Working Smarter Not Harder Actually Made Us More Money

Ever wonder if working less could actually grow your business faster? In this episode, we talk about how one mindset shift changed the way we ran our business and our lives. We share how cutting meetings, simplifying offers, and protecting your calendar can lead to higher revenue and profit. We break down the operational tweaks and sales rules that free your time, upgrade your clients, and make work fun again. Get ready to learn what growth really means and find the freedom hiding in smarter decisions.

Highlights

00:00 Proof that fewer meetings can drive higher revenue and profit.

05:30 Our biggest year ever and why we refused to repeat the pace.

09:00 Short trips spark a new goal for life and work balance.

12:30 Are you willing to lose 40% of your revenue to get your life and your weekends back?

14:30 Two lanes to optimize operations and sales.

20:15 Top tip to centralize all your client communication and save hours.

24:00 Routine that removes guesswork and keeps you in rhythm.

26:30 How simplifying your vendors and offers makes every decision faster and cleaner.

28:00 Why saying "no" might be the most profitable move you ever make.

32:30 The mindset shift that helps you say no without guilt.

36:00 The "no fatigue" we all face regularly and how to push through it when it hits.

40:00 What happens when you serve fewer clients on purpose?

46:00 A story that proves smarter always beats harder.

Resources + Links

Apply for Luxury Clothier Collective Mastermind HERE

More resources for custom clothiers HERE

Watch on Youtube

Follow

Appointment Only in IG: @appointmentonlypod

Resources + Links
Apply for Luxury Clothier Collective Mastermind  HERE
More resources for custom clothiers HERE
Watch on Youtube

