4 ways to work less and earn more

In this article, I'm going to be covering four steps to how I flipped my business so that I could work less and earn more working from anywhere and how you can do the same.

I moved back to my home office

I gave up my physical commercial office that I had used while running my brick and mortar business for over 10 years. When I first started my business the Internet was new. There was no such thing as the Cloud. If you ran a business and you didn't want people working in your home, you had to hire an office. So that's what I did.

But as technology changed, and this was a good few years before Covid forced all businesses online, it became easier and easier to work from home (or anywhere as long as I had a laptop and an Internet connection. I no longer needed a physical office. A home office would do.

I went from having high overheads to having no overheads in terms of rental because I no longer had rental costs to consider. This is one way that you can make sure that you are running your business to save costs, save money, work less and earn more, and just be able to work from home or location free.

I switched to an outsourcing or drop servicing model

Drop servicing may be a new term to some of you. It’s a new business model where you service a project for a client but outsource the work to a third-party on the Internet. You can find vendors to outsource to from various platforms that hook buyers to sellers such as Upwork, Fiverr and People Per Hour. In this model, when the work comes back from your freelancer, you quality check it and send it over to the customer. So instead of having a large team of full-time staff working in an office, you outsource to your virtual team, paying per project or per hour (preferably per project so you can manage your cashflow) rather than a fixed salary per month. By paying only when you have a project, you save the costs of fixed overheads for staff at any time you don’t have enough work in to give them.

Put a system together to look for the right talent, test them out, hire those that work well and allocate projects as they come in. You can build a talented virtual team from anywhere in the world. I would recommend that you adopt this model to manage your business online, not just to hire cheap labour in foreign countries. You generally get what you pay for, so you still want to have a high standard when hiring virtually. The way you save costs here is not on rates per hour necessarily, but on having to pay for talent only when you need them. This is one more way to work less and earn more by leveraging a team.

I began to leverage cloud solutions

Obviously if you're employing people from around the world, you need to be able to communicate with them seamlessly and send them the instructions to do the work and get the work back from them. You also need to be able to assign tasks and have reminders set when tasks are fue so you can manage multiple projects at the same time. You need to be able to market your business online, so that involves having a website and being able to set up landing pages for promotions, and email to prospects as well as have a platform to deliver your coaching programmes and courses, and to get paid from your clients.

All of this can be handled by cloud solutions, apps that are predesigned specifically for the tasks at hand. So use the technology that's out there to do this work for you. It helps manage your time and allows you to work less and earn more by being more organised. And speaking of time …

I learned to manage my time

Better time management is critical if you are the owner of a busy business. One of the things I would task you to do right now is to look at how you are actually spending your time and how much time you're spending (or not) on things that actually move the needle for you and your business.

There are three types of time management measurements: whether you are unproductive, productive or super productive.

If you are unproductive, you are working on activities that are not going to move you towards your goals. If you are productive, you are working on activities that move you towards your goals. Super productive time is when you are training other people to do things for you that will move you towards your goals.

So you want to be working as little as possible and delegating as much as you can. But you also want to be managing your own time. One of the biggest time wasters is checking email and other communication apps like Whatsapp.

You can get quite addicted to checking for communication every five minutes a day. It has become normal for people nowadays to be checking their phones every five minutes looking for what's the next communication that's coming in, or they go on to Facebook, and platforms like that. A few minutes spent seems innocent but it adds up throughout the day and is an enormous time sucker.

Instead, try to batch your time to do set tasks together in one block. You’ll be more organised and won’t waste time as a result.

I realised how much time I was wasting myself when I was in the UK on holiday one time (I live in Singapore). So I was on holiday in the UK visiting my family and I was running my business in Singapore while I was on holiday. At the time I was there, there was an eight-hour time difference between Singapore and UK. So when I was getting up in the morning in the UK, I literally had two hours left of the working day in Singapore to communicate to my staff in Singapore. (I still had the physical office at this time.) So what I used to do was get up in the morning, open my laptop and look at my emails and it took me about an hour to go through all my emails and reply to those I needed to reply to and to delegate project tasks based on what had come in by email to my team. Then I would close my laptop and that was me done for the day because I have my team to do the rest.

I didn't think anything of it at the time. I was just seeing it as taking a holiday. But when I got back to Singapore after a three-week holiday, I went back to my old routine of checking emails every five minutes and reacting to what came in immediately. Then it suddenly struck me - the only difference was geography. I was in a different country, but the business was the same, the work was the same, the projects were the same type, the team was the same and the clients were the same. So then I started thinking, OK, if I could make it work in England, just with one hour a day checking email and then closing my computer, why can't I do this in Singapore? And of course I could. I just wasn’t! So, I started to plan when to check my email once a day and it freed up my time immeasurably. I was able to work less and earn more simply by cutting down the time I was spending working in my business doing transactional work so I could work on it to bring in more projects and earn more.

So I challenge you to look at how you're spending your day. Do you need to be spending your day that way? Could you be more productive by bulking tasks together and deciding, OK, during this particular time, this is what I'm going to do. And at this time, this is what I'm going to do.

Take a look at these four tips and see how you can implement them to flip your business from an offline to online service model and see if you can work less and earn more in the process.