The 60-80% Rule That Saves Entrepreneurs From Burnout

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The Business You Really Want | Burnout

Are you working harder than ever but feeling like you have less to show for it? You’re not alone.

In this anniversary episode, we revisit our fourth most popular episode to explore how the 60-80% rule applies to building the business you really want. Join hosts Tonya Kubo and business advisor Gwen Bortner for this conversation on maximizing profit without maxing out your energy.

Discover why billing 100% of your working hours is impossible, how 2025’s economic uncertainty has changed the profit game, and why energy — not time — is your most precious resource. Learn the hidden costs of context-switching, how to calculate true service profitability, and three strategies for making more money without burning out.

If you’ve ever wondered why adding more clients doesn’t always equal more profit, this episode gives you the framework to work smarter, not harder.

Email your biggest profitability challenge to tonya@everydayeffectiveness.com—your insights help shape future episodes.

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Watch the episode here

 

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The 60-80% Rule That Saves Entrepreneurs From Burnout

Celebrating One Year: The Podcasting Journey Unfolds

Gwen, we are officially one year into podcasting.

One year and one episode.

One year in one episode is technically correct.

The last episode was officially our one year. We are now beyond. We are one year plus.

Just a quick thought. How does that feel?

I love it. I also love that we know what we’re doing for the next four episodes for sure. You and I have been talking. It’s like, “I can figure out what’s coming up for the next.”

I would have to say, as somebody who’s done a lot of podcasting, we don’t have Podfade. That’s the biggest issue. Many shows don’t even make it to 12 episodes or past 12 episodes because people are into things to say, or they just get tired.

First off, I think you and I could never get tired of talking to each other.

Not a lie.

There’s a lot to talk about the business you really want.

There are a lot of different segments to talk about, little pieces of what that means and what that looks like, and because the market is always changing, the perspective always shifts, too.

No, it’s true. Tell them what we’re going to do for the next four episodes.

I will do that. What we are doing is we’re going to do an anniversary countdown. We’ve picked the top four downloaded episodes, and I say we’ve picked, but we didn’t actually, just ran a report and looked at the top four most downloaded episodes.

Technically, they’ve picked.

Technically, this is reader-selected. We’re going to start with the fourth most popular and go count down all the way down to the first most popular for the next four weeks. What we’re doing is we are going to talk about what has changed, whether that’s what has changed in the marketplace, trends, or even what’s changed in us. How we see the topic differently than we did when we first recorded because we have the benefit of Gwen having a service-based business and me having my own service-based business, that we have clients who listen to these shows too, and they let us know how it applies to their direct businesses as well. Does that sum it up pretty well, Gwen?

Yeah, and on some of the topics, we’re just going to go deeper into those topics as well. Pretty much any topic that we ever talk about, we could probably talk about for hours.

Profitability Secrets: Your Top Performing Podcast Episode

Definitely true. Speaking of a topic we could talk about for hours, our fourth most downloaded episode was called Maximum Profit Without Maxing Out. I know, because I think this would be fun for every single episode if we first just kick off a little bit, talking about, like, are we surprised that that landed in the top four? I’ll do a recap, and then we’ll go into the present day.

I’m not surprised because everyone cares about profit, even if they don’t talk about profit. They know that profit is important. When we were just chatting about this earlier, the thing I think that was really interested for people, and we don’t actually have data on this, this is just my projection without maxing out. I think that without maxing out, because a lot of times when people are talking about income or profit, it’s about more, hustle, work harder, work faster, and without maxing out, is not exactly an option in that process.

Everyone cares about profit. Even if they don't talk about it, they know it's important. Share on X

Without maxing out, for some people, maybe going from working one to one to one to many, but that’s not what it is for everybody.

No, there are a lot of options.

