. If you're a solopreneur, you're a coach or a consultant, you have contractors. I can promise you that you don't take enough time to create documentation for yourself and your business.
[00:07:36] Ken: You just keep too much in your head. You don't have those SOPs, you don't have the repeatable systems. And really don't even worry about automation, AI or AI agentic work because. When you don't have these other things, none of that works as well. You say, okay, Ken, well, today I'll have ChatGPT write me something, or any number of different AI tools out there [00:08:00] that doesn't work well, and in some ways can be a crutch or a brute force solution because it's not building it according to the things that are already working inside your business.
[00:08:10] Ken: So before you enter, what I will say is summer mode and you sip lemonade or your favorite drink at the beach pool, or you just take some time to rest. You do a hobby. I want you to take an afternoon, a morning, whatever works for you to do an extensive brain dump of everything that you have done this year or otherwise.
[00:08:30] Ken: Think about regularly, and here's something that's really important when it comes to this. Especially get things out of your head that pop up when you are with family, friends, doing a hobby, not doing work. So if there's something that comes to your head while you're often on a walk with someone, or maybe you're walking your dog, you're out enjoying something.
[00:08:51] Ken: Anything that is not a work activity and that work thing floods into your head, those are the things that I especially want you to get down on paper, so [00:09:00] to speak. And at this point, this is not about assessing. This is not about analyzing. It is more about just getting it down. And as you do this, please don't use dictation.
[00:09:12] Ken: Please don't even worry about the perfect way of getting it down. It could be something as simple as Open up an Apple Notes, Google Doc, a Notion page, and just start writing. Just put whatever comes to mind. I have done this often. And all of a sudden it takes, after a few minutes, I start getting things out of my head that I really actually surprised by.
[00:09:34] Ken: ' cause we often don't give ourselves space to do this kind of thing. Now I do have a benefit that you don't have, and this is again, what my clients have who have gone through my how to plan your next Best Year in business, which is that I keep a change log that shows me. Whenever I do something important in my business, I put today's timestamp and in Notion you could just do at today.
[00:09:55] Ken: And I jot down something important and I kind of group it by. Was this related to [00:10:00] my website? Was this related to LinkedIn? Was this related to a certain system? And I kind of jot some notes there. And then I also go back to my yearly planning document, also in Notion where I have the entire strategy doc there, and then I have sections for each quarter that says Q1.
[00:10:18] Ken: 2025 reflections and learnings or ideas. And so we'll get into that in a minute. But the point here is the recording of the information and getting it all out of your head is important so that you actually have the raw materials to do what I'm about to talk about next. And by the way, I'm a smart guy, but pretty much every productivity system, some of the most popular ones of all time, talk about the importance of.
[00:10:44] Ken: Sort of downloading or getting everything out of your head first. I've definitely been influenced by lots of them over the years, so I won't go through them. But this is not just a Ken special. It is something that people who are, at least in theory, productivity experts, would [00:11:00] tell you to do as well. But I want you to do it within the context in this case of.
[00:11:04] Ken: Your consulting, your coaching business, your agency, and also as it relates to the first half of the year versus everything in life, right? What, what was it relative to what we're seeing in the first half of 2025? So now that we have our raw materials and we have the recording of what's in progress, I want you to do this, and this is my favorite one by far, but you can't jump straight to this one.
[00:11:28] Ken: You need to reflect on what's been done and reflection for me. I used to keep a journal, like a handwritten journal for years. It was actually one of my favorite things to do. I would every single year go and try to find a new journal. They all look differently and I say, what was the journal that I'm gonna have for this year?
[00:11:44] Ken: And it would have different kinds of thoughts across personal. I didn't have business then, right? This is mostly through my kind of later teens into my twenties, even did it a little bit as an adult. And then I had. A couple things happened to me, like this thing called marriage and kids, right? So I don't do it [00:12:00] quite the same way anymore.
[00:12:01] Ken: But the point is that I really enjoyed taking a step back, really trying to see patterns, try to understand where I was, where I was going, and you need to begin to start to take what you've done so far and identify some signals you need to be able to also do this. Next thing before we get overly tactical is I want you to also celebrate.
[00:12:22] Ken: Wins. I don't care if you crushed your numbers or it was a challenging first half of the year. Take the time to celebrate. We always push hard, right? You hear this idea of, okay, we're in a marathon. It's not a sprint, but we actually are often sprinting inside a marathon, and I'm actually saying no.
[00:12:40] Ken: Sometimes we need to sprint and sometimes we need to understand that we are in a longer journey. But you as a person who's probably listening to a podcast. Are often sprinting more. You're often pushing, you wanna learn, you want to get better, but we hardly give ourselves the chance to say, how was I doing this year?
[00:12:59] Ken: And even [00:13:00] thinking about how was I doing at the same time last year when I look. At my business last year, it looks completely different today, and that was purposeful. It wasn't by accident that I'm entering into July this year in a much better state of mind, feeling like I'm in more control of the business.
