8 Time-Saving Tips to Build Your Ad Management Business While Working Full Time

Navigating the balance of managing a full-time job while building a successful freelancing business can seem like an impossible task. If that resonates with you, it’s important to remember that managing your time strategically is key. Today, we’ll explore eight tips to streamline your journey toward a thriving side hustle or full-time business, all while keeping your priorities aligned and achieving a balanced lifestyle.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

1. Set clear, realistic expectations for your goals, taking into account your available time and energy.
2. Prioritize active marketing to consistently attract new clients to sustain and grow your business.
3. Strengthen time management skills through batching tasks to minimize context switching and increase productivity and incorporate visual timers to be efficient.
4. Automate your onboarding process to save time and streamline client management.
5. Implement a project management system to keep track of tasks and responsibilities efficiently.
6. Prioritize self-care to maintain energy and productivity over the long term.
7. Conduct regular time audits to identify where time is being spent and find opportunities for improvement.
8. Focus on offering premium-priced services to make the most of the time you have and reduce the number of clients needed to meet financial goals. One option is ad management!

Find the full show notes at:  https://brandimowles.com/237

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Additional Resources:

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The Project Management Pivot: Why We Moved Away From ClickUp - CLICK HERE

HoneyBook in a Hurry - CLICK HERE

Wow Factor Onboarding Workshop - CLICK HERE

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Transcript

Episode: 237 - 8 Time-Saving Tips to Build Your Ad Management Business While Working Full Time

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Brandi: [00:00:00] Are you working a full time job, or maybe you have a kid that's a full time job in itself, or maybe you have several kids, or whatever it is. But this episode is really about how do we manage our freelance services. specifically ad management services while working a full time job. What's the secret to making it happen?

Other people doing it, but you feel like you're just spinning your wheels and clocking the hours every single day. Between work, family, Home, trying to get everything taken care of. You are clocking more than 24 hours in a day and you're like, how the heck is that even possible? So I'm going to give you eight tips for managing your business while running a full time job.

Now, here's the deal. Even if you don't have a full time job, I bet you're going to find these eight tips really helpful if you're ready to get more strategic with your time, work full time and have [00:01:00] your side hustle, let's jump on into this week's episode.

Welcome back to another episode of the serve scale store podcast, your go to place if you want to start grow or scale and add management business. And I am your host, Brandy miles. And I am beyond excited. If you are just tuning in, Or if you've been here with me for years and after 200 plus episodes, I am just always grateful for y'all who continue to come back and y'all who are taking action and doing the dang thing and getting wins.

But I know this episode is probably going to help some of our people who maybe you're just getting started or maybe you've been doing this and you still have that full time job and you're really trying to balance [00:02:00] everything. How do you get it all done? And as women, because If you're listening, you're probably a woman, not necessarily, but I know the majority of my, with my audience, you are women.

And I know that if you're listening to this, you are not only juggling that full time job and trying to juggle a business on the side. You probably have a family you're taking care of, maybe kids, maybe not. But you have things in your life that you have to take care of. You probably take care of bills in a household and there's a lot going on.

So when we have a lot going on and we have a business, how do we manage that? And especially when we're working a full time job and have to get our business going on the side. So today I wanted to record an episode. With eight really actionable steps of how you can manage Working a full time job and having a side hustle.

Now, here's the deal. I'm gonna be real transparent with y'all I've never [00:03:00] had a full time job while working my side hustle I was a full time mom of Riley when she was five months and my husband wasn't home then For 18 months of her life. It was me and her My husband worked all types of hours. He was the chef in a restaurant.

If you've ever worked in a restaurant, crazy hours, long hours. And I was, me and Riley, and from the time she was five months on, I was running my business and I hit six figures while taking care of her full time with no help and also being able to run my business. And there were moments where I was tired, like real freaking tired, and then there were moments where it got easier.

But it wasn't always easy. And so one thing I want to start this as is one, no, I've never worked a full time job and had this business. However, I have in other stages where when I was in Mary Kay and I was top 1%, I was in law school full time. And I would talk [00:04:00] about, I would leave at 7 a. m. in the morning and not get back till 4, and then I would run my business on the side.

So that was like having a full time. Having Riley, that was like having a full time. And after working with 2, 000 freelancers, the majority of them coming in with a full time job, I know the tips and tricks to help you. But I always want to be fully transparent with the fact that I've never done this with a full time job in the nine to five type of sense, but I have managed my time very effectively pre online business where I had my more like in person business and full time law school and I've worked with a full time caregiver of a baby and also running the business.

