Episode #038 Narrow Your Focus To Improve Your Bookkeeping Business (Even If You Don't Want To Grow)

• Episode about improving profit, efficiency and productivity
  https://thesavvybookkeeper.com.au/Podcast/podcast-36-pricing-bookkeeping-business-profit/
• Amy’s podcast about her “almost” burnout
  https://thesavvybookkeeper.com.au/Podcast/the-bookkeeping-project-part-7/
• Last week’s episode
  https://thesavvybookkeeper.com.au/Podcast/37-social-technology-grow-bookkeeping-business-samuel-burmeister-tall-books/
• Join The Savvy Bookkeeper Facebook group

Good morning. Thank you for joining me today. Today's topic is going to be about growing your business, and you might have had enough of hearing about this topic, so today I'm going to go the complete opposite, and I'm going to talk about what to focus on if you've decided that you don't want to grow. Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting to grow. There's nothing wrong with not wanting to grow, but there is a lot of pressure on us as business owners that we should be growing, and that growing should look like something specific. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I guess I've been reflecting on this, and thinking, “What does it actually mean to grow? And what can we spend our time doing if we have reached the point where we've decided at the moment, or maybe for good.” I don't know, no one really knows.

I've had a few stints where I felt that I've left, or stopped doing something, and then later a new season has come up, and I've decided to go back to doing it again. So, let's talk a little bit about growing first, because what we're going to be talking about today is things to focus on if you don't want to grow.

What does “grow your business” actually mean?

In order to talk about what happens when you don't want to grow, we need to talk about what growing actually means, and then we can kind of look at other options. So, I think what I'm getting at is, so I had a little bit of a look online to see what the dictionary says about growing, and to see what the thesaurus says about growing. Can't even say it. So basically, the dictionary says that grow means to increase gradually in size, and become greater, and larger, and expand.

So, in a minute I'll talk about what I think is meant when we hear, as small business owners, about growing our business, but firstly, I want to talk a little bit about the actual word grow. So, I'm looking at this thesaurus, and it basically says that synonym… Oh, my gosh. It's not a word. Synonyms… I don't know, whatever, you know what I'm talking about. So, another word for grow is advance, or to become, or to build, or to cultivate, or to develop. It can mean expand, flourish, increase, mature, produce, raise, rise, widen, swell, thrive, abound, amplify. Lots and lots of words here, enlarge, heighten, luxuriate. That's a lovely word, isn't it? Maturate, don't know that one. Ripen, and some of these words really, I guess when I think about the word grow, obviously I'm thinking about like a plant growing, or a flower growing, and that kind of thing.

Now, if you have decided that you don't want to grow, the opposite to growing… Okay, in the dictionary, or in the thesaurus, the opposite to the word grow. the antonym for the word grow is to cease, to compress, to contract, to decline, decrease, demolish, destroy, diminish. What else have we got here? Fail, ignore lesson, lower, narrow, neglect. Oh, that's not very nice, is it? Reduce, recede, retreat, ruin, shrink, stop, abridge, condense. Okay. We're getting a little bit away from the original word, but you can see here the opposite to grow doesn't sound very appealing. So, even though you might be saying, “I don't want to grow,” specifically. You definitely, probably don't want to neglect, or demolish, or repress your business. So, I guess what I'm thinking here is that when you say that you don't want to grow your business, you're actually meaning something else.

What does it mean to not grow your business?

I've been thinking about what that actually is and I've been thinking of all the different things that we could do if we have reached a point where we don't want to grow our business. However, I have to give you the definition of what I think people mean when they talk about growing their business. I think that what the person means is to get more clients. So, when someone says, “I don't want to grow,” it means I don't want to get more clients. I think that's the real kind of meaning behind that. So, when someone says, “I don't want to grow,” I don't think it's true that they don't want to grow, because no one wants to do the opposite to growing, unless you've decided it's time to close down your business, and you want to sell. That's a completely different story, but I'm talking about people who want to continue. No one wants to shrink their business, but you may not want to grow your income.

