The Three Types of Time Your Side Hustle Need

In the past…

we’ve talked about the fact that reflection is the first step in starting any side hustle.

And with that being the case, I would definitely argue that getting organized is the second.

Whether you love planning, think it’s the most boring thing in the world, or find it overwhelming to sort out your tasks, creating a plan establishes a solid foundation for your side hustle’s success.

That doesn’t mean you need to create a cookie-cutter path and follow what everyone else is doing. The exact opposite actually,

Your side hustle plan needs to be your own, take your unique lifestyle into account, and work around what you already have going on in your life.

This bespoke nature will make it so your side hustle fits around your life - not the other way around.

What’s more, knowing which tasks are most important for your success ensures you use the time you carve out to actually make progress rather than spin your wheels.

Having a plan for your side hustle means that you won’t just find the time to accomplish things, but the energy and motivation to use that time well.

It’s about knowing what to work on when and how each action will move your needle forward.

So this week, I’m breaking down the three different types of time your side hustle requires. Then we’ll look at which types of tasks fall into each category and how the type of offer you choose dictates which type of time is most important.

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!

Show Notes:

Hey risers, I have something new and exciting for you. I know you're here listening because you're daydreaming about expanding past traditional one-on-one therapy, but the first thing that often comes up is all the fear around what that might mean. It is scary to think about starting over from square one.

And what about all those hours you spent in grad school getting licensed, seeking certifications, and building your practice? Well, I am a firm believer in both/and. Your desire to move beyond the therapy room does not need to mean that you're selling out or sacrificing your clinical career. It simply means that you're ready for the next step.

In fact, I'd love to show you how easy it is to use the education experience and expertise you've honed as a clinician to make this evolution happen—to maintain the practice you're proud of, to build the online side hustle you are dreaming of, and to craft the lifestyle you're craving. So this new cool thing is an on-demand training called Transcend the Therapy Room.

And when you watch, you'll find out how a side hustle can give you more flexibility and financial freedom. You'll get some ideas of the different side hustles you can ethically offer, and you'll also learn how to decide which side hustle is right for you. And when you stay to the end, you're gonna score a bonus tech tutorial where I walk you through the exact technology and software I use to create those brand visuals, those logos, those fonts, those colors.

And so you'll get to get a peek into how I do this and how you can start doing it for yourself. So if you're ready to step beyond that therapist identity and move outside the therapy room, you can sign up for the training and start working towards this new, exciting chapter of your career. Head over to marissalawton.com/masterclass to register.

Hey, risers. Welcome to Empathy Rising. I was talking with my coach, and this almost feels like a full circle kind of moment because when I started in the online space—some of you know this story already—I started coaching moms. And one of the things that I started coaching moms on, granted this was like six years ago, uh, seven years, was on balance.

The word balance has fallen out of favor, but still the idea and the concept of making space for things that matter. And so this was actually my very first coaching package. I used to do it over four calls with the moms. And so I'm really loving that some of this productivity work, some of this scheduling, planning, making space, making room is coming back into this aspect of my business.

I've heard you guys a million times, I swear nine times outta 10, the people who join my Facebook group, I always ask, you know, what's your biggest struggle right now with getting your side hustle started? Nine times outta 10 it's time. And I've just been kind of filing that away, like, okay, okay, I'll get there.

I'll address the whole time issue. And then it just hit me like a ton of bricks. Like you've done this before, right? You've been, you've been using this skill before. You actually have a complete program or package on how to help with this skill. How can we infuse this with therapists?

The whole point is that we are going to find, I don't wanna say find time, I don't like the way that sounds… I like make room, make space, for your side hustle.

And today that's kind of what we're really gonna be talking about is the different types of time that your side hustle requires. Not just lumping it all into one bucket of like, oh, time to build my course or time to work on my membership site. 

But what exactly are the types of time? Which ones should you be prioritizing? And how does each type of time move the needle forward in your side hustle—make it actually happen? Because if you haven't picked up by now, I really firmly believe that reflection is the first step, right? 

If I would say what's step two, it would be getting organized. I reflected, I figured out what my goal is. Now I know that goal. How do I work backwards from that goal? And how do I break it into smaller pieces and how do I make that goal make sense? And how do I make that goal achievable? So if reflection is step one, I feel like getting organized is step two.

And for some people, it's really easy just to jump in with both feet and sort of sink or swim. They don't think about the planning or the organizing, they just run headfirst. And then for other people, I find that when they start to think about organizing and planning, they get really overwhelmed. Just the first step of trying to figure out where to start with a plan is overwhelming.

And so that's one of the things that I wanna kind of address today, is slowing down. If you're one of those people who just dives in head first, and take that energy and take that exuberance and channel it into the plan, right? I don't wanna dampen anybody's spirit. I wanna, I don't wanna dull anybody's shine. I want to channel that shine on the right path. And then for others, kind of breaking it down because, like I said, when you look at the whole, the whole can be overwhelming. 

