Why Working Harder Won’t Grow Your Business (Try This Instead) [Happy Trap Series #4]

 If just working harder was the secret to success, then every burned out entrepreneur out there would be a millionaire. Clearly, it’s not that easy. And I think we can both agree that that’s just not how things work in entrepreneurship. So I used to think that the more I hustled in my business, the more my business would then seem like an equal amount of success.

The more I posted in every single Facebook group. Don’t make fun. That was still really cool back in 2016, 2017. Not, not so much anymore, but you know, posting in every single Facebook group, hosting so much content that it left me feeling burned out, never really taking time off, taking my phone and my laptop with me everywhere, putting in hours all night and all weekend, I thought clearly this will just lead to success.

If you feel like you’re working nonstop or spinning your wheels in your business or creating tons of content but yet you feel like no one’s engaging you with it, then this episode is for you. In this episode, you’ll learn why more work doesn’t always equal more success. The three biggest problems that come from overworking without a strategy.

And last but not least, a better way to grow your business without burnout. Yes, please. If you’re tired of grinding in your business with nothing to show for it, I highly encourage you to order my book When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy, A Practical No BS Guide to Successful Online Entrepreneurship. In it, I give you all my marketing strategies and your roadmap to building a successful online business too.

Click now to order it in the description and it’ll land on your doorstep on April 15th. I cannot wait. By the way, if you preorder my book before it comes out, you have until April 18th to order my book, wherever books are sold, and then head to samvanderwielen.com/book to redeem your two free bonuses.

So I’m giving you free access to my free email list builder course to help you add 1, 000 email list subscribers to your email list using my go to no brainer freebie strategy, as well as how to create consistent lead pipelines to your email list. So go grab that. You’ll also get a seat in my No BS book club coming this May. Anybody who pre orders my book gets access to these four live group coaching calls with me in May. You only have until April 18th though, to snag that email course bonus. All right, let’s hop into part one of today’s episode, the hustle trap.

So why do we believe that more work or more hustle will equal success or maybe even guarantee success? I think there are two things going on. One is that when you go to start an online business or spend really any amount of time on social media, you’re almost immediately hit with all of this messaging about how easy it is, right? About how if you just do X, Y, and Z, it’s easy. You’ll be guaranteed 10k months, or 10k followers, or 10k subscribers, whatever it is, right? But in reality, these strategies, first of all, are not one size fits all, but they also take time to kick in. And because you keep getting hit with all of these different messages, as you consume different people’s content online, you just kind of run around like crazy gathering up all these different strategies and never really either following through with any of them long enough to see whether they work or not looking at the data to know whether or not they work and what you really need to do is get familiar with, you know, why does something work for you or not work for you? How do you interpret your own data? What is the data telling you? Not what somebody else is telling you about what’s worked for them, maybe, if they’re being honest.

So we’ve got that messaging problem and kind of like the inundation of messaging. But we also have the glorified hustle, right? And so a lot of times there are entrepreneurs you might come across who inspire you to build a business and you see them working all the time, them not maybe taking care of themselves, them going out and trying every different strategy under the sun, pumping out tons of content and you think, Hey, they’re successful so like, therefore I have to do whatever they do and then I’ll be successful too. But all that does is lead you down burnout city.

There’s also this very rightful fear of being left behind or even some FOMO of missing out on certain things. So maybe you see certain strategies or some platform gets really popular and you think I’ve got to be there because if I’m not there, then I’m going to be left behind and think our business isn’t going to be successful. And all of this in an online world where things are based on algorithms and platforms and apps that come and go is that it leads you just like running around like crazy, chasing down all these different strategies and not following a simple plan that actually works for you.