What I want to do is talk a little bit about the different types of ways that you can grow without growing your income. So we think… Sorry, not growing your income. Gosh, I think all of us would probably like to grow income, but what I'm talking about here is when you don't want to grow you're potentially, probably saying to me that you don't want to get more clients on board. I will link into last week. No, it wasn't last week. The week before podcast episode where I actually went like quite specifically into different ways that you can grow your profit, because a lot of people think that the only way to get profitable is to get more clients, and bring in more income, but that's only one of many ways. So, I will put the link to that, but today we're going to focus on what to focus on instead when you don't want to grow.

8 things to focus on if you don't want to grow your client base

I've done a little bit of a brainstorm, and I've come up with eight, actually nine different things that you could focus on. Of course, this is not a completely exhaustive list, and actually I did come up with eight, but there was another one that I had kind of thrown on the end. So, let's go through those, and yeah, let's have a look at these together.

1. Improve your financial position

The first one I was thinking of is if you decide that you don't want to get more clients, then another thing that you could focus on instead is improving your financial position. So, I'm talking about growing, so you're still growing, but you're growing your profit instead of your client base. As I said, I do, in the other episode, go into a lot of lot more detail on profits, but that is something that you could focus on, so you can actually improve your profit without actually growing your business.

In fact, you'll hear about people who say like, “I got rid of a whole bunch of clients that weren't a good fit anymore.” Maybe there's some smaller clients that are not sort of fitting in with your businesses. You're changing your purpose, or advancing in your own skillset. Could be anything like that, but it could be sometimes people have moved on clients who are high maintenance clients, so they're taking up a lot of your time, and you're not necessarily getting the best out of your business, and you might be writing off a lot of time, and things like that. So, there's lots of different ways that you can focus on your financial position instead of focusing on growing your client base and you can actually grow your profits.

Your profit obviously is what's left over after you pay all of your expenses. So, your income comes in, and then you pay it all out again, and hopefully there's some leftover. That amount leftover for you is your profit, and so it is possible. Most people just think, “Oh well, if I want my profit to go up, I need to spend less or earn more,” and there are other ways to do that, so I recommend that you check out that other episode.

2. Team Development

Number two is about team development. So, if you've got a business, and you're happy with the size of your client base, perhaps your focus could be on growing your capacity, growing your effectiveness, even you could say. You might decide to spend a season working on developing your team. Now, I did also mention this in the other podcast that when you're a bookkeeper, you don't have a factory with machinery.

We don't have physical machines, but what we have is our assets that generate an income are our teams, and our software platforms, and so it's really important to develop our teams. That is something that takes focus. People, I guess it's kind of easy to think that you just write the correct job description, find the correct person, that they're going to join your team, and it's all going to be great, but the thing is teams need to be developed, especially if you want your staff to work for you longterm, and really understand your clients, and the business, and to really care about what they do. There's some bookkeepers in our industry who share quite a lot about their journey with their team, and things like that, and I just think that that is great.

There are some bookkeepers out there who have excellent teams and we can really learn from others like that. For me, just starting my bookkeeping business. Again, I don't have a huge team, but I've got two team members now, and at Savvy there's eight of us, and so I have learned through my own personal experience that really putting aside time to invest in the team is really, really crucial. I think… Actually, I will talk a little bit more about something that ties into team development. It's actually listed as number eight, so I won't skip to that now, but when it comes to developing your team, like part of it is that your team need to really understand your processes. So, I'll talk a little bit about that a little bit further along, but that's something that you could spend your time on.

It doesn't matter what it looks like, but you could do workshops with your team. You could set aside regular time to actually make sure that they understand the processes. You can make sure that they have the training that they need to use all of your software platforms, and you could have like brainstorming days. One thing that I'm really big on is letting my team contribute to designing the processes, and actually helping them to… Not helping them to. Gosh, they're better than me at lot of things, but I guess empowering them, and giving them permission. When I say empowering, I really mean giving them the permission to say, “Hey, you're allowed to own this. Like if you don't like this process,” and like make it your own, and put your own input into it, suggest ideas, and that kind of thing.