But if we start to break it down and look at planning in a way of like, which type of time makes the most sense for the type of offer I wanna do, the goals that I have for that offer, getting clear on that can really cut through the overwhelm.

So planning may feel, depending on which of these camps you fall into, planning might feel really boring or planning might feel really daunting. But I will promise you that it makes the outcome bigger and it makes the outcome happen faster. We're not all about like fast growth around here and rushing through things around here, but having the plan, it's a direct path. 

It's the straight and arrow versus the windy zigzag path. I've walked the windy zigzag path. Let me help you walk the straight one. Right? So there's an interesting assessment that I always recommend to my side hustle students. We talk about this in week one, and it is called the KOLBE, k o l b e.

Now, the KOLBE is not—I can't find a free version of it—I've looked and I've found alternatives to it, but I haven't found a free version of it. So it is $55 to take. I don't know if that's pricey for an assessment or not. I'm sure compared to some psychological assessments, it's not. 

But I'm sure there's also a way we can figure out how to write it off, right? As a business expense, a training or an exploratory type of expense, but I think it's worth taking. It's 36 questions, and I think it's worth knowing what it predicts about you and Mac Colby is different than, like, a personality test because what it measures, I think it's fascinating. 

What it measures is how you take action and how you start new projects, right? So I think it is really appropriate and really just something that can be really valuable when you're starting a side hustle because it's strengths-based and taps into your instincts. So again, what I like about it is it's not trying to change you. It's not like you get the results and it's like, oh, you scored low here, here's how to go out and make it better.

It's: You scored low here and that's a good thing because you can use that in this way. So I think it's a cool assessment. You get scored from one to nine in four categories. Sometimes just hearing the categories can help you guess where you are. But the first one is a fact finder, and according to the KOLBE website, a fact finder seeks out information before acting or making a decision.

It asks, are you more likely to read a recipe, watch a video, and witness a demonstration before cooking a new dish? Or are you more likely to read the ingredients, see a picture, and just jump in? So I think I'm medium-high in the fact finder, especially when it is my first time doing something. Like if I'm gonna learn how to do, like, a new knitting stitch or maybe a recipe, I will watch a video the first time. I don't need to watch the video 17 times.

But I do kind of watch it or, or read the recipe through like the first time I make a dish. So what I've found is that people who are high fact-finders, sometimes they research something to death. And then we'll look through the other categories and you can see like, um, people who are high on FactFinder and high on some of the others, they research and, and they still implement.

But that's one thing that I find is if you, if you identify as a high fact finder, or you take the KOLBE and it tells you you're a high fact finder, moving out of research mode is something that you're gonna wanna pay attention to. The next category and you guys are probably gonna laugh, is follow through.

So according to KOLBE, are you a systems creator or a person who bypasses the system to get the task done? Can you guess where I score on follow-through? Those who score high here document processes and develop repeatable systems. I'm pretty sure those words are like on my website, and I'm pretty sure I say repeatable systems on this podcast at least once per episode.

Those who score low here are more adaptable. They find ways to accomplish a task through multitasking or shortcuts. So my critical brain reads that as I'm way too rigid, but I do develop those repeatable systems. I want something that you can do, it works, and you can do it over and over and over again. But I like the idea of being a little more adaptable. I wish I could be, I'm just not. 

The next one is a quick start. So a quick start describes your propensity to do something without knowing the outcome. So less risk averse, more risk takers. Typically, a high quick-start person will be heard saying stuff like, I don't know, let's just try. They're experimenters. 

Those who score low here will want to stick with tried and true plans. Middle of the road will check things out before they try them. My guess is that I'm kind of middle of the road on the quick start. I like to know how things work and then I often deviate from how they work. But I like to know the tried and true first before I then go try something kind of off the wall.

And then the last one is an implementer. And KOLBE says, we're all implementers in a non-physical sense, but this measurement shows how we work with physical space. So do you work with your hands to create something physical? Do you problem-solve physically? 

Those who score low here can see things. They understand how physical things work together. So more visionary, more spatial, like kind of imagines… like if you're gonna lay out a room, for instance, you lay it out in your head first. Whereas people who score high here, they create physical solutions to the problem. So they would just start moving the furniture around until they liked the way it looked.

I am very low in this physical implement. Everything happens in my head first. I visualize everything, plan everything up cerebrally. I don't get out there and like get my hands dirty, I guess until I know what I think it's gonna look like. So I just think this is so fascinating. Again, I love the KOLBE because it's strengths-based and it isn't about trying to change your instincts, but how you can use them to your advantage. 

