31 | The Part-Time Paradox: When Extra Work Just Doesn’t Work

Ever wondered how breaking the rules could be the key to your business success? This episode of the Annoyingly Optimistic Show promises to uncover unconventional strategies that can set you apart. Discover how Tim can revolutionize his small business by challenging traditional pricing models and exploring innovative marketing techniques borrowed from other industries. By thinking beyond the norm, he might just find the competitive edge he's been searching for.

We also dive into the often-overlooked impacts of juggling a part-time job with self-employment. Learn why focusing solely on your venture could be more beneficial in the long run. Lastly, we discuss intentional time management, helping you identify your true goals and restructure your time effectively to achieve greater fulfillment and efficiency. Join us as we share valuable insights that can help Tim—and you—navigate through business challenges with optimism and creativity.

If you are self-employed or run a small business and feel more like you're self-annoyed then get in touch, visit the website www.theannoyinglyoptimisticshow.com where you can submit a question or problem and start your journey to becoming self-enjoyed! 

The majority of 'business advice' out there isn't aimed at self-employed or micro businesses, following it leaves you frustrated and chasing quick fixes. I specialise in tools, systems, techniques, inspiration and help specifically designed for YOU, the person who has to do it all, who doesn't have a team of people, unlimited resources or the time to spend months learning complicated techniques. 

Transcript

Breaking Business Rules for Success

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey there, listeners, it's your annoyingly optimistic host here bringing you another season of the Annoyingly Optimistic Show. Welcome to Season 2, voicemails to Tim. Now let's meet Tim. He's been running his own small business for almost three years now and let's just say he's hit a bit of a rough patch. You know how it is Sometimes you get so stuck, you make yourself busy and just avoid finding the real problems. Well, that's Tim.

Speaker 1 0:23

So, as a good friend, I decide to leave him a daily voicemail, if I can't get hold of him, filled with nuggets of inspiration, insight and wisdom and downright brilliant ideas to help get him unstuck Every day. In just under 10 minutes, I'll share some tips, tricks and a healthy dose of optimism to get Tim, and maybe even you, back on track, because, let's face it, we're all a little tired, in need of help and muddling through. So here we go. Oh wait, never mind Tim's being busy. Here's the voicemail I left him today. Hi, tim, sorry I missed you. Good to catch up again, and this one a bit of a weird one. I was walking, thought of you, thought I must kind of give you a quick call. Missed you again, so breaking the rules. Now I'm not talking about getting self-arrested and anything illegal or anything like that, not not the big rules, but the rules of business. Yeah, everything great, different, amazing, new, fantastic, that that we have kind of business-wise, product-wise, has generally come out of people breaking the rules, people coming up with something new, coming up with a new way of doing things, of approaching things, and we need to embrace that in our business.

Speaker 1 1:36

And the way to kind of do this is not to, you know, sell shoddy products or anything like that, but it's about thinking outside of the box. It's about breaking the rules of your particular industry. You know, looking at other industries other way companies advertise, other ways they promote things, other ways they sell to their customers, and seeing how you can take that idea into what you're doing. Because often by seeing something else that someone does successfully and co-opting that theory, that way of working, can make a massive difference to our own industry. Because we tend to follow the same patterns, the same style of advertising that our competitors do, that other companies in our niche who are doing really well, we try to kind of copy and emulate those, and often they've got bigger budgets, more staff and things like that. So if we want to cut through, if we want to, you know, really be different. We can sit there and reinvent the wheel and hopefully come up with something stunning and amazing, which we should always try and do anyway but what we can do is we can borrow, we can break the rules of our own industry and see how we can.

Speaker 1 2:46

We can do something differently. You know, it might be a subscription model, it might be a certain kind of giveaway or competition or a way of wording things. I always remember, years and years ago, advising some businesses who starting doing three for two and this is going back to when, you know, boots was one of the pioneers of three for two. You know, and you know, that if a big company is coming up with a particular way of marketing a product or marketing certain areas of products, that they've had focus groups and lots of teams of people doing it. So take that and see, okay, it might not directly apply, but okay, how can I take that idea, that wording, that way of focusing customers, and make it my own, make it work for me, and that's something that that you know will work really well.