So, in order to do that, you do have to be fairly flexible. I mean, my team telling me they don't like some of my stuff. I come up with all sorts of different ideas on how to do things, and sometimes I go to them to tell them, “Okay, this is the way we're going to do this particular thing,” and they're like, “Oh, why are you doing it like that? Why don't you do like this, this and this?” And I'm like, “Oh my goodness, that's way better. I'm so glad that I asked you.” So, I think working with a team and developing your team, you can't afford to take your own stuff personally. Like if you've built the business from the ground up, you have to kind of learn to let go as well.

The business is not always going to be all about you, especially if you're going to be developing your team, and in the future even if you decide not to grow your client base, you still can invest in the people. So, I think that's a great thing to focus on. If you've decided you don't want to grow your client base at the moment, and you have a team in place, then why not have a think about different ways that you could develop that team?

3. Professional development

That brings me to my next one. Number three, which is professional development. So, you could grow your knowledge, and this is a really exciting, and I think a lot of bookkeepers really love this. For me personally, technical bookkeeping stuff is not my jam, but what is, is learning… For me, my professional development is more centred around customer service, or consulting type services, as opposed to technical bookkeeping, because for me, in my business I've got my, I guess I call her a junior bookkeeper, even though she's like a mid level experience level, and my best agent, so they just work together.

I don't need to know all the technical stuff. I could if I wanted to, but it's actually not me. I've never really been, as a bookkeep, that into all the technical side of things. So, of course there are basic things that you need to know about the technical side of bookkeeping, but there's a lot of stuff that I wouldn't know. I would say the things that I personally know is how to get more out of the software then what is kind of standard, so that's something that I've always been really big on, and I guess that sort of comes back again to refining the client's processes, and making things run more smoothly.

I like to look at okay, like this is the standard set of reports that are available to us from the software that you can click a button and get a report, but for me I like to kind of create my own reports. I export data, and I kind of manipulate it, and put it into a different type of format, so I can get different types of data that I need. I can't really think of an example right now, because I'm not actually thinking in that head space, but that's something that you could think about with your own development. I think learning how to be really good on spreadsheets is great, so a lot of people are trying… When I say a lot of people like, I don't know, I guess it's really just the software programmes that provide like these forecasting tools, and things like that. They try and say like, “Spreadsheets are really outdated,” and things like that, but like I'm sorry, spreadsheets are awesome.

I use a spreadsheet for everything. Well, actually I use Airtable for a lot of stuff now, which is sort of like a spreadsheet, sort of like a database. But Google Sheets is my favourite now. I still use Excel sometimes, but I find Google Sheets is just a lot easier to use, and it allows you to collaborate with the team, but there's a couple of things that Excel does a little bit better, but in a sense they're quite similar. Something that you could focus on is you could brush up on your Excel skills, you could take a software course. A lot of bookkeepers that I know at the moment are doing HR intermediary courses, or payroll courses to really boost up their payroll knowledge. Again, that is definitely not something that I love to do.

I'm not a fan of payroll, it's too technical for me. I'm such a big picture person, so anything that has to really get into the nitty gritty details, I don't like, unless the criteria that makes the details acceptable is I like finding mistakes. That's kind of fun. Although these days, because I've been doing bookkeeping for so long, you sort of like, I don't know. You reach a point where you're like, “Ah, I don't really want to be doing all of this. Like this sorts of stuff.”

So, you do reach a point in your career where you think I need to learn something above and beyond what I'm currently doing, so that I can, I don't know, like move sideways, and upwards within the business, but still technically be a bookkeeper, and still be able to have the relationships with the clients. That's something that you could do. What else could you do in the sphere of growing your knowledge?