I think this assessment could be really informative, right? Because it can help you see why planning and organizing might feel like more of a challenge or a bore or, and why it might come more easily to you. So I am obviously kind of like a medium-high fact finder. I bet I'm a nine on follow-through middle of the road on quick start and super low on implementer.

So it makes sense why planning is natural for me. But somebody who's a high quickstart and or a high physical implementer, those are the people who are going to wanna just jump in, get their hands dirty, mess around with it. Those are the people that I like to, again, not dull their shine or dull their enthusiasm, but channel that along kind of a path, right?

And so other people who are super high fact finders and may be lower in follow-through, those are the ones who are gonna see that big picture and wanna know exactly everything about it but struggle to take the step forward, who feel more overwhelmed by all of the details. So again, I think KOLBE is super worth it to take when you're starting your side hustle cause it just shows how you handle these new projects, how you start and initiate something. 

So I'm really excited to dive into the three different types of time because when you're devoting time to building something new when you're starting a new project, you'll know what tasks to do that will move the needle forward and you can rely or lean into these strengths and make extra time or make more space for the things that are not necessarily your strengths, right? 

So I think this all works together. Your instincts around initiating, organizing your time to get started with your side hustle. And then we're gonna peel apart today the three types of time so you can know which one maybe you lean towards, which one you need to be more intentional about increasing all of that because I do think that there needs to be a bespoke nature, a custom, a tailor-made fit to your schedule and your plan, right? 

It has to fit you. It has to make sense for your unique lifestyle. It has to make sense for your unique circumstances, obligations, undertakings, all of that. But you need to have a plan, okay?

It can be as custom, as tailor-made as it needs to be, but you need to have one because I've seen it time and time again a million times over where someone wants to sell tickets to a workshop, fill a group program, and start one-on-one coaching all at the same time. Or they want to skip a step in the process.

Or they want to devote time to things that are lateral. Like, I'm gonna spend two weeks building my website. When that actually doesn't move you forward, it doesn't make anything happen in your side hustle. It's busy work, right? So people trying to do too much, people trying to skip steps, or people working laterally and not actually taking steps forwards.

And what this just ends up is feeling frenetic and feeling frazzled. You are scattered at best. The results of your side hustle end up being random. And also when you're coming from this place, you don't know what to work on. You don't know if you get a random client or you get a random sale for your course or whatever.

It's not measurable because you don't know what variable actually contributed to the sale. You don't know why it was successful. So again, you can't replicate it, you can't repeat it. I also think what happens is that the time that you've managed to carve out, those 30 minutes you manage to grab, they start to feel like a waste because all you're doing is kind of spinning your wheels and you don't know how to repeat the success.

So it just starts to feel like, alright, well I have 30 minutes, but oh, I just wasted that 30 minutes posting on Instagram or probably were likely scrolling Instagram cause you never actually got around to posting cause you didn't know what you were supposed to post. And when we get to this point, people end up shelving their side hustle.

They either say “I'll figure it out later” or they say “This doesn't work. It's not for me. It works for other people but not for me.” And that's not the case. It's just the fact that you don't know which tasks to prioritize. You don't know which tasks actually are going to work for your particular side hustle, and it feels like it's taking too much time and you're not seeing any results for that time.

And this is why I want you guys to get organized first, and that's why I really see my job as to slow people down, make it more methodical. Now, this is kind of what comes up for me here as I've been talking, you know, about the KOLBE, and as I've been talking about why we want some sort of plan is it's like you have to know the rules in order to bend or break them right? 

Like I said, I like to know how things work one time, and then I can totally go out in left field or I can try something newer. I can put a spin on it, but I like to know the way that it works first. And that's kind of how I see my job, and my mission for you guys is let me teach you the rules.

Let me teach you the methodology, let me teach you the system, and then once you know how to do it, once it's successful, then go put your own spin on it. Then evaluate: What did I like about this way, what didn't I like about this way? What worked for me, what didn't work for me? Then you can put kind of your own flare, your own spin, but let's get it working first, right?

Let's make it profitable. Let's make it, you know, automated. Whatever your goals are, let's make it work first, then go out, and then we can zhuzh it up. Cause I really feel like when you're organized, when you know what type of tasks and what type of time you're working in, what category things fall into, you could start to prioritize based on your needs, right?

If you're squeezing in that 20 minutes or squeezing in that 30 minutes, you know what's going to be effective, right? And I think that that's a big deal. And a big part of this is that guilt-free 30 minutes, that guilt-free 20 minutes, whatever, even if it's an hour part of the side hustle schedule challenges.

So we're not stealing that hour or stealing that half hour from anywhere. It fully belongs on your schedule because you've accounted for everything else. You've accounted for your priorities, you've accounted for your obligations, and you literally can see mathematically that you have an hour, right? So it's your hour.