Speaker 1 3:32

The other thing about kind of breaking the rules is when you're looking at your competition and how they do it. It's and there's a couple of really nice questions that do this. If you had to charge 10, 50, 100 times more for your product, you had to. There was no reason for what more would you deliver? How would you give them more? How would you add value to what you were doing? How would you change what you're doing? How would you market it differently and give more value? And it's an interesting kind of thing because it can lead to all kinds of well, I do this, this and this will be obvious. And so why aren't you doing that now? You know, because if you come up with those ideas, when you kind of take cost out of the option, well, ok, how can we achieve that same idea where cost isn't a problem, you know, and it forces you to think outside the box.

Speaker 1 4:24

The other option is if you had to give your product away for free, how would you market it? How would you get people excited about it? How would you do that kind of same value? It's these kind of questions which challenge us and force us kind of outside of the normal lanes of just doing the same thing over and over again. And suddenly we're confronted with doing things a bit differently, coming them from a different angle and breaking the rules that we'd normally kind of follow. So it's something I want you to kind of think about. So pick some cuts and companies that nothing whatsoever to do with what you do, but you just love their promos, love the way that they kind of do things and approach things and talk about them and, you know, ping me a list of them if you like and let's see how we can take how they market and apply it to you. And all of a sudden you're going to have a fresh way of marketing, fresh way of positioning your products and the chance are you're going to get attention for those because you're going to stand out from all your competitions. So go break some rules and um, and let me know, let me know what you think and let's, let's have a chat about it so I'll catch up with you soon.

The Impact of Part-Time Work

Speaker 1 5:30

Bye, tim, hi tim, sorry I missed you again. Um, thanks, for it was great to catch up with you at the weekend. Um, and I'm glad you liked um, the inspired by you, t I and m? Um, and you're interested in steve as well, which I said I'd get a copy of you. So glad you like that bit of a bit of a step outside, um, the normal voicemails. I was leaving you, but yeah, I'm glad they kind of hit home and, um, you've got some questions and some things we're going to crack on with. I wanted to, um, get us back, uh, some some I would say, some more normal ideas, but generally I kind of throw all kinds of wind of wonderful things at you and and this is going to be no different really um so, but so back to normal.

Speaker 1 6:12

From the point of view of it's, it's it's a bit kind of out there and it was something that the the kind of struck me. I think it's one of the very first conversations when we started catching up again which was in my mind and I've talked, you know, a bit about time and we're working on some bits like that but it was this kind of question of and this comes up a fair bit, particularly with people like you, tim, who are self-employed, you know, who have their kind of struggles every now and again, and there comes around this kind of almost it's almost like an annual question, but it comes around every so often of people going should I get a part-time job? You know if, if things are wobbling a little bit and things like that and it's a question. And there's two, two things I want to focus on this idea. The first thing is that that idea of getting a part-time job although it kind of often feels like, well, you know, that will bring me some money and that will help kind of steady the ship, every single time I've been working with someone or know someone that's done that, going from self-employed and getting a part-time job, it ends up increasing the pressure rather than relieving it, the pressure rather than relieving it.

Speaker 1 7:29

If the money, if obviously money is the, is the pressure we're trying to relieve. Because what it does, is it a? It uses that vital resource that I've talked about energy. You're using up that energy, running around earning money for someone else. And it's that classic thing can't remember who said it? If you're not earning money for yourself, if you're not in charge of yourself, then you're earning it for someone else. You're doing it for someone else. So if you're just working for someone else, you're doing it for someone else. So if you're just working to pay the bills, you're working to pay the mortgage company, the electricity company, the water company. You're not doing it for yourself. And when you, if you're working for someone else to earn a wage to pay those bills, you're working for two other people and even further away from working for yourself. So, firstly, there's an energy cost to that, which again is something that we will dismiss, you know, in in the rush to to fix that financial issue.

Speaker 1 8:15

The other one is the time pressure that it puts on, because and you know we've spoken a bit about your time and I think, if you're considering this, unless you are sitting there twiddling your thumb for half the week and you've literally got 20 hours just kind of going, I've got nothing better to do, I'm just sitting here watching telly. If you've got that much time, then that's time that should be spent in your business and would generate more money in your business. If you've got that much time and you're not doing anything, well then yeah, you could go and get a, a part time job, because it's it's time that's not earning you any kind of money. Now I know for you, tim, you'd wish, you wish you had that much spare time, but you haven't. So you know, getting the part time job not only gives you less energy, it zaps you from that point of view, but it still is the most important commodity. It still is that, that commodity of time, and so that's why it typically ends up and again it's not not in all cases, but I would say it's a probably an even 50-50 split that there are those that find some kind of balance, but their business is scaled right back. So if the money you are earning is enough to kind of so that your business is the top up, then fine.