You could, I don't know… I'm just trying to think, like there's lots of different courses and programmes. There's lots of free information out there. You can just surf the internet, find different things. You can work with somebody else, so you could work with another colleague. You could work with a mentor, or something like that, but there's just, there's lots of other opportunities out there. Some of the clients that I work with are really focusing on developing their knowledge of add-on softwares. So, not some people decided to learn a wide range, and other people decide to kind of go a little bit more narrow, but really go very deep in their knowledge about that, so I think that's a really good idea if you decided that you don't want to grow your business, and that is you don't want to get more clients, then you can actually focus on growing your knowledge instead, and focusing on your professional development.

4. Customer service

Number four is customer service. So, that kind of relates again into what I was saying. This is about growing your relationships with your clients, so if you've decided you don't want to get any more clients, then maybe it's a good idea to get yourself in a position where you can start to actually invest in your clients, your existing clients more, because there's a saying that it costs more to get a new client than it is to retain an existing one.

If once you make that decision, okay, I actually don't want to pursue trying to get new clients. You can actually spend more time and more focus actually nurturing your existing relationships with your clients and to be able to find out if there's anything else that you can offer them. You may have other interconnected expertise related to the BAS work, or the payroll that you're doing that you've just been dying to do, but you needing to spend some more time nurturing your relationship with the client.

So, that's something that you could focus on if you don't want to get more clients. You could actually spend a season coming up with a way that you could actually work on your customer service, your customer retention, and to be able to actually really take those relationships to the next level, and it could be something as simple as reaching out to the clients, asking them for a coffee. Half an hour coffee, have a chat, see where things are at in their business, or just giving them a call from time to time. Especially if you've got staff managing everything, and you feel maybe that you've lost touch with the clients a little bit, and that kind of thing. Everybody likes to be able to give great customer service, but it doesn't happen by accident. I think sometimes you just have to prioritise that into your day, into your week, make time to do that, because otherwise you can get so busy with lots of different things.

5. Upselling

That leads me into my next one, which is number five, which is actually upselling. So, once you've started to understand your clients more, and spend more time with them, and seeing if you can come up with some solutions, then another way to actually… The focus here will be on growing your revenue, so you can actually grow your revenue without getting more clients, so that's another way to grow, but without technically growing.

So, upselling is where you offer additional services to your existing clients. Once you've got to know the deeper pain points that your clients are having above and beyond the standard kind of bookkeeping stuff. Like obviously when your clients come to you, they're like, “Oh, I just need my BAS done, my BAS is overdue. I just need someone to do my payroll. I don't like doing it,” but if you spend the time getting to know them, you might discover that there's other little problems in their business that you can also solve for them. Then you can upsell them into new services.

6. Product development

So, that's number five, and number six ties into that again, and that's product development. You could actually focus on growing your free time. The way that product development can help you grow your free time is, and I call it product development, but what I'm really talking about is putting your intellectual property, and your knowledge, and your training, and everything that you do can actually be put into some kind of a product. It doesn't have to be a product that you sell. Like, for example, you don't have to turn your expertise into like a mini course, or a programme of some kind like that, but I know a lot of bookkeepers now are using Loom to make little training videos for their clients. I mean, last week I had a great chat with Samuel Burmeister, from Tall Books, and he talked all about how he's been developing his YouTube channel, and he didn't start the YouTube channel to actually grow his business.

He did it because he wanted a spot where he could refer clients to for teaching them how to do things. And so, what you can do is you can grow your free time by turning your knowledge into little products that you can share with your clients. You can use that for training clients. You can use it for training… I guess you can use it for training staff as well. You can also use it as part of your marketing strategy as well.

From there, I guess, obviously there's a lot of things on this list, but hopefully it's giving you some ideas on things that you can focus on instead, because if you've been feeling pressure to grow your business, and you thought that that means getting new clients, then now you can see that there's lots of other things that you can focus on.