 Follow
Appointment Only in IG: @appointmentonlypod

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When we made that shift and we dove headfirst into working smarter, not harder, the number of meetings that we had, of course, that number went down. But our revenue actually went up again. And our profitability actually went up again from the year previous. So that was really encouraging to see after that year had come and gone where it's like, man, we have much more of a work-life balance now. We are working so much smarter. And we're also making more money. And the same thing happened in 23 and in 24 and in 25. It's possible. We're going to walk you through what we actually did. And I think you're going to hear some things here that you can implement today. This is Appointment Only, the podcast for entrepreneurs building profitable high-end businesses. If you want control, profit, and freedom from the endless hustle, this is for you. We're Kenny and Danny, twin brothers from day one and business partners for 15 years. We're sharing insights from our own experiences running a high-end small business, the highs, the lows, and what we've learned along the way that will help you build businesses you enjoy running that aren't running you. We're here to help you continue creating businesses that support the life you actually want to live. Your appointment starts now. It is getting increasingly difficult to come up with a new outfit to wear. Tell me about it. Every time we do a new episode. I think I've worn this before. It's it's possible. And I may have worn this before. I just I can't keep track anymore. And actually, that leads me into kind of my worst nightmare happened today. Okay. We were, I was thinking about it as I was changing clothes to do this episode here where we are. And you look out and I can actually see some windows. And I was just thinking to myself, like, oh, what if somebody was looking in and watching me change? Today at the shop, when I was changing, here's a little peek into what we do every morning is we actually get ready at our shop. And we come in, we wear sweats, and then we change into our work clothes. I was changing into my work clothes, and I I didn't have a pair of socks, so I was gonna run out really quickly. I and I do this all the time. I run out wearing, you know, my underwear just real quick to grab something, and then I run back. It's very professional. It's exactly what you would expect to see from a high-end luxury custom clothing owner running around like a chicken with his head cut off in his undies. Well, I turned the corner wearing my underwear, and there was a lady looking through our windows at that exact moment. She got a little more than she bargained for. But that we've been in that shop for almost five years. It has never happened. And this morning, as I'm doing it, turn the corner wearing my underwear, trying to grab a pair of socks like a normal human being does. Yeah, you know, as we all do. And there's somebody looking in the windows. It's time to move. And now she has a story. Yeah, exactly. Well, we're moving anyway. So now she has a story she can tell. I can I can only imagine the story she's telling her podcast listeners today. She's just like you won't believe it's six-pack ever today. You won't believe what I saw when I was peering into someone's windows today. I mean, that's what she gets for peering into our windows. That is true. It's just closed on the outside. We're obviously not open. Nothing to see and hear except for except for one of the running around in his understanding. Almost everything. Well, and with how I turned the corner and how quickly I scampered to the back, I'm sure she thought I was like running around doing something weird in my underwear at work. Did you make eye contact? Was it one of those where like it was you made eye contact or we we didn't, I didn't stop. I just I turned the corner wearing my underwear. I saw her immediately and then I ran to the back. Okay. So I don't know. Well, we'll find out. We'll find out. Yeah. I don't know how we'll find out. Maybe on the next door app. Yeah. True. Man running around in his underwear at King Bros Clothiers. That app is um very unhelpful, I've found. It's mostly ads these days. Well, and I got a no, I got a notification for some like medical emergency event that happened four days ago. I just got the email about it. It's like, yeah, I know that's not an emergency anymore. Seriously. Thanks for coming to Appointment Only. Your appointment begins now. Today we're talking about this thing that we say a lot where we talk about working smarter, not harder. I think so many times in business, there's all these conceptual things that when push comes to shove, you may be sitting there saying, okay, yeah, but how? Like buzzwords, like synergy. How, what? Huh? Smarter, not harder. Okay, how? That's what we're talking about today. The how behind working smarter, not harder. And there's nothing wrong with being a hard worker. There's absolutely nothing wrong with working hard. And there's also nothing wrong with working smart. So wouldn't it be great if you could work a little smarter and not quite as hard? Most people didn't get into the business that they're in because they are really hoping to burn the midnight oil. Yeah. Because they want to be exhausted and overworked. By the way, there's no sort of uh, there's no prize or award or reward for being the most burnt-out business owner you know. The busiest business owner of 2025 award goes to. No, they're not giving up words out for that. And I I don't know what it is about people who are running their own businesses, but it's all it's kind of like a badge of honor. It's like this thing that a lot of people brag about. How is everything? Oh, it's so busy. Oh, I'm so busy. I'm so tired. I have so many things to do. And that's avoidable. So let me just set the stage a little bit before we get into what our definition of working smarter, not harder, has looked like in our business. The year was 2021. We had just had our biggest and most profitable year in King