I've been in all different stages. So as we do this, I am someone who I think one of my superpowers, and this is not to brag or boast, but it's just it is what it is. I am really good at time management, not in the sense [00:05:00] of I have Googled calendars blocked off and stuff, because I don't like time blocking.

If that works for you, great, but that's not my jam. And if you looked at like my desk and my planner, you'd be like, Oh my God, this girl is a hot freaking mess. Bye. I put effort into things I value. And chances are you put effort into things you value, too. And I value time over everything. I value time over money, I value time over my business, I value time over everything.

Cause it's the only thing that we can't get back. You can, I was bankrupt, bottom, and I got money back. I learned how to make money. I learned how to manage money. Like you can get money back when you lose money. When you lose your time, you don't get that back. We're only given so much time. So with that being said, I value it so highly that I've got really good at making the most of it.

So I can go out and live the life that I really want to and create the memories I want to. So with all this being said, I have not one, not [00:06:00] two, not five, not seven, but eight. Eight tips for you on how you can make this business work, even if you're working a full time job. So let's jump on in. Okay. Number one is we got to be real honest.

We got to set clear, realistic expectations. So if you're like, I'm at zero and I want to go to 10, 000. Okay, awesome. Do you have the capacity right now to make that happen with the amount of hours you have in a day? Some of you will, some of you won't. An example of this is after I had Bodie, I had really big goals to grow our business that year.

And I was like, Oh my gosh, okay, we've been stuck at this 1. 2 million for three years now. So this is going to be the year that we do 2 million. The same year I'm having a baby. And then once he was born, I had to get real clear. And I was like, you know what he was [00:07:00] breastfeeding fully, exclusively, and I didn't know what a full time job that was going to be.

And so I had to reset my expectations and be like, you know what, this may be a, just, and it's a stagnant year where we're just maintaining and that's okay. And honestly, we didn't maintain, we dropped. And this year we're up back well over where we were last year. And now this is a growth year, but last year wasn't.

And I had to get really clear on the expectations of what I had time for and what was a priority. And at that time, the priority was Bodie. And so one, we have to set X realistic expectations, and this is why I do not. Like setting yearly goals. I think that we should have a goal. What is our next yearly goal?

But it doesn't have to happen now. So maybe you're like, I want to hit six figures. Okay. Awesome. Does it have to happen in the next 12 months? What if it only happened in eight months? What if it only took five months to make it happen? What if it took 18 months? It doesn't really [00:08:00] matter when it happens, but it's going to happen.

So our next big goal is 2 million. Will it happen this year? No. Will it happen next year? Maybe. Will it happen the following year? Hopefully. But the thing is I'm not putting a time constraint on it. I'm going to work towards that goal and keep forward momentum. Because then I will hit it. But what we can do is set 90 day goals.

I'm a big fan of this because our business is changing so much. Our life is changing so much. To set a year goal is just like unrealistic in itself. Let's just set a 90 day goal. One that you can be, like okay, in the next 90 days, maybe I'm at a 1000. Okay, maybe I wanna get to 5000. Okay, that seems doable.

Now let's reverse engineer this. What does the action look like to have this happen? And this is one thing we do every month in Strategic Society, is we do our Revenue gap analysis. And this is where we say, Here's what we already have booked. Here's our goal. What's the gap? And now what's the action we need to take to fill that [00:09:00] gap?

I do this in my business every single month. So I know exactly what actions do I have to take? How many people do I need to reach out to? How many discovery calls do I need to have? When we work from that, we can say in this season of life is the action that needs to happen to hit my goal. Is it doable?

And then you can say yes or no. So then you either change the goal and then you have a real clear vision. So then you focus on here's my next 90 day goal. Here's my 30 day goal for this month. Then at the end of next month, I'm going to make my next 30 day goal. Then I'm going to make my next 30 day.

And then I'm going to evaluate at the end of the 90 days. Oh, okay. Am I getting closer? Am I further away? What worked? What didn't. And we're always making pivots, but we have to give it enough time to work, which is why we give it 90 days. One, are we setting realistic goals? And then, two, is prioritize active marketing.

We'll link up an episode on marketing. We have so many of them, but [00:10:00] marketing and passive, but we really need to make sure that we are actively reaching out to clients on the right platform. So no matter if that's cold calling, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. I don't care. In Conversions for Clients, we teach 10 different ways, but are we prioritizing active marketing or are we posting and praying?

The first thing on your list every day should be to take care of your active marketing. Are you making 5 to 15 touch points every single day? This is something we teach in Conversions for Clients. This is something we track in our accountability trackers each week in Strategist Society. This is probably the most important thing because clients are what runs our budget.