[00:13:15] Ken: And I didn't have a bad business last year. Did a lot of money, but I didn't like the way that I was doing that money. I felt like there were too many peaks and valleys and I wanted to kind of get more into a MRR model, which I had MRR, but I just didn't push it as aggressively. And sometimes we fall in love with getting.
[00:13:32] Ken: That payment upfront or cash collection and seeing these mega months, and I just didn't want the mega months anymore. Just one example. But I felt in general that I could do the way that I work with my clients differently. I could want it to come in to not have the slow month of July. might just be even the mentality thing, but just didn't personally want that.
[00:13:52] Ken: And I can see a lot of sophistication in the business from the revenue model. My offers are completely different. I redid them in my [00:14:00] planning session. My integration of AI is not superficial. I think I've used ChatGPT to ask some questions once in a while. Now it's actually a collaborative partner. I build app scripts in them.
[00:14:13] Ken: I have a bunch of key projects that allow me to go back to work on certain things
[00:14:19] Ken: such as even modeling revenue, and then if I actually look at Q2 versus Q1, there were a few patterns that smacked me right in the face. About refining my lighthouse client, how to get my clients even better results. And actually, believe it or not, what I want my business to look like a year from now. Oh my gosh, Ken, a year from now.
[00:14:42] Ken: Yes, a year from now. And I have actually kind of chartered a course to say I'm gonna have a good July of this year, but how can I have an even better one next year? And that work starts today. It starts actually as part of this exercise that I am doing for myself. And actually I can't wait for it because I know that it's [00:15:00] gonna get me more energized for the second half of the year.
[00:15:03] Ken: Someone was asking me more recently like, oh, what specific questions are you asking yourself as part of your planning? And I wouldn't say that it's just about certain questions. Maybe at this point I have a little bit of a curse of knowledge, but in the same way that someone says, oh, I worked on my offers, and then I work with them and I completely.
[00:15:22] Ken: Overhaul them within a session or two and it transforms their business. This is something that is a little bit more innate in me, but it's really just as simple as some things like what's really working well? What wasn't working well? What are places of friction? What are places that I said, I can't believe that this thing worked really well.
[00:15:42] Ken: And I do try to find sometimes very specific patterns or signals down to the level of this hook. That I did on LinkedIn, I'm very surprised that this hook resonated more and I had people booking calls, and then if I see that a few times to say, oh my gosh, I need to actually talk more about this thing in my marketing because [00:16:00] whenever I talk about this thing, I'm attracting a certain kind of client and this person bought a new thing for me.
[00:16:05] Ken: That actually is an easier thing for me to deliver, and I want to go find 10 or 15 more clients just like that person. So again, the reflection process helps with this and it will get you pumped up if you do it the right way. It'll get you feeling like you've accomplished a lot more. It will get you really feeling like you are a person who's building a real business versus, oh my gosh, I have a glorified freelance operation, or I just sort of have a body shop.
[00:16:36] Ken: I'm just doing things for clients. So I promise you that you'll get excited for the reflection state if you actually wind up doing this the way I'm describing it. Okay, so we have record what's in progress. We have a reflection period of what's been done,
[00:16:52] Ken: and now we need to recharge for what's next. And I know you are like me. And being like me, it's not [00:17:00] easy to turn off that big, beautiful idea generating brain.
[00:17:03] Ken: I sometimes wake up in the morning and legitimately have a new idea that I never had before. That has become transformative in my business. Does it happen all the time? No, but it is hard if you have a brain like that to then go from. Going a thousand miles an hour to vacation. My wife and I joke around about what, I have this thing called work mode, and she learned about it actually when we were dating.
[00:17:28] Ken: And she would, you know, call me at the office and we didn't have, you know, super fun, fancy phones at that point. But she would call me while I was still working. And I would kind of be talking low or I'd kind of be not as energetic, and she's like, what's wrong?
[00:17:42] Ken: Or you know, are we having problems? I said, no, I'm at work. And so in the world of remote, we don't have this often ability to decompress before the end of the workday. So you go straight from working in wherever your office is in your home, a lot of times straight to the dinner table or straight to dealing [00:18:00] with kid things.
[00:18:00] Ken: and you don't have that ability to sort of ramp down and ramp up, but this is even more important relative to vacation. You're like, Ken, where are you going with this? It's a more important relative to vacation, and it's why some of you take 70% of your vacation, and I say that some of you, but also me to finally have vacation for the last day or two, and then you have to come back home.
[00:18:19] Ken: And we love our families, we love our kids, but vacation is really not vacation with them anyways. It's actually just living in another spot. Right? I joke around about that as well. So how can we, when we are in those moments, be more present? How can we be the people that are recharging our batteries, refilling our cup, whatever expression you want to use, the fastest way to get there.
[00:18:41] Ken: Is to start with these first two steps, and we're gonna talk about this one more, but if you can get everything out of your head, you can actually reflect and come up with a plan or come up with some things that you're gonna enact, but don't go do them, right? I didn't say after reflection you should go do all the things I just [00:19:00] said, reflect and come up with a plan, or come up with some things that you should go after next, but you need to give yourself a chance to actually breathe.