Brothers history. Our business tripled, our profits quadrupled. We looked at each other and we did not say, Let's run it back. Let's do it again. Let's do it again. Nope. We looked at each other and we said, We are not doing that again. I'm not doing that. I can't do that again. Now, in our defense, the one thing that we said at the beginning of 2021 was this is the year that we are gonna make as much money as we possibly can. That is our one goal coming out of 2020, where we thought that was gonna be just a banger year, and it wasn't. When did we we told that story? I don't remember which episode it was, but it was it was one of the first episodes we we were feeling pretty good about 2020. We both were so confident about 2020, and it started so strong, and then new decade, this is it. New decade, new King Brothers, and boy, is it gonna be a good year. And it started out strong, it did, and then it petered off real fast, and we did not hit any of the goals that we had set for ourselves that year. And so 2021, we had one make as much money as humanly possible, and we did goal accomplished. Well, and I I we should point out too that before 2021 rolled around, we had this idea in our minds of what the maximum dollar amount was that we would be possible to make in our industry as you know, a couple of business owners with a couple of part-time support staff. We had we had this idea that here's the glass ceiling for what we could make. And in 2021, we doubled the glass ceiling. So we we were wrong, we did make a good amount of money, but at the cost of things that we were not willing to sacrifice anymore. What it looked like in 2021 was we had very, very full days every day, six days a week, because we worked every single Saturday as well. And oftentimes on Saturday, maybe we would have, you know, a couple fewer meetings. Yeah, a little bit of a shorter day, maybe. But it was we were working six days a week and we were in back to back to back to back appointments all day. And for the first half of the year, it felt really good to work that hard because we essentially had had a year off previously. We we were all rested up. We were all, we were plenty rested. We got a we got plenty of sleep, we drank plenty of liquid, we were ready to work. And for the first half of the year, it felt really good working that hard. Because it feels like, you know, I'm the I've got a purpose, I'm waking up, I've got somewhere to go, I've got needs to meet, I've got clients to see. You also feel really accomplished. There is nothing beats that feeling when you've been working your ass off, and you know you've been working your ass off, and then you get like a chunk of time off, which is what happened sort of at towards the very end of 2021. We took a trip to Palm Spring with our wives. And shortly after that, we did another trip around Christmas time to New York. It's actually when I got engaged, which we mentioned on uh a few episodes ago. But we we did a couple of uh it was short. I mean, it was like four, four days or five days, very, very short trips. But we were thinking, huh? It's pretty nice. It's pretty nice to have time off. And then we're then we got to thinking, hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to enjoy the life that we've built and actually feel like we can take not only weekends off, but where we could maybe conceivably be a little more regular and taking you know some trips without completely bankrupting the business. Do you think that's possible? So obviously the way that we make decisions is the things that we do and the things that we don't do point to a goal that we set or what we want to get, what our priorities are in that stage of our business and of our lives. 2021, our goal was singular money, make as much money as we can. And after we did that and we realized it wasn't sustainable, just from a personal perspective, or even mentally or physically, probably it wasn't sustainable. We were not working 20 hours a day. I know. I feel like we have to be realistic on what what the days actually looked like because it's it's not as though we were. I mean, we sell custom suits. So it's not like we were we weren't having meetings at midnight, 24-7 here, but it we were working a lot more and a lot harder than we had gotten used to. And our business wasn't geared yet towards the clientele that energized us. We were still filling our calendar with a lot of the clients that drained you of your energy. And I think that's an important distinction to make because as you as you grow your business and you and you want to run a high-end business, that type of business is usually geared towards the clients who bring you energy, not just take your energy from you. So it was a year of back to back to back-to-back meetings all day, every day. Isn't there that there's that analogy where that you take a bucket and there's you know, there's different ways to fill your bucket. And then, you know, the the right way to fill the bucket is to start with the the rocks? Yeah. Because if you start with the pebbles, then you can't fit the rocks on when and then when you pour the water in. I is this a church thing? I don't know. It might be a biblical maybe fill your heart with the important stuff. Well, I don't think it's like a church. It's not like Jesus did this in Nazareth, but he did it for his disciples. He's like, Does anyone have a Home Depot bucket handy? Uh no, but you the the the word picture, I guess, is you know, if you have a bucket and you're supposed to put the large rocks in first, and then you pour the little pebbles in, and then you pour water on top, and then it all fits in the bucket. But if you do it in any other order, you can't fit all the things in. So we were very focused in 2021 on pebbles. We weren't focused on rocks, pebbles in water. Pebbles and water. And we you there wasn't a lot of room in our lives, in our heads for the boulders. Yeah, that's that's good. I like that. There we go. We've got a teacher on our hands. Oh, I could never, I could never be a teacher. I'd be the worst. I would have no patience. You actually would