So if you're not focusing on landing clients, even if we're completely full with clients, we still should have clients in our pipeline because that's what moves our business forward. Then you're prioritizing the wrong thing. So if you don't get anything else done in the day, you're You should be getting at least 30 minutes of [00:11:00] marketing done.

Where does that happen? Maybe it's on your lunch break. Maybe it's after work. Like when I was in law school, I would go to school. I'd get home. It'd be like five o'clock and I'd sit down with a list of 50 names and I'd cold call each and every single one of them. And it would take me an hour to two hours some days.

And that's what I would do. It just became a habit. I'd sit there and I would just cold call. For that time it was blocked out and I was tired and I've been there all day. But you know what? It was a priority for me to grow my business. So that became something that was just built into my schedule. Like it's something I had to do maybe for you at your lunch break, maybe for you at that night while you're scrolling on Instagram.

I don't know, but you need to figure out when am I going to do this and try to do it at the same time every day, but also be flexible. If you miss that time, where can you fit it in now? So one, we're going to set realistic expectations and goals. Two, we're going to prioritize active marketing. [00:12:00] Three, we're going to batch our task.

We will give you, link up an episode where I talk about batching and why time blocking isn't the end all be all. And if you can't time block, you can batch. How can we not do so much contact switching and we have an episode for that, too. Because when we batch our tasks, we can be more efficient. More time is wasted each and every single month on, and this is a study and I talk about it all in the contact switching episode.

More time is spent switching task and wasted than any other thing. You could literally save 40 hours a month if you stop contact switching and you focus on batching your activities. Four is use visual, visual timers and don't take five minute chunks for granted. So this is something I teach in Strategist Society and having a visual timer really, really helps a lot.

I think that whenever we have a time where it's our focus time, so maybe you don't have 50 minutes. We [00:13:00] focus on 50 minutes in Strategic Society. That's what I focus on. And I have a visual timer. It's like a kid's timer that I use for Riley in homeschool. And I can visually see how much time I have left.

You can get these on Amazon. They're super cheap. And I see okay, I have to get this done. If I set 50 minutes to get my Instagram post done and I see there's five minutes, I start pushing those things out way quicker than before. Like the last few ones aren't always the best, but that's okay. They don't have to be.

I'd finish the task. Also with that, whenever you have five minute increments, scrolling on social media. Use that. That could be a touch point. You could be making your touch points in five minute increments throughout the day when you have them. Don't take for granted five minute chunks. You can get more done than you think in five minute chunks or ten minute chunks instead of wasting them scrolling on social media or something like that.

Fill those five minute chunk gaps. Okay. One, set [00:14:00] realistic expectations. Two, prioritize active marketing. Three, plan. batch or task. Four, use visual timers and use those five minute chunks. Five is automate your onboarding. Your onboarding of clients. Onboarding is the longest process. The more you can streamline and automate it, the less time it will take you.

This could save you an hour, two hours, three hours a week, depending on how long it takes you to onboard a new client. But also on top of that, keeping clients longer, you won't have to do so much onboarding. And so that can also save you time, but automate your onboarding. If you haven't and onboarding starts from the moment they want to book a discovery call with you.

And we have a whole episode on that. We also have resources in HoneyBook in a hurry that you can grab and we'll link that up. That helps you automate your whole onboarding process. And we have a whole training, a two hour workshop inside of conversions for clients on wow. The wow onboarding process for no matter what service you [00:15:00] provide, and we give you templates.

You can also pick that up in the shop. If you're not in conversions for clients, we'll link that up as well. Okay, so six is use a project management system. I do not know how people function without a project management system. This isn't for you to put your clients in. This is for you. Here's the deal. I love to write down my list on a piece of paper, and I do every single day, but Everything is in my project management system.

I go into my project management system and then I write it on my piece of paper so that I can check it off. But here's the deal. You are managing a lot. You have all this stuff in your brain, whether that's your work stuff at your nine to five, whether that's your business that you're running, whether that's client work, whether that's the kid's schedule, whether that's What needs to be done for dinner.

There's so much in your head. You do not need to try to also remember the tasks that you need to take care of. That's how balls get dropped. So pick a project [00:16:00] management system and use it. We have a sauna. We have a whole episode, I think. Why we went from Asana to ClickUp. I don't care what you use. Trello, Asana, ClickUp, whatever, but use something.

And this isn't about putting your clients in there. You can. This is about things that you need to get done. Some people even put their personal life stuff that needs to be done in there. I don't care. I just want you to have a place where you know that you go each day that you know exactly what needs to be done and taken care of.