And then I think what makes it feel guilt-free is that you're using that hour effectively, right? You can be confident that you did make space for that hour for a reason, and that that hour is gonna do something for you, right? When you have a plan and when you know what type of category of time you're in, and what you should be doing, it optimizes, it skyrockets that hour, and then you get to prioritize your business needs.

And we're gonna talk a lot about this in just a minute, but does your side hustle need more people? Does it need stronger relationships? This depends on the type of program that you're gonna run. And, like I said, we're gonna go into all of this, but when you have a plan, you know what you're prioritizing so it makes sense for you and it makes sense for the side hustle. It makes sense for the business. 

You ultimately feel much more focused here, right? You feel confident, focused—I have this much time, I know what I'm doing with this time. And it is going to have a result. And that result makes progress.

It makes you money, it helps you serve. And ultimately I think what's really important in the beginning is that validation. That validation that this is actually working. So if you end up getting, you know, 10 subscribers to your email list, or if 20 people join your Facebook group or if somebody buys right? That validation early in the process is often what gives us the motivation to keep showing up. 

So, like I said, sometimes it's not about finding the 30 minutes or making room for the 30 minutes. That's not always the hard part, but showing up in that 30 minutes, being motivated to use that 30 minutes, that's different.

So when you know exactly what to do in that 30 minutes and you know it's gonna be effective and you start seeing the results, you start getting validated from that 30 minutes. It's like, okay, now the steam engine's rolling right now, the snowball's rolling, and I see what this is gonna be and I see what this could be.

And it all starts to kind of come together. And so I really do feel like it, it starts with having that plan. It comes from having an organized plan. Alright, so let's break this down and start talking about the three types of time that you need to devote which tasks fall into these categories and how each category plays out with different types of online offers.

So you might want a notebook for this, you might wanna kind of write this stuff down, but the first type of time and this is actually like one A and one B, so I, it might actually be like four types of time, but it was more catchy to do three. So one/a , right? 

So the first type of time is marketing. And within your marketing time, there are two things that you need to think about. Okay? Marketing time is one. One A is generating new leads, getting new people, right? We need a continuous stream of new people. And this is more important depending on the type of program that you're running, right?

So how do we get these new leads? There are four different types of marketing that work online really nicely. The first is SEO/search marketing, right? Somebody literally typing into Google, YouTube, or Pinterest about what you do. Search marketing takes time to build up, three months, sometimes six months, or you know, or more to really start ranking and showing up in search.

But that is one type of marketing that is important for online business. I don't talk a lot about SEO because I don't teach it. I would send you to Jessica Taana for that at Simplified SEO. And also, like I said, it takes time to build up and I think there are things that we could do that would get us an audience and sales much faster.

So it's not where I focus, but it is something to keep in mind. I always talk about it with my students who are maybe more on the introverted side or who know that they're probably not gonna be like that, you know, public speaker type of person. Then I say, well, maybe we should investigate more on search.

The next type of marketing. is broadcast marketing. So this is where you are pushing a message. You are broadcasting a message out. This can be content marketing. The podcast is a perfect example of this. I create content on a weekly basis and I send it out to you guys, right? Podcasting, blogging, YouTube, those are all considered content marketing.

Then we have social media marketing: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. All of those would count as social media marketing, TikTok, all of these out there. So again, you are creating a piece of content or creating a piece of social media, and you are sending it out to the masses. 

This tends to take, depending on, you know, how long podcast episodes may you make and that kind of stuff, but it's kind of the very little time up to the moderate time category. Depends on how often you're posting, how long of posts you're creating, that kind of stuff. 

Visibility Marketing is the next type of category, and this involves you and one other person or one other business. So these are considered like guest posts. I will be writing some guest posts in the future for Therapy Notes. So I will write it, but then it will go on Therapy Notes website, and it will go out to Therapy Notes email list, which is over like a hundred thousand therapists.

So I do the work, but Therapy Notes sends it out to their audience, right? Guesting on podcasts, going and being interviewed by somebody else. Again, it depends what you're creating. If I'm creating a 500-word blog post, that's gonna take me half an hour. And if I'm being interviewed on someone else's podcast, that could be anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.

So it depends on if somebody's asking me questions, right? I just kind of show up and answer their questions. That's very little work on my part. But when I'm writing an article, I might have to do some research or I might have to do some other things. So again, this can be kind of a moderate time category, but if it's an interview, those are, those take very little time, very little prep, right?

The next step up is JVs, Joint Ventures. You guys saw me do a couple of these over the summer. One with Joe Sanduk and one with Lee Shay McDonough, where we partnered together, we created a webinar and we delivered that webinar. And you can use this just for audience building where it's just something that people sign up for.