be the worst teacher ever. Thank you. You're welcome. So, anyway, we were working much more and much harder than we ever had historically in business. Pebbles, pebbles, baby. We bring on the pebbles. We also were working much more and much harder than we ever have since. Yes. So our our goals transitioned and changed. We learned a lot. Our priorities shifted from we're gonna just make as much money as as we possibly can, and it doesn't matter what that what that looks like or or what the cost is, to we did the math and we were willing, because we wanted to make changes, we wanted to, we wanted to get our weekends back, we wanted to have more reasonable expectations, we wanted to work with a higher caliber of person, mainly. There's only so much uh proactivity, you know, you can do for that. But we were willing to do the things that it that it was gonna take to make sure that the right types of people were gonna book. We were willing to go without 40% of what we made in 2021. And just knowing that, you know, if if we're gonna set these as our new goals, then probably the make as much money as we possibly can goal has to take kind of a back seat. What we were pleasantly surprised with when we made that shift and we dove headfirst into working smarter, not harder, is that the number of meetings that we had, of course, that number went down, but our revenue actually went up again, and our profitability actually went up again from the year previous. So that was really encouraging to see after that year had come and gone where it's like, man, we have much more of a work-life balance now. We are we are working so much smarter, and we're also making more money. And the same thing happened in 23, and in 24, and in 25. It's possible. We're gonna walk you through what we actually did. And I think you're gonna hear some things here that you can implement today if you want. Some things to think about, and we've kind of broken it up into a couple of different chunks. So the first chunk we're gonna walk through is what does this look like from an operational standpoint, like a behind-the-scenes logistics. And then the second headline, and you know, a handful of sort of action items there is gonna be more about the actual appointment and sales aspect. You know, if you're in, if you're in a role where you're someone who sells a product, it's gonna be more of like the sale part versus the behind the scenes operational aspect of being a small business owner. I think it's gonna make sense when we start talking, talking about it. So the first thing that we identified, these by the way, are in no particular order. These aren't like the order that you're supposed to. And they're certainly not by like, oh, this is the most important thing. No, number two is this. These are all just the things that actually, when we say working smarter, not harder, I think that's part of the intro of the podcast. I mean, it is like the very basic of what we're trying to do here on appointment only. This is exactly what we mean when we say smarter, not harder. These are the things that we did and that we do, that we continue to do, and they're very easy to implement. It's not like we're going to be telling you all this stuff that's impossible to do. And it's not like from 2021 to 2022, we totally changed our business either. We just made some very small tweaks to certain things that the end result was we were working much smarter than we were hard. Thing one, again, not in not in a specific order, but the first thing, delegate, duh. I mean, it sounds so simple, but as a small business owner, I don't know what it is about us where we think that we're the one who has to wear every single hat. And it's just not true. There are so many things that we do on a daily basis that we do not have to do, that there it's not a good use of our time and our expertise and our energy to do certain things. A perfect example of this is taxes. If you are a small business owner and you are doing your own taxes, you have got to stop. That is not a good use of your time. There is somebody out there who is much more efficient and effective than you are. They're gonna save you money in the long run because you're spending your time doing something you're not very good at. That was a decision we made early on in our business. And we ended up hiring someone who embezzled from us. We had a stinker for a couple of years. We had a stinker for sure. I would recommend not hiring him. That was actually one of the reasons why in 2021 our singular focus was to make as much money as possible. Yeah. Because we knew we were in, we we didn't even know at the time what our tax debt was. But we knew it, we knew we we had tax debt. And I had heard this piece of advice that actually made a lot of sense to me. It was, I don't even remember who it came from, but it was like something along the lines of if you're in a situation right now as a business owner and you know that you are going to have to pay someone to figure it out, but you're not at the place where you want you're able to get it figured out right this second, and you pouring your own time isn't gonna help, then you need to focus on making as much money as you possibly can so that in a year or two, when you're ready to cross that bridge, you can pay the right person whatever they're gonna cost to get it done right for you and get it done once. That's great advice. I mean, and that that you're that's exactly where our heads were at in 2021. We knew we were gonna have some tax issues to iron out, and we knew that it probably wasn't just gonna mean hiring a new tax firm. We knew it probably was also gonna mean hiring an attorney, which it did. And we were fortunately in the position because we had worked so hard in 2021, where we were able to hire the right people, the attorney, the tax people, pay all the penalties, the fines, all of that. So that was that was a good thing. And that's and that's definitely like big picture business stuff, tax specifically. But when we're talking about delegation, we're also talking about the things that that take your time and