I think the title also, this is your point, the title definitely is what I think attracted people, because this is our only episode so far to have gotten 100 downloads. I think part of it is that it’s not a titled scale. It’s not titled work one to many. It’s not titled any of those things because, to your point that you constantly make, its context matters. All of those solutions are valid and work, but not all of those solutions are valid and work for every business or every business model. Just to remind readers, or for the readers who haven’t been here since the beginning.

This was episode 33, which went live roughly about March of 2025. We recorded it in February of 2025. That’s really important for this particular topic, just because the market has gone through some significant shifts between February 2025 and when we’re recording right at the beginning of Q3 of this year. This is the episode, Gwen, that you introduced us, or at least me, I took pages of notes during this episode, to the 60% to 80% utilization rule for solopreneurs. That is such a mouthful, but I’m just going to ask you to define that for us here before I go into the other points.

I know the reason you love this is because it’s one of the only times I actually gave you a rule or a calculation, because you always want rules and calculations.

I love formulas.

I don’t give them a lot. I don’t believe that they’re universal. The idea of utilization is how much of your time that you’re working actually is going toward billable work. When we talk 60% to 80%, we are generally talking about that smaller business that is either a solopreneur, nearly a solopreneur, or a super tiny team. If you’re an entrepreneur or CEO of an organization that has 20 or 30 employees, the chance that your utilization is that high is not very likely. If it is, it’s actually probably a problem at that point.

It’s designed for that smaller-sized organization. I’m going to say definitely less than 10 employees size, probably even less than five. At least like you’re full-time, equivalent sorts of employees. The idea being, how much of your total time are you actually billing? The issue is that people will say, “I can make the money I need to make if I’m billing 35 hours a week.” It’s like, “Okay, but you cannot also do the other stuff you have to do to run your business in that remaining tiny little five hours. That’s probably not going to happen, especially if you’re only wanting to work 35 hours a week.”

That was the piece that like really blew my mind. It’s one of those things, it’s like you know it, but you don’t know it. Which was like, “I know so many business owners who they want to work a 35-hour work week, and they base their income goals on as if every single hour is billable.” When they do get to that point, because I know a lot of entrepreneurs who are fully booked out, they don’t understand why they’re so tired if they’re only “working 35 hours a week.” It’s because they haven’t accounted for the admin time and the overhead that is associated with fulfilling those 35 hours of service.

It’s a simple percentage calculation of how many hours you’re actually billing versus how many hours you’re working. We’ll stick with 40 hours just because it’s easier math and I can do it in my head. A 40-hour week, 80% utilization would be 32 hours, and 60% utilization would be 24 hours. That’s a reasonable expectation. The more people you have, the more your utilization will likely go down because now you’re having to manage the people as well.

 

The Business You Really Want | Burnout

 

Thank you for recapping that again. The other thing that we talked about is that we addressed why more clients don’t always equal more money. To your point is the hidden minutes that sabotage you when you’re trying to plan for your capacity. You’re not accounting for the admin time. Just the idea of time tracking because that’s really the foundation of if you want to apply the utilization rule, even you, as the CEO, have to track your time.

Even if you work on a retainer, even if you’re working one to many, this is another mistake that I see a lot of business owners make is they don’t track their own time. Looking at myself here, too. I track my time working for clients, I don’t track my own time working for me, which means I have no data on the business-building activities that I might go through.

That’s one of the things that makes me a weirdo in the world, is I spent so much time early in my career as a freelancer where I would have to track time. In other environments where I needed to track time, even when I no longer needed to track time, I have always tracked time. I can tell you on any day and any week exactly how many hours I put in working in and on the business.

We’ve addressed this in other episodes. The myth of one-to-many being the most profitable and maybe I’ve just talked to bad people, that’s entirely possible, but what we’re told is if everybody is paying you on average, a $100 for that session, you got five people in the session, you’re making $500 an hour. That sounds like great money versus meeting with five people individually at a hundred dollars an hour, but the problem, of course, is it’s always going to be more than an hour. There is reminding five people about the event. There is managing five people. There are the notes you have to take beforehand, and the notes you have to take afterwards. It may not be $500 for 5 hours of work, but it’s definitely not $500 for one hour of work.

