How To Make Time To Work On The Business When Client Work Takes All Your Energy
The $100 MBA Show
This episode of The $100 MBA Show tackles the common trap of entrepreneurs who are so consumed by client work that they neglect building their business. Host Omar
Key takeaways
- Client work feels urgent and rewarding in the short term but prevents long-term business growth.
- The core issue isn't lack of time—it's belief: equating client work with income traps entrepreneurs in a cycle of doing more to earn more.
Main topics
- The difference between being self-employed vs. an entrepreneur
- How belief systems limit business growth
Notable quotes
If client work eats all your time and energy, your business will never grow past you. That's just called the facts.
You're not there to do the work. You are there to build an asset that does the work for you.
Conclusion
To build a business that truly sets you free, you must shift from being self-employed—doing all
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) If client work eats all your time and energy, your business will never grow past you. That's just called the facts. Because the business that would set you free is the one that you're just too busy to build. Listen, I get it. Client work feels like you're making money. Because it is, right? But that belief is exactly why you are trapped. Doing the work is the job of the self-employed. Growing the business is the job of an entrepreneur. You need to decide which one are you. Today, I'm gonna show you how to decide, but more importantly, how to steal your time and your energy back starting this week. Let's get into it. Welcome back to the $100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Speaker 1 (0:58) Hey, if this show has helped you in any way, it would be amazing if you dropped us a quick review on whatever app you're using right now to listen to this podcast. It helps me and my team bring you new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover the podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. First, let's dissect why client work always wins. Why does client work always take priority and we don't have time to build our business, okay, and bring in more clients and build the mechanism to set us free? And I'm gonna tell you right now, it's for one reason and it's not time, okay? It's actually belief. Stay with me now. You have a belief that client work is what's actually making you money. Speaker 1 (1:42) And that's what's keeping you from making more money, which is funny. As a person responsible for fulfilling the promises to the clients, it feels responsible to prioritize client work, to do the work. It feels urgent. It feels justified. I get it. But the honest truth is it's very short-sighted. Listen, client work has everything that the business building part doesn't, okay? It has a deadline. It has a person waiting. It has money attached to it. Speaker 1 (2:10) And it feels urgent, right? It feels like you got to get this done. But guess what happens? You get it done and then another client comes in and you do the work for the client. And then you continue the cycle over and over again. And you find yourself with like, oh, I have no time to build my business to get more clients. And I have found that the reason why this happens is because many of us, when we leave our jobs and we go into entrepreneurship, we don't leave the job mentality, right? We carry it with us. Speaker 1 (2:36) In a job, being busy, being productive, doing the work is rewarded. It's seen as a good thing, okay? But in entrepreneurship, it's actually not a good thing. You are not there to do the work. You are there to build an asset that does the work for you. And that's the whole difference between being a business owner and being an employee or working in a job. Because it doesn't matter how hard you work, that doesn't correlate to making more money. Speaker 1 (3:05) What actually makes you money is building a system, is building a team, is building a company that actually does the work for you. The person that actually engineers that, the best engineer of a business, is the one that wins. And that's really what you have to see. You're the planner. You're the person that puts the pieces together. You're kind of like the team owner of a sports franchise, right? You're not actually dribbling the basketball and scoring the points. Speaker 1 (3:30) You're putting the pieces together so you can win a championship. You're not doing the work. You're not cracking a sweat. What you're doing is you are actually being the strategic person and doing this other type of work, business building, team building, so that you can win. And I point this out because this is the exact difference between being self-employed and being an entrepreneur. The self-employed person owns a job, right? You are a designer. You do the designs. You implement the designs. You get paid. You are self-employed. But the entrepreneur owns a business. The goal of an entrepreneur, this is my goal personally, and every entrepreneur that I know, is that I want to build a system. I want to build an asset that serves me. I want to create a machine that does the work for me so I can remove myself and reap the benefits. So you're sort of like an investor in your own business. Speaker 1 (4:24) So the decision to be made here, you can either be a doctor and serve your patients in your own clinic. And every day you show up, you help patients, you be the doctor. Or you are the clinic owner and then you hire other doctors to see the patients. They do the work. You open other clinics and get other doctors to do the work. And therefore, you start expanding, you start scaling, and now you're a business owner. You're not a doctor anymore. You're just a doctor that knows how to run businesses. I want to share with you a story to just make sure this hits home. I lived this trap completely, okay? I had a web design agency. It was the first business I had when I left my teaching job, and I built websites for bloggers, for entrepreneurs. That's what I did. I did it all myself. I did all the work. I actually went out. Speaker 1 (5:13) to conferences, I went to meetups, I networked, I got the customer myself, I did all the marketing, I did all the sales. I then, after that, actually built the websites, then made sure I went back and forth with the customer, made sure that their reviews were implemented, they're happy with it, I delivered it, I collected the money, I did the accounting, I did everything. And most of my time was spent building websites. But what happened was, is that I didn't have time to actually expand the business. At some point, you're gonna cap out. Speaker 1 (5:42) I had zero time to actually work on my business. I was working in my business too much. I had no marketing funnel. I had no way to get new clients. I had no way to create content. I had no growth, really. I could only serve a certain number of customers because I only have 24 hours in the day. So I really couldn't expand beyond that. Now, in that moment, I had to make a decision. Am I happy with this life? I could just continue to do the client work. I can continue to, you know, just cap myself and build the websites and maybe increase my prices here and there. Is this the life I wanted? No, I didn't want to design websites for the rest of my life. I enjoyed some of it, but not all of it. At some point, I wanted to get out of that exchanging time for money. And this is the key here. I only made money when I worked. Okay, if I went on holiday for, let's say, six months. Speaker 1 (6:34) You know, no one's doing the designs. No one's creating the websites. So I would not make money. So at the end of the day, I just bought myself a job. And in that moment, I kind of had a wake up call. I was like, oh man, I'm not going to really grow out of this stage if I continue down this path. So what I started to do is I started to hire some freelancers to do some of the client work for me, right? At the beginning, I was very