Or you can use it for audience building and pitch a program at the end. So it can be audience building and it can be sales. These, depending on the type of person that you're working with, can be moderate to a lot of time. I'll tell you, I spent more time doing the one for Joe and less time doing the one for Lee.

Right? So it just depends on who you're working with, what you're creating, what you're going after, that kind of stuff. But because there's other people involved, there is more kind of time involved in that. The next thing to think about is: Invisibility marketing is the networking. So, It's not actually the visible part, right?

An audience isn't watching you, but it's the time that it takes to connect with these people, right? If you're gonna be doing a joint venture with somebody, or if you're gonna be going on someone's podcast, typically you connect with them before, even if it's over email. But I always recommend coffee dates over Zoom where you can kind of spend 20 minutes talking, chatting, getting to know each other. So you have to think about the time that goes into that as well. 

The next category of marketing is public relations. And instead of you and one other person, this is you and several other people. So a good example of this is you can do a bundle. If you have an opt-in… Let's say you work with college grads, right? You wanna start coaching college grads on their first job, then you could find other people who serve that niche. It might be a financial planner, it might be—like if you're like a career coach, you could find a financial planner, you could find probably someone in the health and wellness space, maybe somebody in the relationship space.

Get all of your opt-ins in one place and promote a bundle of your opt-ins. And you guys could massively grow your email list that way, right? Because it's more attractive to get a bundle than it is to get one opt-in. However, public relations has the biggest bang for your buck. It has the potential of growing your audience by thousands, but there's a lot of time involved.

So you have to find the right people. You have to invite the people to participate in the bundle. You have to sometimes convince them to participate in the bundle. Sometimes it's like herding cats because you're trying to make sure everybody turns their stuff in on a dime and all of that stuff. So it's a lot more time intensive, but the reward for that time is super.

The other thing that falls into the public relations category then is a summit, and a summit is similar to a bundle, but instead of just collecting like opt-ins, it's some sort of live delivery of something, or a recorded delivery of trainings. So there's more Q&A, more interactive. It's more didactic than just a bundle of opt-ins.

So I kind of mentioned this before, but I want you guys to think about the direct relationship between time and reward. Bigger events like a summit or a bundle bring you more leads, right? But if you remembered what we talked about on last episode, just because the total time involved is high, it doesn't mean that it has to be overwhelming, because if you start early enough, you can break some of these huge, like this daunting summit or this daunting bundle idea, break it into the smallest of smallest pieces.

And so you end up starting. Earlier, but it feels much more manageable. So for example, inside Hustle, anybody who runs a summit in Side Hustle, we give it three months. Three entire months to plan a summit. Do you need that long to plan a summit? No. But this is a side hustle, guys. You still have your practice, you still have everything else that you have going on.

Something that you could, if you were working on it full-time, you could probably knock out in three weeks or a month. Let's give it three months as a side hustle, and then you can do itty bitty pieces every day. So don't be turned off by some of these things that feel big because, like I said, they have a bigger bang for your buck.

You get an audience of thousands after one event. However, they're a lot to plan. So just start earlier, break it into smaller pieces, make it more manageable. I also want you to think about… this might sound like a little bit of a contradiction, but I also want you to think about which type of marketing fits your personality.

Just because the big events have a huge reward, don't force yourself to plan one if it's just not you. Right? If that's not you to be an organizer and a cat hurter and a facilitator of something like that, then you don't have to do that. Just realize that you might be relying on some of the less time-intensive, but less rewarding options.

And so it might just take longer for your audience to grow. And that's totally fine. There's no time limit here. There's no stopwatch. It's not a race. And you'll hear in just a moment that you can do big things with a small audience. I would much rather a hundred percent hands down, have a small engaged audience than a huge audience that I don't even know if they're gonna buy from me.

So don't get down on yourself if you know you don't wanna do these big events because we can absolutely maximize other types of your marketing. I just want you guys to have a realistic picture of what you can do with the time you have, and what you want to do with the time that you have.

Because those are two different things. What can you do in 30 minutes a day, and what do you want to do in 30 minutes a day? Right? So that is marketing one A, getting new leads. And depending on the type of program, that is gonna be one of the highest priorities. Now marketing one B is nurturing your leads.

Okay, so we market, we get colder leads. We get people to know who we are. We call this top-of-funnel marketing. They're just coming into the funnel, and then the way that they get from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel is through nurturing, is through developing relationships, through establishing something called know, like, and trust.

And this is what moves people from leads, from interested lookers to buyers. What I use for this is my email list and Facebook group, but typically nurturing happens in a more intimate capacity. It's not shouting on social media. It's not broadcasting a podcast to the masses. Though my podcast absolutely nurtures it continues to provide value on a weekly basis.