Understanding all of those pieces and what the expectation is. It’s all of those bits.

Navigating Economic Headwinds: Client Capacity In Uncertain Times

We just got off of your annual, quarterly planning retreat that you do with your clients. Just so our readers know, so it’s 2 days, it’s 3 hours each day. Day 1 is 3 hours, looking back. It’s a reflection. Day 2 is 3 hours looking ahead. All of it’s informed by what’s going on right now. One thing that I would like to say bubbled up, but that’s much more gentle than what happened. It was glaring, like shouting from the rooftops, is this economic uncertainty that everybody is feeling? When we first recorded the episode in February, of course, there was a lot of fortune-telling what may happen.

Uncertainty, but it was expected uncertainty. We had a new president. Everyone, it doesn’t matter who comes in as a new president. There’s always going to be unexpected uncertainty. The expected uncertainty was like, “This is going to be eeehh,” but we weren’t in the middle of it.

We had that. The other thing that I was just thinking about now is we’ve also ended a fiscal year now. A lot of business owners know they should be tracking their finances and running reports regularly, but many don’t until they have to hand everything over to the bookkeeper or the CPA. On July second, everybody is acutely aware of where their revenue, their income, and their net profit were this first half of the year and last year.

My question for you is just from your perspective, both based on the circles you run in, because we run in different circles, and your clients. How have inflation, recession, fears, and the general economic uncertainty, I love how you talk about economic uncertainty, changed how people are thinking about client capacity? How they should be thinking about it? Tell us more.

A couple of the things that came out of that were one of our clients said, “It’s like COVID was.” When she said that out loud, there were a whole lot of nodding heads that were going along with it. There were several, were like, “Yes, that’s what I’ve been feeling, but I couldn’t quite put words to it.” What I realized as we were talking about it is it’s not a COVID-like pandemic, like a worldwide pandemic.

It’s much more of everything I thought was certain now is being shown is not certain, which is not the same thing as it being uncertain. What I think has happened is that the veil has lifted on that. Most of the things that we feel pretty certain about actually are not that certain. I feel very certain that tomorrow I’m going to wake up, and it’s going to be tomorrow. There is a high probability of that, but there is no certainty of that for a whole lot of things, but because all of the indicators say that I’m going to, I’m just going to assume that.

If some of those indicators started getting pulled away for whatever reason, it was like, “No, something could be terribly wrong.” I mean, all of a sudden, that wouldn’t have the same level of certainty. It was actually the same level of certainty as it was the day before, when I didn’t know, but it feels different because what we’re envisioning, what we’re experiencing, has lifted. I’m thinking about it as a health example because people have dealt with this in various aspects of their lives.

The day before you find out you have cancer and the day after you have cancer, your likelihood of having cancer was exactly the same on those two days. It was a whole different experience the day after you knew, because it’s now that the uncertainty piece has been lifted. It’s like, “No, I actually don’t have as much control over my body and my health and all of the things that are going on.” Until it is revealed to you, you’re not so sure.

I think that’s what’s happened is a lot of things that we thought we were very certain about, people are saying, “No, we’re not very certain.” We were never certain. We deal with a number of people who have product-based businesses. All of the conversation around tariffs is out who knows how much, all of those things, people are getting really wound up about that. The thing is, it’s like tariffs are one thing, but there are a thousand other things that could be changing the price of your product that you’re bringing in that you’re not considering them.

The whole supply chain, a tsunami in the right place at the wrong time, could absolutely have as much or more impact than any of the tariff things that we’re talking about. It’s not on the news until it’s more likely that it’s going to happen or that it becomes fodder for the conversation. Probably it was six weeks ago, I want to say. One of my clients, we were talking about this, and I told her, without any sarcasm, “You need to stop watching the news.”