take your energy that are are things that are not within your sweet spot of your company. You know what was another thing that uh I delegated that year was cleaning of the shop. Right. I remember I was scrubbing, like I was, I was Windexing the interior of the shower before we were gonna have a big meeting of like a wedding party. And I knew there were gonna be people in and out of the bathroom. And I was tidying it up and I was cleaning the shower and I was wiping down the sink. And I thought to myself, why am I doing this? Why am I spending my time doing this when I should be preparing for this big appointment? And I, you know, I remember that day, it ended up being like, you know, over $20,000 or something. And I thought, I don't need to be wiping the shower. I should think I should hire someone to come clean so that I don't have to worry about is the shower clean or not, or is is the sink looking dirty? I can just do my job, which is to run the business that earns us this kind of money. In your business, there are only things that you can do. Only you are equipped to do those things. And there are other things that so many other people can do. Those are the things that get hired out. And I do think before we move on, I want to just throw one thing out there as business owners. One of the things that for whatever reason, I think there's some confusion on is when you make a hire, I think many business owners are tempted to hire help in sales. Yeah. When sales is the thing that they're actually the best at. If sales are the thing that have helped you grow your business to the point where you're making a hire and you're actually really great at it, do not hire another salesperson. Hire somebody who can help you with behind the scenes, you know, the backroom stuff that can allow you to exclusively only focus on selling. You don't need help with sales. You just need more time to do what you're actually really awesome at. And that was something that changed in in 2022 is we we hired people to take things off of our plate so we can do the things that we're the best at. Another thing that we made a conscious effort about doing in 2022 was funneling all of our communication into one place. Funneling all of our communication into email. So we're not dealing with a whole bunch of people reaching out in a whole bunch of different ways. Everything is in one place. It's simple, but it ends up being that you're working smarter, not harder, when you only have really one place to go check to find all the information and to have all the conversations than if you're on the phone and then you're off, and then you're texting when you're off the phone and you're also emailing and you're answering DMs, and you know, they're just that's a silly waste of your time and you shouldn't be doing it. So funnel your communication. We've mentioned this before. Email is best because there's a paper trail, you have time to craft a response. There are a hundred different reasons. Not to mention, nobody expects an email response from you outside of business hours. That was the other thing. When we started getting serious about we are going to take our time seriously, I am willing. To let some money slip through the, slip through the cracks here, if it means I'm able to work a little bit smarter. You don't have to get back to people at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday. You can spend that time doing what you want to do. Email is the only method of communication that we found so far where the expectation is responses in a timely manner during business hours. So that was another thing that was really crucially important and really helpful in us identifying email as how we communicate, is the expectations of email are just different than other modes. I remember working on this with my therapist actually. The week of my wedding, I was having such it wasn't, it wasn't on the week of my wedding. It was leading up to the wedding week. I knew I was gonna be out of town and I knew that we were gonna, we we put a vacation responder on and we were setting an intention that we were gonna take whatever time we wanted. We intentionally like peter our meetings down for the the I got married near the end of a year, and we decided to peter our meetings down so we were gonna have very little to deal with time sensitive. And then we also raised our prices, which we didn't, yeah, we did do that, didn't we? Uh I think we're talking about that in a different episode. So we'll we'll get to that later. I remember sharing with my therapist, I'm really stressed because I was not at that point, I was not good at letting an email sit unanswered in our inbox. This is a pat me on the back example because I did it well and it felt really good. I remember I turned, I didn't delete the email off my phone. All I did was I turned off push notifications. So I still could, I still saw if I had an unread email, but my phone wasn't lighting up every time we got an email. I turned them off for the entire week of the wedding. And guess what? Nothing bad happened. Nothing bad happened. And we also changed our email, our out of office reply that that week, I remember, to it used to say, you know, thanks for contacting. We're out of the office, someone will be with you shortly. And we changed it that week, I remember, to if this is in regards to something urgent, someone will be in touch with you shortly. And I was gonna take the, I was gonna take that on. It was not a problem for me getting married. But I could have too. I was, we were in Arizona. Like it wasn't like I wasn't the expectation was not that you were gonna be on your phone. I was like, I was I was fully prepared to answer emails and I was doing it off and on. But that was a nice little tweak to that language was if this is in regards to something urgent, someone will be in touch with you. Because then what happens is if a client emails you with something they think is urgent and they don't get a response quickly, what they're telling themselves is, oh, I guess this isn't as urgent as I think. Yeah. Another thing that we implemented