What I think is more nurturing is when I send out an email every Monday and somebody responds and says, wow, this message really resonated with me. And then that turns into a 15-email thread back and forth where we're talking and we're chatting and we're getting to know each other. And I know people's names.

I know, you know, people have reached out and said, my brother's in the service. It really helps me when you share your stories about being in the military because I can kind of relate to him a little bit more. And you know, I know things about my audience because I create. This safe place to develop relationships.

So that happens on the email list, and that happens on the Facebook group or in my Facebook group. There's other ways to do this. You can use Instagram and create kind of like a custom hashtag for your brand or your people, and then you can go have more direct conversations over there. 

A new trend that's starting to pop up is you'll hear people say DM me, like Amy Porterfield is supposedly asking people to DM her on Instagram. I don't know if she's the one ever responding, maybe she actually is. But getting into private messenger. So the way that I kind of talk about this is you're having a party, right? And the lead acquisition is all hundred people who are at the party, right?

And the lead nurture is when you and your best friends go sneak off to like the bedroom and you're like, ugh, okay. I'm happy that I'm having this party. It's fun, but I needed a break and I needed to just come chill with you guys. So all the leads are at the party. It's fun, it's a good time. But you've kind of taken a little portion of the people that you feel closest to and you're developing further relationships with them. Okay, so that's kind of the difference. 

It's both marketing, they both fall under the same type of time category. But one is about getting new people to your party and one is about finding the select few of those people and going and having, like, a mini breakout party where it's more comfortable, more intimate.

So when we move into category two of time, we're talking about delivery time. Okay, so you've been marketing this course, or this program, or this membership site or whatever it is. You then have to deliver it. So for courses, this is making the course, right? So some people just think that that is sitting down with PowerPoint or whatever in front of the camera and saying the content teaching and then putting it in something like Teachable or Kajabi or Thinkific, or whatever platform you wanna use. Right? 

But that's actually the very last step of course creation. So we have to think about the market research, the market validation, the curriculum planning. Then we go out to build out, then we start making the thing. And you guys know me, we sell it way before we build it, but I'm just talking about delivery time here. 

Then we build it out. The good thing about course creation and delivery time is typically you build your course once and it's done, but we can't forget about maintenance, right? Depending on what your course is about, new information is gonna come out or new trends are gonna happen or new whatever. And it's part of your job to make sure that the content in your course is current. 

So a good way to do this is to gather feedback from students as they complete your course, and then make sure that you're asking if there's anything that needs to be updated or anything that they wanna see differently and going and making those updates. So just cause it's made once doesn't mean that you don't go back and update it. 

So I would suggest probably doing a review maybe every quarter, and then maybe doing updates… it depends on what kind of volume, how many people are taking your course. But I would say updating your course at least once a year after you've kind of reviewed it every quarter, make sure everything feels current.

And then of course, if something like major happens and you need to redo a whole module or something like that, right? You might be talking about—for instance, in my case, you might be talking about a software throughout your course and then all of a sudden that software gets bought out by somebody else.

You're gonna have to go and redo, you know, a whole module. So just because it's made doesn't mean that there's not other types of time and other tasks that come up with a course. Now if you're doing coaching, obviously your deliverable is your coaching call. So the things that you need to think about with this is how long are they? Are they 30-minute calls? Are they hour calls? Are they 90-minute calls? What is the duration of your coaching call? 

And then how frequently are you meeting? Are you meeting once a week, once every other week? The other thing you wanna think about is, is there support between calls, either email support, or in my case Voxer support, right? So are you talking with people between your calls? 

So we wanna account for all of that time in a membership site, right? You wanna think about what you're doing on a weekly basis and a monthly basis inside your membership site. So again, how frequently are you meeting? Do you have something for your members every week?

If you do, how long are those? Like, are you doing a Q&A call? Are you doing a training? Are you doing a challenge? Are you doing a breakout, like, a hot-seat coaching call? How frequently are you meeting? And then how long are those meetings, right? So if you're doing a training, is it a 20-minute training or an hour-long training?

The other thing you wanna think about is: How high touch is your membership site? So again, if you're doing hot seat coaching calls, that's higher touch. That's gonna require more time from you. Or do you have a lower touch membership site where maybe you're gonna, you teach 'em a lesson, you give them a deliverable, and then that's it, right?

So that would obviously require less time. So all of these factors are things we need to think about. How long are we meeting with people? How frequently are we meeting with people? How high touch are we meeting with people? And if we, if we've created something where we don't meet with people, like a course or an ebook, are we validating that in the market?

Are we researching it? Are we planning out the curriculum so that it makes sense and that it flows? And are we continuing to update the program, um, with new trends, new information and changes and just feedback from the students as they go through? Okay. The third type of time is then your admin time, right?