And a tip with that is you should not have more than three big items each and every single day in that. And one of them should be your marketing minutes. Okay, number seven, take care of yourself. This is really important, is that you need to take care of yourself. We have some of the conversations that happen in my one on one Voxer support that we do in Strategist Society are a lot about, I'm feeling tired, I'm exhausted, I'm having a health issue, a medical like a hormone thing or whatever it is.

How do I fit all this in? [00:17:00] And the first thing is you have to prioritize your self care. If you're not getting enough sleep, if you're not eating healthy, if you're not moving your body, if you're not resting, then you're not going to be able to do any of these time management tips I'm giving you because your body isn't going to have the energy to make it happen.

So instead of waking up at 5am to do it, sleep until you need to. Go to bed earlier. I'm not someone who's going to tell you to get up at five o'clock in the morning. I'm lucky I don't have to clock out of my or leave my house at a certain time. I do have two children that wake me up, but for the most part, 6 30 is my natural Circadian.

So I'm not going to wake up at 5am to get like an extra hour and a half because I know by the end of the day I'm going to be so freaking exhausted. I would love to stay up till midnight every night. I'm such a night owl, but I know that it's not going to serve me or my goals. So I get in bed and I [00:18:00] start reading, turn off the TV, I have a Kindle, I read at 9, by 10, 1030 I'm tired enough to go to sleep.

These are things that I've had to put in place. I don't do work at night before bed. 'cause then I'm not gonna be able to turn off my brain and then I'm gonna be up later and then I'm gonna be tired. You have to be able to manage your energy levels. And then the last one is time audit. This is everyone's least favorite thing, and it's one of the things that I always make people do when they come into Strategist Society is give me a two week audit.

Let me see where you're spending your time and I will save you so much time. It never fails. I can. And then I can look at their schedules and be like, Oh, this is why you're exhausted. This is why things aren't going well. This is why. And I can find areas where you could trim, get rid of and find those holes all day long.

But you have to be honest. And so doing a two week time audit of where's your time going? That can be, if [00:19:00] you're commuting, I want to see that. If you are working, I want to see that in your time audit. Okay. Great. If you are running your business, if you're running errands, put all of that in there, especially when you work a full time job.

It's not just about how do I look at my business and see where my time's going, but where do I have time to work my business? And in that case, you need to do a full time audit of your personal life and your business. And so doing a time out, it's not fun, but it can. Not PC, though, there a lot of things that don't work, it can just save you a ton of time and it can help you see the areas where you can fit your business in.

So the eight tips for having your side hustle and working a full time business one set realistic expectations. And on top of that, stop comparing your journey to other people's. They may have all the time in the world, and they may not. It doesn't matter. Stop comparing your journey to other people's.

Realistic expectations. That's why we focus on the 90 days. Two, [00:20:00] prioritize active marketing. Three, batch your task. Let's eliminate the context switching. Four, use visual timers and don't take the five minute chunks for granted. Five, automate your onboarding. Six, use a project management tool. Seven, take care of yourself.

And eight, do your time audit. And I would encourage you to do a time audit every 90 days. So that is how some tips to making sure that you are getting everything done in your side hustle plus working a full time job. Y'all and I'll tell you at the end of the day if you were working a nine to five and a side hustle You better be offering a premium price side hustle If you are offering all the things or a bunch of different things or general VA Or something that ain't paying the bills Then the first thing you have to do before you do any of this is you gotta niche it down.

And you gotta get serious about offering a full premium [00:21:00] priced service. And of course the best premium price service you can offer is Ad Management. It is seriously the highest paid freelancing gig in 2024 and moving into 2025. That's not me. That's by Upwork, which. It teaches all freelancers, gets, it's a job placement platform.

And so that ain't coming from me, even though I agree that is coming from them and all their data. But here's what I know. Now's the perfect time to learn ads. And there is no shortage of ad management jobs. And if you can come in making 1, 500 per client per month, you only need a few clients to hit your goals.

And less clients is always the most efficient way. If you're running your business and you have a full time job, go in on a service that's gonna pay really premium prices. And if you're like, but I don't know how to land clients, I don't know systems, and I don't know how to run [00:22:00] ads, then head to brandyandcompany.

com slash 100k. And watch my 100k with five clients training. At the end, I'll also tell you how you can join us in conversions for clients, which gives you the step by step on how to do all the things. Even if you've never ran ads before, we're going to support you on setting up your business. So you can have your nine to five, or maybe we'll also help you leave your nine to five and replace that income.

So in this video, we're going to talk about how to make a transcription that is easy to use and easy to manage with your ad management. Whatever your goals are, we're here to help you. Okay, my friends, go out this week, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.