Speaker 1 9:33

But it either ends up just kind of creating this where the, the part-time job, becomes more important and generates more of the income, and the self-employed business becomes the the side hustle again, and for the other group of people it's the beginning of the end in terms of, slowly that takes up more energy, more time brings in more money, their business, they're getting less and less return from. Now what typically happens is it very rarely completely kills off the business, because your business is a passion, it's something that you feel you really want to do. So as you feel it waning, it reaches a point of going. I'm losing my business, I'm losing this thing that I really want to do. This wasn't the idea, and often by the time that comes around, not that it's too late, but it's even harder because you've got to then try, and, you know, grab that time back and at that point you've become a bit more comfortable with the second kind of income and things like that. So it's not that it can't work, but it's one of those things that can make things a little bit kind of tricky. So what I want to do because you know me annoyingly optimistic, I never just want to leave that on a downer, you know me annoyingly optimistic, I never just want to leave that on a downer I want to look at the other side of this idea of part-time, because we have these notions of, you know, nine to five, full-time, 40-hour weeks and all the rest of it.

Speaker 1 10:57

And I've said, and I've skirted around it a little bit, when you're self-employed, none of that is, or a lot of that isn't relevant. You have to find your own kind of set of working practices and times. The construction of nine to five is a complete construction. You know it's a, it's a modern day thing. You know you go back into history. People worked when there was light. They worked at different times, at different times of the year. Look at different countries. Look at European countries, where they have a siesta every single day. That's part of the day. Look at some scandinavian countries where they have literally six weeks off. You know so, different countries, different cultures, different times through history, work very differently in terms of how they deal with time.

Speaker 1 11:42

So you have to first of all break through that shackle of oh, I have to put this many hours in and I have to do this and this, because the reality is most people working nine till five, that 40 hours a week. If they get 30, 20, 18, good productive switched on hours in that they're doing really well. So the whole 40 hours is a is is just a as a construct and you've got to find your own working time within that. But one of the ways to look at this is and that the idea that I said just now, that if you've got 20 hours kicking around, that you're not doing anything enough to fit a part-time job in there, cool, go and do one.

Speaker 1 12:24

But one of the other ways of looking at it and this will seem counterintuitive to start is that if you can break down the work that you're doing and really, really focus on every minute, every hour of every day with a view to go right, I'm gonna work 30 hours, 24 hours, basically part-time. Now, if you physically cannot cut down any hours out of your week and you are still struggling to get everything done and manage everything, then that clearly points to the workflows, the systems, the capacity of what you're doing, and you need to really delve into those to make it work for you, not the other way around. If you can quite comfortably cut out big chunks of time by just merely focusing and going, yeah, actually that only takes me a couple of hours. And if I did it all on that day rather than doing bits and bobs over the week and then it takes me five times as long and you find that you can easily suddenly go well, yeah, I could. Probably, if I moved a few things around, I could not work those two days a week.

Intentional Time Management for Business Success

Speaker 1 13:35

As soon as you do that and this comes, you'll see where this links in with this idea of getting a part-time job. If you can do that, then what you've just acknowledged is that whatever you're currently earning, um, you're earning it pro rata, because if you've just taken two days of your week out and let's say you were doing a five day week, which again would be unusual, but it's easy from the maths point of view, you know, if you're earning £50,000 a year and you needed to earn more and you thought you worked five days a week. But you've now managed to take two days out're actually working fifty thousand pounds. Fifty thousand pounds from three days work. So your pro rata, you know, if you worked, those five days would be worth a lot more, and that alone can help you kind of refocus and go well, wait a minute, why, why aren't I making the most of those two days?

Speaker 1 14:22

And this comes back to something I said very, very early on what is it you actually want of your business? What is your profit purpose? What is it you want your business to do? Because at that point you can actually go God. If I had those two days, I could spend time with family, I could go and do something else, I could engage in a hobby which would fulfill you and energize you and give you more enthusiasm in your work. You could could volunteer, you could go and do a part-time job one day a week, you know, but it all.

Speaker 1 14:51

Immediately you've restructured and looked at what you're doing and kind of go, wait a minute, I wasn't doing this effectively and there was time left on the table that was just wasting, because we're monumentally fantastic at being busy fools, at sitting down in front of that computer, clocking in and clocking out, and as long as we're moving the mouse and looking at the screen and checking our emails and checking our social media and moving files around and generally in the workspace, we will give ourselves a little kind of pat on the back. But if you're not actively generating new business, following up business, satisfying your current client, putting ideas together for future things, if you're not actively really kind of pushing and developing that, then the chances are there's time left on the table that you could spend reading, walking, learning, doing a course, you know, researching things for future products, spending time, getting more rest time, whatever it might be. But you've got that time back and if that then becomes time that you want to get another part-time job, well, you can now fit that in because you're not trying to squeeze it in for everything else. You've actively looked at what you're doing, how you're spending your time, how you're spending your day Is it productive or is it just busy? And that then gives you the impetus to then make those decisions based on what you want.