I know at first she thought I was joking. I was like, “No, because what you’re doing is you’re worrying about things that you don’t need to worry about, and you don’t know what the outcome will be until you actually know the outcome.” Tariffs are the most complex thing in the entire universe to understand. Unless you happen to be a tariff expert, even if who’s getting charged, how much they’re getting charged, all the rest of it, you don’t know how much it’s going to affect your price until the product shows up with a new price. Why are we spending hours and hours worrying about it? We’re taught to worry about things, but that’s a lot of lost energy.

It’s lost energy, it’s lost time. I want to talk about energy, but before we talk about energy, I want to go back to what you were saying about it feels uncertain, but it’s just because the veil has been lifted.

It was always uncertain.

We’re seeing underneath the hood, and we didn’t see underneath the hood before. What I was thinking about is especially for our product-based businesses, but it’s a little bit for our service-based businesses to some degree. It’s always been assumed, it’s been a given that you can get products cheaper overseas. The labor is cheaper, and the materials are cheaper. What’s leading to this uncertainty while we talk about tariffs and we talk about this, it’s really about the fact that it’s no longer a given that importing goods is the cheapest option. Now I have to think and review, and research what might be the cheapest option.

What's leading to this uncertainty? While we talk about tariffs, it's really about the fact that importing goods is no longer a given as the cheapest option. Share on X

My answer always is, you don’t need to spend a whole lot of time doing that until it’s no longer the cheapest option.

I do agree with you. It’s they’re worrying about it, but I think part of it is just like, this is something that I just thought was going to be true for my entire career. I don’t even know how to think about it. I love that just as a reminder that right now it’s tariffs, and cost of goods sold, tomorrow it could be something else.

All of those things affect individuals’ relationships with their money. I’m worried that all the goods are going to go up, and that my groceries are going to go up by 50% and because of that, I don’t think I can afford to do this other thing. Even if you’re not selling a physical-based product, it still affects the money. Money is always an element in business.

The Hidden Cost: How Energy Impacts Profitability

We’ve talked about the economic concerns. We haven’t talked a lot about how that works on pricing, but I want to get to the energy piece because profitability isn’t just about dollars. There’s also this energy component that goes into how profitable you are.

As I said, that was I think, part of the reason this episode, the prior episode, episode 33, did so well  is about that last half of that statement, which is really about energy. The maxing out is really about energy. Without maxing out, we focus easily on money because money is easy to measure, and we love to focus on time, even though time’s a funky thing, we have these things called watches which help us feel like we’re able to actually measure it.

Our most precious resource after time, maybe before time, it’s hard to know, their very close relationship with one another, is our energy. We get to replenish it every day if we sleep well and eat well, and do some of those things. Our bodies are rather magical in being able to do all of those things, but it is a limited resource at any point in time. What are we putting our energy to? It’s really hard to measure what we’re putting that energy into.

Our most precious resource after time or perhaps even before it, is our energy. And we get to replenish it every day, if we sleep and eat well. Share on X

We don’t have like a really good energy measurement tool that is consistently available and everyone knows how to use, and all of those things, and most of us know how to use a watch. That’s the piece that I think we’re missing in the profitability is, are we using our energy in the most profitable way possible? Profitable in this case means how much is it costing us. The fastest way to increase profit on anything is to reduce expenses.

That is always the fastest way. We’ve talked about it before. Marketing people love to say that it’s revenue. You’ll be the first to acknowledge that, but revenue always has a cost associated with it. A dollar of revenue does not get you a dollar of profit. A reduced expense by a dollar does increase your profit by a dollar. It is the fastest way.

The same thing is true with energy. If we can reduce the wasted expenditure of energy, we actually have more energy profit that we can then apply to the things that we want to be applying them to that may in fact be creating more time and or money for us by reallocating, reusing, and doing all the things that we need to do. Focusing on things that we don’t have control over is, to me, one of the expenses of energy that is wasted, expensive energy.