7. Pricing Structure

Another thing that you could focus on in the next season is to change your pricing structure. So as you know, I am a big fan of this topic, because I've seen how it helps bookkeepers to grow their businesses in other ways. I'm going to call this growing your, just because I'm trying to come up with something unique, because I've already used growing your profit, but I would say changing a pricing structure helps you to grow consistency in your income. It helps to improve your cashflow and just to have a better sense of consistency in the business. The other thing about changing your pricing structure is, personally, I actually think it helps to grow your confidence. So, the reason that I say that, and it might not make sense instantly, but the reason that it helps you to grow your confidence is if you imagine, I think it's because it removes you from the picture.

Like every bookkeeper that I start off working with, they think that their bookkeeping business, and what they do is all about them. That's not a bad thing. That's just quite natural. What happens is as we grow in our own knowledge and expertise, we start thinking to ourselves, “Oh, well I'm just going to keep putting my prices up, and up, and up, and up, because my knowledge and expertise is growing.” The problem is what we're doing is we're actually ignoring the fact that there is a market rate when it comes to bookkeeping, so just because bookkeepers want to keep putting their prices up, because their expertise and knowledge has grown, it doesn't necessarily mean that clients are going to want to continue to increase their fees forever. I do talk about this a lot more in that podcast from a couple of episodes ago, which I mentioned about improving your profits.

So, if you have a listen to that, you'll really understand a bit more on what I'm talking about when it comes to changing your pricing structure. I'm a big believer that once you have like a catalogue of everything that you offer, it actually removes you from the picture, and it makes it less personal. There are ways for you to… Actually, it's going to come as a surprise, but did you know that you can actually lower your hourly rate, and remain competitive, and actually earn more overall? That's something that I teach in my programme, which is called Pricing for Profit. I'm amazed. I was working with a client yesterday, and this client when he first started working with me… I think we've been working together for, hang on. What are we? September.

He started working with me in July of last year, so it's like 14 months, 14, 15 months. Well, we've had about 15 sessions together, and we work together on a monthly basis, and when he first came to me, he wasn't really a very confident person. In our initial planning strategy session, I thought… When I spoke to him, I just saw something like really cool in this guy. Like he was pretty quiet, and not very confident in himself, but I could see that the underlying beliefs, and the underlying motivations for why he was doing what he was doing were really great. The problem was he was having trouble articulating that, and so when we first started working together he wasn't happy with his profit. He wasn't happy… He was still billing… I think it was billing his clients.

Some of his clients were still on $40 an hour, and that kind of thing, and he was feeling really down about the business, like wondering why did I start the business in the first place? And sort of having some regrets there. Everybody develops at different paces, but for this client he was, I guess there were when we would meet together way where he really felt that he wasn't making progress, and so it was really great to get together yesterday, and we've been working on his pricing, and he's been on a fairly slow journey to transition the clients. Like he hasn't been in a rush to do it, but he's actually managed to transition 62% of his client base, which has been really great to see, but as we looked at, he's still got a couple of clients to go.

I think in total like close to 20 clients, like maybe 18 clients, or something like that in total, and so we worked out a plan on how to transition those client. I mean, I'm not taking credit for all of this, but he went off on his own after he'd done the programme, and he went and transitioned these clients, and out of all the ones he's approached so far, every single one of them have signed onto his new package. We actually worked out his income, once he transitions the rest of them, and I'm confident that he'll transition most of them we've pitched to, that we're not going to bother to transition. We're taking a different approach with those. Everybody has a client or two that's not going to work with the packages, especially initially.

We actually worked out that once he finishes transitioning those last couple of clients, his income is going to be increased by 42%, and I was like, “This is amazing.” So, already his income is increased by I think $3,000 a month. Something along those lines. I was just like, “Wow, I'm so proud of you. You should really be proud of yourself,” and it wasn't until we had that discussion that he actually realised that. So, now he has this more consistent income, and also a better sense of confidence, because I said, “Look, you know, obviously I've helped you in this process, but really it comes down to you, and your relationships with your clients, and I can't take credit for that.” What I can take credit for is the bit where I helped you put some structure in place, but the rest comes down to you.