So this is any task that you are required to do that runs your side hustle that isn't directly tied to getting new leads, nurturing those leads, so marketing or delivering your program. The good thing about admin time is, for instance, when you're building your funnel, you build it once in the beginning, and then it's just maintenance, right?

So sort of like the course, right? You build it once, and then it's maintenance. So it's still time, but it's like an initial push of time and then it kind of slows down, and then other stuff is low in the beginning. If it's not part of your funnel build, it's low in the beginning. 

So for instance what falls into this is emails, right? If somebody emails you with a question and then you respond to that question: Hey, do you offer coaching? Yes, I do. Right? That kind of stuff. It's low in the beginning cause your name's not out there yet. It will get higher, it will take up more time, but in the beginning it's low. Building new landing pages, designing graphics, those are the things that are part of your funnel build, right?

So it takes time in the beginning, but once it's built, it's just about maintenance, sending invoices, right? So that email, that person emailed you: Do you do coaching? You say, yes, I do. They say, okay, I wanna work with you. Alright, let me send you over an invoice. That kind of stuff is all of your admin stuff, or if you set up a software, you guys know I use Dubsado, which is basically like a non-HIPAA compliant software, we call it a customer relationship management software, but that's what houses, you know, my invoices, my contracts, all of that.

But I had to set that, right? I had to spend the initial time to get that software set up the way that I wanted it. So all of those things fall into your admin tasks, so you can't forget about those. Admin for me is the sneakiest one because it's the stuff that'll sneak up on you, right? If you don't account for it, if you don't think about the 20 minutes it takes to do this or the 15 minutes it takes to do that, that's the time that sneaks up on me. And I'd be surprised if it's not the time that sneaks up on you as well. 

You can probably tell that the type of program that you choose is going to dictate which of these types of time you have more of. Everybody has all of them. Everybody has admin time. Everyone has marketing time, and everyone has delivery time. But they are on a spectrum. And depending on the type of program you choose, you're gonna need more and less, right? 

So a low-price, high-volume program. This is a course, a membership site, an ebook. Those types of programs, they need more leads. You need more people for those because they're lower priced, right? So low price, high volume means more leads. 

So it's more of the broadcast marketing, more of the visibility, more of the public relations, and more of the search. These leads do not need as much nurturing because price alone, if it's low enough price, that will be an incentive to buy. So they don't need as much time nurturing.

But what you will need is more admin, right? Because you're gonna have customer service. You're gonna have more because you have more lead acquisition marketing, more getting-new-people type of marketing. You're gonna have more admin associated with that. You need a bigger audience for these types of programs.

So you have to have the marketing that draws that audience, and you have to have the admin support that supports that audience, but you don't need as much time nurturing that audience. We can totally flip that on its head, and it basically goes the exact opposite when you're in a high-price, low-volume category.

So these are group programs, coaching retreats, things that are premium priced. Obviously, you don't need as many people, and because they're premium priced, they're likely really high touch and it's hard to deliver high touch with lots of people, right? So the intimate nature, the higher price means we need less people.

So we don't need to spend as much time in marketing one A, right, in getting new leads. So we don't need to spend as much time being visible. We don't need to spend as much time planning big events or other things like that. Where we really need to focus is lead nurture. If someone's gonna buy a program from you that is premium priced, they need to trust you.

They need to believe that the money that they're spending is gonna be money well spent—that they're going to get a transformation for that money. So there's less lead acquisition, less admin, but way, way more nurture. So you can start to think and really see how all of these pieces fit together, and why you need a plan for all of these pieces.

Now I have a really quick note on outsourcing here. Can you outsource any of this? Absolutely. What I recommend is hiring out your admin tasks. Absolutely. You do not need to be the person who does that. After you hired out your admin time, I think you can then start to hire out your lead acquisition time. Your “getting new people” time. 

You can have a social media manager. You can have somebody who does those other things for you. I don't ever recommend… There are people who do it, but I don't ever recommend hiring out your lead nurture tasks, right? You can't build relationships, like, people can't build relationships with you if you've hired that out, right?

You just can't. It doesn't make any sense. So hire out admin tasks first, hire out lead acquisition second, and I would really consider not hiring out your nurture. You could have a copywriter write your emails and they could sound a lot like you, or, you know, just like you, they could, they could totally work.

However, if somebody replies to that email, I would be the person replying, right? I wouldn't have that. Then it switched to an admin task. So that's just my two cents on outsourcing. 

So I know a lot of you guys have asked about this, and I wanna share what does my breakdown look like? Where do I have admin time? Where do I have marketing time, and where do I have delivery time? So the thing that I want to remind you guys is that I have three programs. I have Space Holder, which is my course that helps you get your first idea for your Side Hustle. I have Side Hustle Support Group, which is my signature program, walks you from idea all the way through to income.