If you don’t have control about the tariffs, you don’t need to worry about the tariffs. There’s only so much you can do. Maybe you need to write your congressman. Maybe there may be some things. Do those things, but just sitting and being all like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” That doesn’t actually get you anywhere. The same thing is true with our products and with our clients.

Are they the clients that bring you energy, or are they the clients that take energy? Are they the products and services that create energy, or are they the products and services that take energy? Products and services. We also want to look at money. It is not the only thing. Clients, we also want to look at money, but we forget. Both of those cases to look at energy because money is an easier thing to measure.

I want to talk about energy versus time really quickly because you made a really good point about not being sure which one’s more important. I am going to draw a line in the sand and speak in an absolute, Gwen, because I know you love that. I am going to say that energy, hands down, is the most precious resource. Here’s my justification because time is fixed. We will never have more than 24 hours on any given day, and we’re not going to have less.

 

The Business You Really Want | Burnout

 

Now I’m sure there’s a solstice thing somewhere, or it’s different. All things being equal. There are always 24 hours in a day, our choice is how we use them. We are not widgets, we are humans. No human has the same energy capacity as another. I know the majority of our readers are women, they are women in business, and many of the people who have left reviews are women who went into business because they have some other challenge that makes it much more profitable for them to work for themselves versus working for somebody else.

I’m talking about having an intense caregiving role. I’m talking about chronic health issues. I’m talking maybe differences like where they live. Living super rural and not having the ability to get a decent job without it costing an astronomical amount of money. The energy pieces are so much more important to manage because it’s not a pie. You can turn a clock into a pie.

You’re right. Energy is not a pie, but it is a pie for each individual.

The mistake I think, to your point, is all too often we base what we think our energy is and should be on the other person who’s outrageously more productive than us.

That’s always bad. We’ve got a whole episode, you can link to that too, on the comparison trap, because the comparison trap is just that, it is a trap. Back to context matters, all the things that we’re saying all the time. We’ll just use you and I for a moment to talk about it. I potentially can get a lot more done than you can because I have no children to manage.

Potentially, even by the time you reach my age, I will have gotten more done by my age than your age in a business work environment, whatever you want to call it, because I never had children to manage. That was not something that was on my to-do list any day, other than an occasional day here and there where I might have been helping somebody out. That was not a full-time gig for me. Does that make me better than you?

No, not at all. It just makes me different. If you’re comparing the things that I’m able to do and the choices I’m able to make and all of that between you and I, that’s a horrible comparison. We do really well when we talk about it because we appreciate the difference. It’s not only that you’ve got two kids, your husband is different than my husband, although they’re the same. There are some similarities, but also there’s an age difference.

I’ve got way more laps around the sun than you do, which means other things have happened because of that. There are so many things that go into that. Being aware of what our energy is, but also understanding that at different ages and stages, both socially, what’s happening in our world, from children versus empty nesters versus pre-children versus single versus married, all of those things, but also our own physical world.

My energy when I was your age was way better than what it is now. I had not gone through menopause yet. I wasn’t dealing with the hormones. There’s a whole other set of things that I know when I was your age, my energy was different than it is now. I also know I manage my energy better than I did back then because that is a choice. What am I spending energy on? What am I investing my energy in? We were talking about it, our quarterly tuneup process.

We love our quarterly tune-up process. It’s energizing for both of us because one of the choices that I’ve made that I did not necessarily make when I was your age is I only work with amazing clients. I am as happy to get on a call with my least income-creating client as I am with my most income-creating client. The energy is the same, regardless of the money.

Part of why you can say categorically that you work only with amazing people. This is something I feel the need to say as your marketing professional, because not everybody does this is when you’re talking to somebody and to decide whether you want to take them on as a client, you never just think about, “I help them?” It’s can I help them? How will they fit in with everybody else I’m working with? It’s entirely possible that there is somebody who would be a great fit right now, who would not have been a great fit two years ago.