And I said, “Isn't it great that your clients actually respect you more than you thought? And they've decided to come on board with the new packages.” So, I think changing your pricing structure can really give you a boost in confidence, and now, for him, when new clients come along, he doesn't have to feel like, “Oh, you know, should I try $40 an hour, $60 an hour, or what should I charge? Or are they going to value me and stuff?” He just goes, he goes out the back of his shop, and he picks out five items off the shelf, and he goes, “Here they are. This is the price,” and they can either take it, or leave it. It puts a lot of simplicity into the business model. I think that's great, because it's good for you, it's good for the client.

8. Process Development

That takes me to my next point, which is developing processes. So this side, it sort of ties into… I guess it ties into quite a lot of all the other ones. Developing your business processes is about growing your efficiency or your productivity. And again, in the previous podcasts, a couple of podcasts ago, I do talk about the difference between efficiency and productivity, and how they're actually in conflict with one another, which is something that you might not have thought. They're actually opposite, which is really funny, and I never knew that. So anyway, listen to that podcast if you want to get a bit of an idea of what I'm going on about.

Developing processes is a great thing to focus on. If you decided that you don't want to get more clients, you can spend a season developing, and refining your processes. If you have a team, I suggest that you involve the team, and let them make decisions, let them help to develop the processes. After all, they're the ones that are going to be operating the processes. So, I think if you can set aside some time to look at those processes, and sometimes that involves various… You're going to have to assess what does your business actually need? What do your clients need? And maybe you might need to adjust some of your software platforms, and things like that, but really it's not about the software programme.

Everyone thinks, “Oh it's the software, it's the software,” but you need to understand the underlying processes, because if you don't, what will happen is you can jump from software to software without really knowing what's going to be the best. Because I can tell you right now, every software provider in the entire world, they just… You go on their websites and a lot of what is on there is BS. Like there's a lot of stuff.

Nothing against software programmes, but the whole idea of a software company is they want to make money from selling this software, and obviously they want to also help people, but they need to make sales, and so they use marketing on their website. Surprise, surprise. So, when you go on a website for a software company, they're going to make it sound like it's so easy, and it's just click a button and blah blah blah. Software companies are always going to make themselves seem better, or easier than they actually are, and look. There are some amazing software programmes out there. Don't get me wrong. And I'm grateful for the fact that we're in the cloud these days and we can really… We can do everything online. I love the fact that I can work from home.

I have my little, like five, or 10 minute breaks. I just went off before and chucked on the slow cooker, put some lamb in the slow cooker, and my husband was putting some of the laundry away, like maybe it was towel washing day, or something like that, and we both just said to each other like, “How cool is it to be able to take a break and do stuff around the house.”

Like I love working from home, so cloud platforms really have enabled bookkeepers to just go so far from where we were just like 10 years ago, it was nothing like this. You're synchronisingfiles through Dropbox, and stuff. Oh my gosh, like you'd never want to go back there. The client logs in, and you're all logged in, and then you end up with a duplicate file, and you got to figure out which one's the most recent, and you got approve all the transactions, and again, it's just stupidity.

So, these days we don't have to deal with those types of headaches, but we do need to understand our processes, and then find the right platform to support that process. I think that's really important. Everyone just assumes that all bookkeepers are the same, and just because a bookkeeper is a bookkeeper is a bookkeeper, you can basically just all use the same software platforms, but we all do things in different ways. We all have different goals, we all have different clients with different needs, and so it really is a customised process. There's no one solution for that, so I say get beneath the software, and the shiny, shiny things. I was joking with them, my project coordinator this morning, Maya, she's great. We were just talking about how bookkeepers, we're not really… Well, maybe some of us are, but we're not really into shoes and handbags.

For us it's about the software platforms, and our intellectual knowledge, and different things like that. So, I guess it's different things that we as bookkeepers are attracted to, and the thing is we can go off chasing those shiny things, and I'll be the first person to put my hand up and go, “I've done that and I do it,” and that's okay, but what I've come to learn as I've matured as a business owner myself is that understanding underlying processes grow your efficiency and your productivity. This is going to help you with your customer service. It's going to help you develop your team. It's going to help you to be able to upsell to your clients, and develop new products to free up your time, and it's just going to be awesome.