For the first few years when I started my business, like I said, I was posting all over the place, but I was also creating a ton of content, original content, on every single platform. So not creating one piece of content and repurposing it, but actually creating content for pretty much every single platform that was available at the time and I was especially spending a ton of time on Instagram stories at the time, which was really popular and at the time, one of the strategies or like tactics that was really popular was sharing a lesson on Instagram stories, like a daily lesson for your audience, right? So I’m a lawyer who teaches online business owners how to legally protect their online businesses. So I was going on there giving a legal tip or breaking down a contract or sharing some kind of legal thing that they needed to know. And in doing so, I was putting out a ton of content. In addition to all the other content I was actually posting on the platform. And it wasn’t until I actually paid for a VIP day with Melyssa Griffin back then was a really popular business coach, she offered VIP days for people who were like a little further along in their businesses. And as I was starting to hit this peak of, you know, very consistent $10k, $20k months in my business, but couldn’t break through anything more at the time. I booked one of these days with Melyssa and Melyssa was like, wait a minute “You’re doing what you’re, you’re posting how much you’re posting where like girl, your content has to get out of there, has to marinate”. . And so she was both taking issue with the amount of content I was creating, but then also like where I was posting it. So focusing more of my attention on evergreen and long form platforms like YouTube, like a podcast, like an SEO optimized blog post versus spending all this time creating what I now call affectionately toilet content, because a lot of the content that we create for traditional social media platforms, almost, you know, the moment that you post it or within minutes of posting it is essentially gone, right? It’s, it’s gone until the algorithm, cause like millions of other people have come and they’ve spoken their, their thing, you know, said their piece now too.

So that very expensive, but well worth it day with Melyssa was a huge game changer for me and my business back in 2019, because from then on, I really did start scaling back, even though it might look to you, like I still put out a lot of content, I’m also really good at kind of repurposing these days. We create a YouTube first, you know, we’re taking a YouTube first strategy right now where we’re posting videos on YouTube, extracting the audio for my podcast On Your Terms®, and then that those also get turned into reels so we’re getting pretty good at like creating one core piece of content. And even within that strategy, focusing on the platform that has more of that evergreen searchable, you know, capacity versus popping this kind of thing on Instagram or TikTok.

All right, let’s hop into part two because the hustle problem also is leading to a whole lot of burnout in the online business industry.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m overworked or even just spending too much time on social media or doom scrolling on my phone, I like, it’s like somebody poured water over my creativity. If it was a fire, it leaves me completely burnt out. I get really overwhelmed really easily, can’t make any decisions, I definitely get decision fatigue and then don’t end up making things move forward and I just don’t feel like showing up. I mean, even in having a job where it’s very video and camera forward. It can lead to a lot of retreating, which isn’t exactly good for business. This is why the hustle strategy isn’t an actual strategy. It’s just a fast track to burnout. And often this happens because without a plan, we just stay in reaction mode. And reaction mode does not grow businesses. You need to be stable and steady, kind of like a ship that’s constantly moving forward, regardless of what’s going on around it outside with the weather and not like a little boat that zigzags through the water, just being like, Ooh, something over there now there’s something over here. Now there’s something over there. We need to be steadily moving that business forward, regardless of what’s happening around you. I know for me, this often feels like the businesses version of a treadmill where I feel like I’m doing something, but I’m just not getting anywhere.

If this is all hitting home with you so far, you definitely want to order my book: When I Start My Business I’ll Be Happy because in it, I’m going to teach you how to create a very chill marketing strategy for your business, including my big three content strategy that will have you putting out less content that has a much bigger impact in a snap.

Okay. So speaking of feeling like you’re doing tons and tons of work, but don’t really have anything to show for it, let’s go over why your business isn’t growing if you’re already working a ton.

You might be working too much in your business and not in your business. So it’s very common entrepreneur mistake to get caught up in these little minute tasks or doing a lot of tasks that take up a lot of time but don’t actually move your business forward and what I really want you to focus on and what I wrote so much about in my book was about working on the bigger picture marketing strategies that take a little time to set up, but honestly, once you set up things like your big three content strategy and a funnel and your sequences, these are all things that are going to consistently pull in the right leads, leads that would become customers in the future and they will do that all the time, whether you are working or on vacation or you’re just resting or taking a little tea moment, which I’ve been trying to do in the afternoons lately. That’s why it’s so important. If you’re feeling really burnt out or you’re feeling like you’re working a lot, but you don’t have that much to show for it, then you sort of zoom out and allow yourself to take the time to set up the bigger picture things that will pay off for you in the long run.