at that point was we forced ourselves to have a routine and to stick with it. We were coming in, we were doing our thing, we are answering emails at the same time every day. Now, some of you are not going to, this is this would not be helpful for you. Yeah, this is one of those things that depending on the type of person that you are, having a routine either feels like life is easier, or having a routine feels like work in and of itself. I would go as far to say if you're somebody who being put into a routine in and of itself feels like work, then this is something that you can probably disregard. Yes. But I do think a lot of us out there, a routine that we know we can count on, that's the easy thing. And it made it simple too, for you know, anytime there was uh something that came up, like a call or it's one of us needs to have an appointment of some kind or whatever it is, you know, specifically this time is gonna work, this time isn't gonna work. Because you know the routine, you know when you're coming into the shop, you can predict when someone's email is gonna be answered. Sticking to that routine takes the guesswork out of it and it put us in a position where we really felt in control of our day. And for for us, the way that our our brains operate is if we feel like we're not in the rhythm and we have to deal with something or address something that is very much something that we do have a place for in our routine, I will sometimes break into like an actual physical sweat. If I'm outside of my rhythm and I know something needs, and this makes it sound like I have really severe OCD, which I don't, which I don't have. Are you sure? But it is one of those things where when I know what my days are gonna look like, I know exactly where responding to people, where doing this, doing that is gonna fall. If I'm not operating in my rhythm and I need to deal with something, that feels like extra work for me. Yeah, and it's at the top of your mind. I you can't think about anything else. You're like, I actually have to do this right now. And I'm sorry, but I have to leave the room and do do this right now. And obviously, you don't have to, but that's how my brain works. Yeah. Mine too. So take that with a grain of salt. If you're not the type of person who feels like a routine makes your life easier, that's probably one you don't have to factor in. You don't have to do everything we did. We're just sharing with you what working smarter, not harder looks like for us. When we say working smarter, not harder for a business that you run that doesn't run you, that these are the things that we're talking about. Another thing that we did in our business in 2022 is we simplified everything. And by everything, I'm talking specifically about our offerings. We really doubled down on what we knew sold, what we knew our highest profit things were. We took a second look at the vendors that we had access to and the things that were a part of our business. And unless we could identify clearly, you know, this is going to be a part of our business moving forward. This is not just serving as a band-aid, in our case, mill, like the people who provide us with our fabrics, it's gone. If we can't check stock in real time because they don't keep as good a record, they're out of here. It doesn't matter if this thing costs a lot less. When something is out, it becomes more work for us. It's gone. We simplified things so that we had a very clear understanding of what it is that we were selling, what it was that was making us the most money, and just making our lives easier. What simplifying, though, did on the flip side was it also put us in a position where we were saying no a lot more. We're gonna talk about saying no. We talk about saying no all the time. We're gonna talk about it specifically in a few minutes here. But when you simplify and you remove things off of what you do, you do end up saying no a lot more. And the more you say it, the easier it becomes. So those are the operational things. Let's talk about what this looks like as far as an actual sales perspective. Remember what I said when we made the shift in our priorities in 2022, we were willing to part with about 40% of our revenue that we had made based on the previous year. We were willing to do it. It didn't end up translating to that, thankfully. And it has never required us to lose 40% of our revenue. But that was something that when we were gonna make that shift, we also were identifying like if we're gonna work smarter, not harder, we're gonna make sure that the people that we're working with, the meetings that we're having, are needle-moving meetings. They're not just helping us today, they're helping our business. And not only are we going to focus primarily on those, but we're gonna as best as we can focus exclusively on those. It started with a primary focus and then transitioned to an exclusive focus. And as a result of focusing only and primarily on the appointments that are really important, the boulders, the rocks rather than the pebbles. The rocks rather than the pebbles. Again, you end up saying no to things that are fine. You end up saying no to things that are fine in order to potentially say yes to something that's great. Remember, in 2021, the biggest year we'd ever had to date, like I said, we were working way too hard for that money because so much of that year was spent with people who were energy drainers. And that's a really great way to identify is this going to be a meaningful meeting? Yes, a needle-moving meeting, yes. But you all also want to keep your sanity in mind as you're as you're running your business because we're the business owners. We get to decide who we work with. And if there's a type of person or a type of demand that is really draining and is not fun, and you hate it every time somebody reaches out and asks for that thing, why are you continuing to put up with that? You can say no. You can you can just decide that you're done doing that. You really can't. It's up to you. And speaking of saying no, the more you focus on what moves the needle, the more