[00:19:09] Ken: To actually pull back. 'cause if you go straight into that, you're not gonna get the same results. I sometimes have my most interesting ideas when I step out of whatever I'm doing. It doesn't mean I'm on vacation, but I can remember something simple as I'm leaving my home office and I went to go into a city, right?
[00:19:29] Ken: Take the public transportation. I'm sitting on a subway or a metro, and all of a sudden I have a new idea. Why didn't I have that idea when I was sitting at my desk or in my normal routine, in my normal environment because I didn't have my brain detached from what I typically do. So you need to have a way to enter into a rest mode.
[00:19:50] Ken: And when you have all that not stuck in your brain, you should feel a lot better about being able to get there faster.
[00:19:57] Ken: Here's something else that I want to challenge you on, and maybe you weren't [00:20:00] expecting a challenge in a podcast, but if you get very excited about whatever it is that you want to do, I want you to again, have that ready to go and you'll come back in with a plan of attack. But try something else. When you have this downtime, and I know this is hard, I know this is hard for me.
[00:20:17] Ken: And sometimes I feel like I'm that caged lion. On the weekends, I, I want to go do things and I'm not always super motivated about cleaning up my garage as an example. Right. and in the winter months especially, I might be okay with getting some work things done on the weekends, but during. The next four weeks especially, and I'm finishing my own recording and reflection session so that I can be ready to recharge, try to find something that really is a passion or interesting on the personal front. In my mentoring program more recently, someone shared about a return to something that they did more when they were growing up.
[00:20:56] Ken: And I was inspired by it. I was inspired on it, on [00:21:00] not the way they expected, for people to be inspired, but just more in terms of finding that thing that was a passion that maybe was a passion in another time of your life. And I realized over, you know, the years of maybe because I'm. A dad. Now I'm a husband.
[00:21:15] Ken: I am a mentor of a lot of other things that I wasn't when I was in my twenties, to a lot more people that some of those parts of me have fallen away, have died a little bit. I used to like to read,
[00:21:26] Ken: But growing up I read a lot of the classics, and every once in a while as an adult, I would find a really good. Fiction book that just transported me. So what is the thing that I want to come back to, and I'm not saying you shouldn't develop new things in your personal life, but what are some things that I knew that kind of lit me up? If you want to use the word spark joy, use it in a different context, right? For sparking joy in items you wanna keep in your house.
[00:21:49] Ken: If you don't know. That method of, of organizing your house but sparking joy in yourself. And it used to be reading a little bit, I know, super nerdy and geeky. It used to be, you know, [00:22:00] elite level of fitness and going to the gym, you know, five to six days a week doing a, a pretty extensive amount of workout playing basketball.
[00:22:08] Ken: And I still did some of that even more recently, and I still have some of those hobbies today. in terms of that, but not to the level of, it's just really for me and it's really just a personal item. So maybe it's going back to an old hobby. Maybe it's reconnecting with friends you haven't spoken to in a long time, or just hanging out with your family more.
[00:22:26] Ken: I hang out with my family a lot as part of why I am a remote solopreneur, but what is the thing that you need to do, including please be okay with this. Taking more time for you. And if this does feel like more of a challenge, it's precisely why you need to do this.
[00:22:41] Ken: So I hope this changes your perspective on business being a marathon. Sometimes it is a marathon. Sometimes it is a sprint. Within that marathon, we are sprinting and resting and we're being very purposeful. We are adapting to ourselves.
[00:22:57] Ken: We're adapting to seasonality. We're adapting [00:23:00] to the rhythms that we see the business has. When I ran an agency, the rhythms were very different compared to what I have as more of an advisory practice today. What do your buyers tell you? What do the signals of yourself tell you in terms of your own need for reflection, resting and sprinting.
[00:23:19] Ken: So now you have a game plan that works for this part of the year in a lot of ways. Everything else that I've been helping you with to this point, and the conversations are more about the sprinting, they're more about the going and going. But I love this time of the year. I look forward to it. I work hard for it, and I hope whether or not you worked hard for it up to this point, that this gives you a little bit of a playbook to make this time of the year more about recording, reflection, and resting, and that you have a way by the time this time of year comes again.
[00:23:56] Ken: Next year, but even in other parts of the year, like the end of the year [00:24:00] holidays, that you have a clearer way to get this flowing. So that is gonna be where we end the conversation for today. Always love going into these topics with you. If you found a nugget, if you, you're alerting something, a rating or review is super appreciated.
[00:24:14] Ken: I'm also very available to chat. The best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn. If you haven't done that already, feel free to send a connection request, mention the podcast or send me a DM there. You can also get in on my weekly briefing where I go deeper on some of these topics. Both of those are in the show notes, but that's it for today.
[00:24:33] Ken: Thanks so much for hanging out with me as always, as we go into how to grow without hiring.