So many, many years ago, probably like 2019, I remember I told my friend Margo, who was working for me doing some marketing work for me at the time, um, that I felt like I had adopted this strategy and I was producing less content that had a bigger impact just like I teach you in my book but that I felt like it was so slow at first, right and so I was frustrated because I was so used to that dopamine hook from creating something on social media and getting immediate feedback and I told her at the time like I feel like i’m just depositing 10 cents in a bank account every day and it’s just like Man, I hope that this all stacks up and turns out to be a nice, you know, healthy savings account one day. And she talked about how, and told me at the time that like, it might feel like it’s 10 cents right now and it feels so minute, but for one, pretend like it’s a high interest savings account,Two:,you just don’t realize, just like if you had set up an automatic deposit for 10 cents or a dollar a day or whatever it is over time between the automatic savings that you’re not even thinking about anymore, because you’re automatically putting it in there and the interest and then the compounding interest that’s coming from that, you would end up making more and more and more over time and gaining a lot of traction, like a snowball effect. And that is exactly what happened with my content strategy. So although it felt like that 10 cents at a time, all of a sudden I looked back and it was like, whoa my email list had grown to now over 46,000 people, over 47,000 people on places like Instagram. A few thousand of you here, right? So there are many different areas where I was pulling in different leads and thousands and thousands of new customers came through the door as well, through all of those funnels that I had set up.

And especially if you feel like this about content, like you’re putting in a ton of work, but you really have very little progress to show for it., I would encourage you to think about whether you’re spending too much time on creating toilet content. Like I mentioned earlier, that’s content that once you create it, it kind of goes away. It doesn’t really have a lot of lasting power. It’s very difficult for people to find. Maybe not searchable or it’s not a great searchable algorithm or something like that versus more of this big three content that I teach you in my book. So in my book I teach you about creating a big three content strategy, focusing on one of the three platforms like YouTube, creating a podcast that of course you SEO optimize, or creating a blog post or a blog on your website that is of course, as you’ll optimize as well.

My idea with these, with the big three is that when you create long form content, first of all, it will have more lasting power and people can usually search and find it depending on which platform you’re picking. It can also convert customers a little bit easier because they, it gives you the ability to create this like, know, and trust factor with people so that they actually want to buy from you. But also I create all of this content in mind with having a call to action to something that will lead you somewhere into my business. It will be the next natural step.

Okay. So I want to share three practical steps with you that you can take if you’re identifying with anything I’m sharing in this episode.

Number one, pick one of the big three content platforms to focus on moving forward. Ideally, for at least six months.

Two, I want you to create a sustainable content strategy for yourself. Whether you create a certain number of videos or episodes per month, or a certain number of blog posts per month, or you can commit to a weekly schedule or something like that, the most important thing is that you want to pick something that you can stick to.

If you’re not sure with where to start, one of the things I write a lot about my book is that I highly encourage you to start with whatever platform you like consuming on like if you love YouTube, try creating a YouTube channel because you’re also going to be more familiar with kind of like what works there, what you like, what you don’t like, all that kind of stuff and with even how the platform works itself. I’m also a huge fan of you picking whatever platform sounds fun to you. So if it sounds fun and creative for you to create videos, or you’re just somebody who absolutely loves podcasts and always has headphones in your ear, like listening to podcasts, create your own podcast.

As my social media, \ mentor, Natasha Samuel always says, “If you don’t, if you can’t get onto other people’s stages, create your own,” right? So you can create your YouTube channel. You can create your podcast. If you want to be a writer, write on your blog posts, like create your own stage.

And the third thing you can do after listening to this episode is to prioritize tasks in your business that actually move it forward, right? Now that we’ve had this conversation, maybe you see where you’re spending too much of your time, too little of your time, and now is your opportunity to adjust, zoom out, and re take a look at everything you’re doing day to day in your business and see if it’s actually moving things forward.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you go back and listen to parts one, two, and three of this Happy Trap series, because we’ve really built on this whole idea of, okay, maybe our businesses aren’t going to make us happy maybe that’s not their job, but how can we be a little bit happier in our businesses and not let our businesses run our life? I particularly loved the episode about how we don’t need more followers in order to grow our businesses and I know I got a lot of messages from you guys saying that you loved it as well.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen, text a friend, a link to this episode if you think that they would find it helpful, and DM me on Instagram @samvanderwielen to let me know if you liked this episode. And since this is the last one in the series, let me know what you thought of the series.

Next week’s episode actually dives into how to audit your last quarter. So we’ll be auditing quarter one in our businesses in order to use the data and the feedback that we get from it to plan on even better quarter two. See you then.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, “Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business” at Samvanderwielen.com

And to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram @samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.