It’s possible.

Unlikely because back to amazing people, amazing women, but it’s entirely possible. I think that’s also something that nobody talks about. We talk about grading, I’ll say, clients on how much they pay us if they pay us on time, and how much of a pain they may be. There’s a little thing in the back of our minds, I think, that thinks the more somebody pays us, the more of a pain they have a right to be, which is, you would tell them, is absolutely not true. The other piece of how we look at our clients is I think it’s how easily we can go from one client to another client to another client. It’s back to like when you’re told to streamline your offers. Oftentimes, you’re told to cut the offer that seems siloed from the rest.

You’re right. It’s very much about how much energy does it takes to disconnect from the client that you just finished work with and reconnect with the client that you’re going to work with. Now, this is also a personal thing. Some people are way more empathetically attuned. That disconnection takes more energy for them, and that reconnection takes more energy for them. I’m not saying a right or wrong thing, but saying, is it a reasonable amount? Is it a reasonable amount of energy to disconnect, and is it a reasonable amount of energy to reconnect? To me, that’s where the profitability comes. If you’re having to spend a lot of time re-grounding yourself, letting all of it go, and finding yourself caught in thought cycles and spirals, that’s actually taking away from your profitability.

Optimizing Your Offers: The Profitability Puzzle

I think we have to hit the third aspect of profit. We’ve talked about economics because that does affect cost. We’ve talked about energy and time. We’ve talked about billable hours and your utilization. I think we have to talk about offers, Gwen.

Yes. The offers are related to what we were just talking about. It’s who we’re working with and how we’re working with them. How much is the transition from one to the next, a big jump or a little jump? We talk about it from time to time. I don’t know how recently we’ve talked about it, but context switching of “I’m doing this thing and now I’m doing that thing.” Although it feels like we transition instantly, it’s not really true.

If you really pay close attention, very few of us are capable of paying that close attention, but if someone else were watching you, they would be able to tell you. There are people who’ve done lots of studies on this. It’s actually potentially a huge amount. The smaller the activity, the bigger the amount it is, because it’s like credit card fees. There’s a base fee and then there’s a percentage on top of it.

If you’ve got a really big thing, if you’re only doing two things in one day, that context switching ends up being a very small percentage because there’s the base cost and there’s the percentage cost, but I only did it once or twice in the day. When you do 8,000 little things, then it becomes bigger. The same thing is true if we’re having to context switch through our products and our offers. Entrepreneurs love to do something new.

It is their natural tendency. It’s part of the reason they became an entrepreneur, for heaven’s sakes. They like to build, they like to start things, they like to create but I was recently reading a newsletter from one of my friends and folks that I follow, and he was saying that his physical trainer told him what he needs, he was like, “What do I need to do next?” He is very classic entrepreneurial fashion. What the trainer said is, “You just need to sleep more.” I was like, “That’s not cool. That’s not sexy, that’s not fun.” It’s like, “Yeah.”

What it was is you need to cut something so you sleep more. This is actually what you need to do. For most entrepreneurs, part of their profitability challenge is they either have too many offers so none of them are doing as well as they could, or there’s too much context switching so there’s too much lost in administrative energy thought all of those processes and/or they’re not paying attention to the individual profitability of the product and/or service.

Can you say more about that specific thing? I think, in my opinion, we don’t hear a lot about that. We hear which offer when you’re told to look at your best offers. We’re told, “Which one do you sell the most of? Which one’s the easiest to sell?” I don’t often hear outside of corporate business circles, somebody saying, “What is the profit margin on offer A, offer B, offer C?”

The thing is because we’re entrepreneurial and often we’re a smaller organization, when we look at it, it’s hard for us to divide the profitability from service 1 versus service 2 versus service 3, and because it’s hard, we just don’t do it to figure out how much that profitability really is. That’s the piece when people generally not having marketing or sales problems, but their profitability is a problem.