And then after Side Hustle, we have a Mastermind, and it's only for Side Hustle students. So the funny joke that I've been saying is Side Hustle is inpatient, and then the Mastermind is outpatient, right? Because that's what it feels like. 

Like we go into this closed room in Side Hustle. It's this intimate container separate from everything. We get your Side Hustle completely built. And then there's a mastermind that happens after, which is the maintenance, right? The maintenance, the growth, the continuation of that. So I have three programs. Keep that in mind. You guys are working towards one program, but what I do is I start every morning with 30 minutes of admin.

I just knock it out, right? I reply to all the emails. I look at my schedule, what's on the to-do list for the day, that kind of stuff. So that's kind of my admin time. My marketing: I have to outline this podcast. That takes me about an hour. I have to record the podcast, which takes me about another hour.

I do the show notes, the graphics, and the Facebook posts for the podcast. That takes me about two hours total. I do a Facebook Live once a week, that's an hour, and then responding to everybody in the Facebook group. I set a timer for 15 minutes a day for that. 

Outlining the podcast, recording the podcast, show notes, and graphics. That is all lead acquisition. That's all getting new people into the business, the Facebook Live, and then responding to the email or responding to Facebook and my weekly email that I send out on Mondays, that's another hour. Those are all nurturing. So that ends up being seven in a quarter hours. 

So if we total all of that together, the admin time so far, and then the marketing time so far, we're at nine in a quarter hour or nine and three-quarters hours. So we'll just call it 10 hours. 10 hours a week for admin and marketing for three programs, remember. 

So my delivery, I can't exactly count this as weekly because my Mastermind calls are twice a month. And then my Space Holder call is once a month. So we're gonna add it up monthly and then we're gonna average it. So Mastermind is twice a month. That's three hours. Space holder is once a month. That's one hour. And so for Side Hustle, then we meet for two hours a week every Wednesday. So that's eight hours for the month.

We meet in separate calls for three hours a week on Friday. So that's 12 hours per month. And then we don't have a Facebook group for Side Hustle. We have something called Voxer, which is like a walkie-talkie. We talk to each other, and I'd say that is about 30 minutes a day. So two and a half hours a week is 10 hours a month.

So that's 34 hours a month. And if we average that per week, that's eight hours per week. Okay. So the 10 hours that is marketing and. And then the eight hours that is delivery has me at 18 hours a week. Now, I set aside all of that time, but I don't use all of that time. I'm not using all 30 minutes of my admin time all the time, and I'm not using, you know, sometimes it takes me 20 minutes to outline a podcast instead of an hour to outline a podcast.

So that 18 hours a week is like if I used all of the maximum time. But I did make a big decision to outsource my lead generation. I just made the decision a couple of weeks ago, so this will be cutting three to four hours out of what I do each week. And that person is going to start doing social media for me.

Because if you were paying attention, I don't do any social media, and so she's going to take three to four hours off my plate and then she's going to add something onto my plate. That probably would've been another five hours a week at least if I had decided to do it. So by making that decision to hire, I'm actually gonna be saving more like nine or 10 hours of time.

So that's kind of what my breakdown looks like. To make multiple six figures working 18 hours a week, I feel like is really, really manageable. But remember, we're talking about your schedule and what works for you. So it might be wiser depending on the type of time categories that you like. If you, you know, are interested in something that is lower price, high volume, you're gonna need more leads.

You're gonna spend more time there and have more time in the admin. Less time in the nurture and then you're going to be able to have a higher volume business, right? So all of these variables play in together. But I think that knowing that there are different types of time, there's marketing time, there's delivery time, and there's admin time.

When you find those few minutes in your day, knowing what are you doing with those few minutes. So you can totally see why knowing what type of time category you're working on just makes a big difference. If you've got 30 minutes a day, I would be focusing on getting in front of as many people as you can in those 30 minutes, right?

Then I would shift to nurturing those people in 30 minutes. So I think it really kind of puts it all into perspective of knowing what your plan looks like, what your schedule looks like, and being able to literally drop in an effective task into that time slot that is going to move your needle forward.

That's going to make a difference. That's not going to be a waste of time, and it's not gonna ultimately end up leaving you bailing on your side hustle cuz it's not working. So this is where the side hustle schedule comes in because we're going to first make room for your side hustle by prioritizing the non-negotiables.

We're gonna then audit your obligations. And then we're going to talk about what you do with the time, once you've made space for it, so that it is effective so that it actually does something for you. You start to get those pieces of validation, the audience growing, the money coming in, and it makes it all feel possible. And then, like I said, it's a snowball effect. It just all gets more possible from there. 

Alright. Until next time guys, keep on rising. Thank you so much for listening to the Empathy Rising Podcast.

And check out these related posts!