Speaker 1 16:21

So it kind of comes down to, you know, intentionality. What are you doing with your time? How are you spending it? What do you want your business to give you in terms of time and money? And are all those things aligned? You know when you're searching for and coming up short, you know, kind of financially it makes you want to bring in more money and therefore we trade our time. But if we don't actually know how we use our time in the first place, it's difficult to trade it effectively. So that's what it's kind of really about. So work part-time if that fits in with you financially and all those, but actually work part-time, really work part-time on your business and give yourself the time to do other things which will enrich you, which will energize you and give you more focus or will financially repay you, because it's an actual kind of part-time job. But don't just do it as a knee-jerk reaction without looking at how you're actually spending your time, and then spend your time with a level of intention, intentionality and purpose, so that you get the most out of it.

Speaker 1 17:30

And this doesn't fit kind of directly, but it's a book I'm listening to at the moment there's and I'm going to butcher this because I haven't quite remembered it correctly, but the broad strokes will be correct but he talks about with any kind of project, you know, not necessarily new, something different, but this kind of flow that we go through when we're doing things and whenever we start something new. There is this optimism, and often it's an optimism born out of we don't have all the facts, all the things, but we have an idea and we have this goal in mind. So it's this kind of naive optimism. What that then gets replaced with is this kind of informed pessimism. We then start seeing the problems and the issues and the you know, the hard work kind of starts, and it takes a little bit of the tarnish off the thing that we ultimately wanted to do.

Speaker 1 18:25

Now, the reason why I'm saying this because it's the next stage, and this is often where this part-time job kind of question comes in is, as he calls it, I think, it's the valley of despair. That's it, which is just. You know, it's very descriptive and it kind of like, yeah, it's not somewhere that you want to spend a lot of time in, but basically it's the point whereby you're doing the hard work, that vision of what and that excitement that you started out as is kind of like a vague memory. You know what you're heading towards, but you're so in the weeds at that point, doing the hard work, not necessarily seeing the results yet, because it's a long-term thing and you've got to have that compounding effect and all the rest of it and it's, it's hard, it's, it's a struggle and at that point it's the easiest thing in the world is to retrace your steps, get back out of the valley the way you came in and get back to the exciting thing and start again.

Speaker 1 19:26

But it's that it's exactly at this point whereby if you push through that, if you the projects that you're working on, the ideas that you're working on you spend that intentionality of working out where your business is, the reward is that you climb back out the other way, out of the valley of despair, and you know you reach that goal and you see the fruits of your labor and see all that work coming off and you know it's far more rewarding. But in the moment it's easy to kind of turn back and it's just something that's and I want to kind of throw that in there, because that's often when you're chasing problems, when you're battling with problems. It is that kind of throw that in there, because that's often when you're chasing problems, when you're battling with problems. It is that valley of despair that you find yourself in. And if you've been doing the right things and you're doing the right things and you can just tweak some of those, keeping going will always give you the far bigger reward than the the chimp inside our head telling us to run back where we came from because it's nicer back there. So I just want to throw that one in to finish off. So I hope that's been kind of useful and I know we kind of touched on a few of those bits. But let me know and we'll speak again soon. Bye for now, tim.

Speaker 1 20:34

And that's it for today's episode of Voicemails to Tim on the Annoyingly Optimistic Show. Now, remember, tim might be busy, but we're all in this together. Whether you're tired, in need of help or just muddling through, tim is here for you because, well, tim is you. Yes, you heard that right. Tim isn't just my friend. He's a reflection of all of us who are struggling to make it work. T-i-m stands for tired in need of help and muddling through. Tired in need of help and muddling through. So if you're feeling like a Tim, you're not alone For all those ambitious listeners. If you've got a burning business question, a quirky thought, or just want to see if you can leave an even weirder voicemail. Head over to the website voicemailstotimcom. Submit your question and maybe, just maybe, you'll hear your idea in a future voicemail to Tim. So until then, stay annoyingly optimistic, keep pushing forward and remember if life gives you lemons, leave a voicemail about it.