It’s like, “Why are we not actually making money?” Usually, there are these generic things that say, “This makes this much and this makes this much.” It’s like, “How much does it cost?” It’s hard to say because we’ve got overhead and this and that and the other thing that’s like, “I’m not you.” When you’re dealing with a product, it’s so much easier. I buy a widget for $5 and I sell it for $10. I make $5 on that.

The Service Business Profitability Challenge

The widget that I buy for $500, but I sell for a thousand, I made $500. It’s so much easier, but the service gets iffy. First, we have to be tracking time, and most entrepreneurs don’t want to be tracking time. That’s why they’re selling in retainer models or offer models. It’s like, “I don’t know how much time I spent.” That means you don’t really know how much profit it is. You can sell it as a one-price product, but you still need to know, did that one-price product take you the 10 hours you thought, or did it take you 12?

Did it take you 14? Did it take you 15, or did it take you 8, and you’re making more money? Often, we aren’t looking at it that way. That’s the place where we really have to get careful and say, “Where is that?” The additional challenge with entrepreneurs is that often they aren’t saying, “I offered this service and I’m the one delivering it, but I’m early stage, so I’m not paying myself, this product makes X amount.”

It’s like, “Does it?” At any point, if you need to pay somebody else, are you still making that amount? Heavens know you are not making anywhere close to that amount. Even if you’re not paying yourself, you need to allocate what it would take to pay someone to do this job that you’re doing. Now, how much money are we making? Often, the thing that we think we’re making a lot of money on, we are not making a lot of money on. Even if we’re on an hourly rate, we’re charging the most hourly, but I’m not saying, “To pay someone else to do this would cost X amount.”

I’m just looking at, I’m paying myself zero. I’m making the whole amount. It’s like, not the same. I think that’s the other place that we struggle with profit, that is to say, we really have to allocate the costs to the product. I do think it’s actually harder in a service-based business, particularly in a small-based business where it’s a solo printer or a nearly solo printer or a tiny team environment, because we often aren’t really allocating costs the way that we need to allocate them.

The Profit Power-Up: 3 Key Takeaways For Business Owners

Gwen. Here’s what we’re going to do that’s a little different from most of our episodes. I would like you to sum up. If the reader has gotten this far and they remember nothing else from this episode, what are the three things that you want them to take with?

Maximizing profit without maxing out are three key items. One, don’t waste, lose, or drain energy where it’s not actually providing any ROI for you at all. That can be around thought processes, it can be around people, it can be around products, there are a thousand places that it can be, but pay attention to the energy. The second place without maxing out and it’s related to this energy is choose your customer base, your client base, and your offer wisely, because it can drain a whole lot of it away.

A bad client who ends up taking twenty hours when you really were supposed to give them ten is going to take a lot away, but also a client who only takes ten, but you sit and think about hours and hours after you’re done working is also stealing your time and your energy from doing other good work other places. The third thing is to be critical about looking at your products and your services, and do I need them all, and do they make sense, and whether they are all profitable in a way that is really profitable. We love to add things. Everybody makes more money when they cut something out. Even an offer.

Those are the three things. I love it. This brings us to the end of this particular episode because we have three more episodes that we get to count down.

We have a lot more episodes, but we have three more in this little series.

Three more that we get to count down. Typically, I would say if you want to learn more, da, da, but what I would love, especially since we’re recapping the most popular episodes of the last year, is I would just love for you to email me if you are reading. You can email me at Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. Specifically, I would love to know what your biggest challenge is when it comes to profitability or when it comes to these three categories that Gwen and I have addressed, whether it’s the economic piece, it’s the offer piece, or it’s the energy piece. That is what I would love to hear from you. Again, it’s Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. Thanks for reading.

 

Mentioned in This Episode

 

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.