9. Grow your wellbeing

So, that brings me to the very last one, which is not really like any of the other ones on the list, and that is something outside of business. I don't even have like a clever thing to contrast it to growing your whatever. I don't know, it could be growing your social life, or growing your sense of enjoyment in life, or maybe you're growing your, I don't know, your spirituality, or your relationship with your friends. I don't know. This might come as a surprise to you, but… And I'm not trying to generalise here, but a lot of bookkeepers are introverts. Now, not always. I mean, I don't know if I'm an introvert. I have no idea what I am. I'm like introverted, extrovert. I'm one of those people. I don't know. I like talking, but I don't like being around lots of people, so people always go, “Are you going to Xero Con?” And stuff like that, and I'm like, “Ah!” I couldn't think of anything worse than being in a like a massive room full of people.

I don't know about you, but it's not really something that I find exciting. I'm like a one to one, maybe small group kind of person, but at the same time, I do feel that when I get around people that I really like, I'm very outgoing, and things like that. I think on the whole, I'm not going to judge here, but I do know from our customer surveys, or not surveys, but we have a questionnaire that we send to people before they come and have an initial session with us, and I always ask a question on that questionnaire about whether the person has interests, or hobbies, or if they have any kind of activities that they do outside of business, and a lot of people say no. A lot. So, I think sometimes when we reach a point where we say, “I don't actually want to grow my business,” for me like you can listen in on episode seven of The Bookkeeping Project. I'll put the link in for that as well.

I actually burned out. Believe it or not, probably you believe it. I do know that some of our lovely bookkeepers in our community kind of saw it coming before I did, but life isn't all about business, even though it is. I absolutely love business. Business is my thing. Okay. Like I like people. I like software. I like business. I love the way that business works, and all that kind of stuff, but the thing is it can be get a little bit too much, like sometimes I just focus so much on the business that I tune out everything in my life, and then what happens is when I'm not working, I sort of feel a little bit dull, or a little bit disconnected, and in the back of my mind I'm like, “Hmm. Hmm. Wonder what else I could be doing. Wonder what else is on my to do list,” and that kind of thing.

It's actually really good if you decide that you don't want to grow your client base, and you just want to you know, it's okay to take some downtime. It's actually okay to want to focus on something outside of the business. Like great things that happen outside of the business are not going to happen by accident. It's the same as with business. I guess, and I'm not speaking as an expert here, because I'm not really a person to have a lot of hobbies. So, my hobby, my favourite hobby, is reading books. I love reading about business. I like reading… Well, I guess, I don't know. I did say before that I don't really… I said I like people, like in a way. Like, yeah, I like people, but not in that kind of like, I'm not like a real people person, if you know what I mean, but I like to understand people, you know?

I like to read books about people who think differently, and things like that, to hear about people's stories, and their struggles, and things like that. So, yeah. I don't have a lot of like… I like to go for books. We've got a really nice park around our house, like a community garden, which I'm not a member of. I'd love to be. I like to get out in the garden sometimes, and I like to cook sometimes, but I would say I'm not really like a hobby, hobby kind of person.

So, that's actually okay, but if you reach a point where you don't want to grow your business, maybe think about something outside of the business. Could be anything. It could be a holiday, could be… I don't know, anything. Like, yeah, I can't even think of anything, because I'm not really that creative. You know what I mean? Start a podcast. Oh, no, that's a business thing, or you could start a non business podcast, I guess.

Anyway, I am just rambling now, so I will not subject you to any more of my rambling, but I hope that you found this very helpful, and I hope you've got lots of great ideas on things that you might be able to focus on instead, if you don't want to grow your business. And again, I'll chuck in some links in the podcast, helpful notes, and I will see you next week. Goodbye.