I want to take a 30,000-foot view to look at how to grow your business in 90 minutes a day. Or with my Three Halves Method. I know that there’s no such thing as three halves but it made you look twice, didn’t it?
Let me rewind a little and tell you where my Three Halves Method® comes from.
It starts when I was a little babe and my parents sent me to a Montessori School. I couldn’t tell you what the principles are off the top of my head but I know that it instilled in me a few things that have been influential to my work ethic today. Namely being prepared in what I need to do and my environment, getting things done quietly, and thriving on accomplishment. Most of all I remember working at school and with my mom doing homework in 90-minute sprints, having a little break, and then going again. It was ideal, enough time to be productive but not so much time that I started getting bored.
90 minutes, Three Halves Method®
Three half hours is the perfect amount of time to do one chunky project or tackle three smaller but still needle-moving activities. By applying this principle and this discipline to your business you can absolutely build your business and achieve your goals in 90 minutes a day.
Where you are right now in your business, if you’re reactive and can’t imagine having that much time in a day, that’s ok. Start with working ON your business for 90 minutes a week. Anyone can find 90 minutes in a week. You could get up a little earlier, watch a little less Netflix, plan the groceries so you’re not nipping to the shop every day, prioritise a little better and find other things to NOT do.
Inside this segment of time that you commit to your business, that’s where you can really start to work on the things that need to get done to move you closer to your goals. Hey, maybe your first 90 minutes is looking for a VA to do admin or putting in place some processes and systems to save you time.
Being a little product of Montessori, I’m a super independent worker. I’ve never needed anyone to tell me what to do and never struggled with figuring out what I should be doing. I don’t have it all together all the time but lately, a few business owners have been asking me, “so I’ve got the Three Halves thing but what should I do in that time?”
Great question.
What to do to grow your business in 90 minutes
I want to talk about the things you can do in your 90 minutes or your ‘three halves’. These are the things to focus on, what things to do (and not do), how you can develop positive habits all in a bid to help you become a business builder!
Your Numbers
You can’t manage what you don’t measure
Tracking your numbers or your KPIs is the place to start. Not fun I know, but KPIs are the tip of the spear when it comes to building your business. You can’t decide where to spend your time or make decisions about where to go without tracking the numbers. It’s like playing a game of golf, cricket, or tennis, you need to know the score. That’s part one, your first 90-minute session should be to put together a dashboard or a scorecard. Get some religion about your numbers and look at them at least once a week.
Social Proof
You have clients, you have delivered services to those clients. Part of your time working ON the business should be to collate testimonials and reviews. Having social proof for your sales page proposals is great. It’s also game-changing to find out why clients choose you. And why do they stay with you. This is like intelligence gathering in the military, you are going to uncover gems that will help you in your positioning, your marketing, and developing what you do for the better.
Potential clients are influenced far more by what other people say about you than anything you can say about your company. There’s a right way and a wrong way to ask for client testimonials, develop this in your business to supercharge your testimonials.
Marketing and Sales
As the business owner, it’s your number one priority to become the expert at the marketing and selling of your business. The number one marketing strategy I love talking about is email marketing. I won’t sugar coat it, but if you’re not building a list and leveraging the power of email marketing you are not doing you or your business any favours. These days it’s not enough to rely on your Facebook likes, your LinkedIn engagement or your Insta-worthy content because you don’t own your audiences. You rent them from the algorithms and they are a cruel mistress.
When you’ve got email marketing up and running, you’re actively building your list. I’ve got 28 other ideas to Get Sales. The ideas in my book are fast, affordable, and scalable. It’s not full of theory so if you need some real strategies for real business owners, head on over to grab your copy.
Whatever you decide to do with your marketing strategies, you want to make sure that your content marketing for inbound and your outbound strategies are working hand in hand. It’s as much about getting your messaging right as it is about adding value to your audience. When you reach that tipping point where these two are complementing each other, absolute magic happens and you don’t even need to worry about where your next client is coming from again. As with most things in life, consistency really is the key.
Creating Irresistible Offers
Instead of looking at your services and what you do and thinking about how you can sell more of them, the best mindset shift and gift you can give yourself is to start looking at how you can add more value to your clients. When you start focusing on increasing the quality of their experience and you change your offer, your results will change. You won’t be stuck analysing your competitors and trying to figure out how you can “stand out” in a noisy world.
You should be working on developing your offers so they are utterly irresistible. It’s a skill and an art to learn how to package up your services in a way that makes your clients realise that you were simply made to be together. I’ve got a simple, repeatable framework for creating offers and pricing strategies too.
If you need a hand with this, drop me a line and I’ll share some resources.
Make the Three Halves a Habit
That’s quite a lot. The main principle or idea behind the Three Halves Method is to adopt better habits. I definitely identify with being a high-producing entrepreneur and I’m always looking for ways to add value. In fact, my husband Quin has recently joined the ‘Work With Sian’ business, we’ve worked together in the past but on this new mission, he’s often said that my work ethic and my productivity are next level. I’m really proud of that.
I’m not going to tell you to get up at 5 am, to work all the hours under the sun, or tell you what morning routines will make you a billionaire or what rituals you need to fire you up. It’s far more simple than that. It’s about showing up for your business every day and making the tiny incremental improvements towards your goals and watching it stack up. Someone once told me that winning happens an inch at a time. I think building a business happens one-half hour at a time.
Start with 90 minutes a week. Maybe after the first week, you can build it up to two days a week. Then three days and eventually five days a week you’re working ON your business for every day. If you achieved that you’d be giving your business the right kind of attention 7.5 hours a week, 33 hours a month. That’s 16 full 24 hour days in a year. Imagine what you could achieve for your business in that time?
Let’s punch the next 90 minutes in the face and make the next 90 days unstoppable!
You have to be disciplined, set boundaries, make it non-negotiable.
Busy is not a badge of honour. Busy is overwhelm and burnout. I’ve got some failsafe steps to planning your way to productivity, being prepared and preparing your environment. If you’d like to get your hands on that, grab a copy of my Three Halves Planner in the shop!