you're simplifying what you offer, the more you're gonna end up just saying no, and you have to. Please, please do not fall into the temptation of allowing yourself to make compromises all the time. Because if you're compromising all the time, then you don't have any processes and you're reacting then. And now you're in a position where your business is running you, you're not running your business. As you're saying no, it feels weird. Right? It feels weird to say no. Nobody likes to, well, that's not true. I think maybe some people like to say no, but especially if it's not been part of what you've historically done. If saying no is more of a foreign concept, it is gonna feel really weird to start to do it. But it is one of those things that you have to commit to doing. Like if this is the result that you're after, then that means you have to say no. That's the way that as business owners, we are kind of in control of our own destiny, is it starts with our priorities, starts with our goals. And then the things that we do and the things that we don't do have to line up with those goals and with those priorities. You're able to reverse engineer how your day looks when your focus is on whatever you're prioritizing. So for us, like we were saying in 2021, our priority was money, money, money, money, money. And we reverse engineered that. And it didn't take a lot of hard work. Well, all it was was hard work, but it wasn't hard to do it because all we had to do was show up and just work our asses off and say yes to everything. Yes, yes, yes. Saying yes is so much easier than saying no. This is one of those things where it's like, what came first, chicken or the egg. It's easier, it's not hard work to say yes. What do you think came first? The chicken or the egg? Like, like literally, what came first? The chicken. I think so too. Cool. Great combo. What do you think, regular? Keep tuning into appointment only for more bangers like this. Saying yes is not hard at all. The result of saying yes to everything, though, is a lot of hard work. Saying no is much more difficult because we're people pleasers. We love our jobs, we wouldn't be in the businesses we're in if we weren't passionate about it. That's why we started it, right? To say yes to people. But as your business changes and grows and shifts, you need to say no. That's more difficult than saying yes. But the result of you saying no to things results in a much smarter way of working because you're not burning out, you're not bogging your calendar down with a bunch of things that don't move the needle, and you're able to direct your day towards the goals and the priorities that you set for yourself. As you're thinking about trying to do this thing that you love and being a people pleaser, you have to think about what, you know, yes, you're saying yes to someone and you're and you're allowing that you're allowing that to happen. But they're probably not going to even have as good of an experience with you if you're so bogged down because you've said yes so much. I think about the people that we worked with in 2021. And I think about of those people, whoever, whoever of them happened to have come back now in the last couple of years, they had a much different experience when they worked with us in 2024 or 2025 than when they would have had in 2021. And those people who we worked with in 2021 who haven't been back, my guess is they're probably thinking, like, I wonder what all the fuss is about with those guys. Like it, you know, it was it was it was a much quicker thing. The process didn't look as good. We weren't as invested or involved or checked in. Now we'll have appointments with people, and it doesn't even really matter what the dollar amount is that we make, but they'll leave and I'll say, I'll tell Danny, like I felt like I was really engaged there because I felt really good. When you're making space for needle moving appointments, when you're making space for meetings and clients that matter, you're actually able to have real conversations and meet real needs. These days, when we work with people, we have enough time to talk about things that would actually help them meet their needs and solve their problems. That's what high-end people hire people to do. High-end clients, high-end people, high-end buyers, they hire people to solve problems. We can have those conversations now because we're working with fewer people. We're not just saying yes to everybody. When we were saying yes to everybody, it was very much hello, nice to meet you. What do you want? Okay, here you go. All right, swipe your card. Thank you. Bye. See you in a little bit to pick it up. You send the next guy in on your way out. Yep. Make sure to tell the guy who's waiting on the bench that he can come in now. It's just a totally different way of running your business. And some people love the pace of the busyness. For us, we never did. That type of thing drained us and exhausted us. And we knew we could be doing our jobs better if we were to be able to just be a little bit more strategic of the things that we said yes to and the things that we said no to. There are plenty of cons, by the way, yes, in being more strategic and saying no and making sure you're focusing on needle-moving meetings. Sometimes that pace just feels too slow. Like I said, there are people who absolutely love that feeling of busyness. They love to be busy. And if they happen to have a slow day, they don't feel productive. They feel, you know, totally out of sorts. And it just is the exact opposite of why they started a business. And it took probably about a year for us to feel comfortable with the idea that the pace feels different. The pace when you're running a more strategic, more intentional business for a clientele who energizes you sometimes feels different than you're running a transactional business. The other thing that is so real and that we suffer from on not the daily, but fortunately not the daily, but it is something that you suffer from regularly and it's recurring. It sits dormant in you for a while and then it flares back up, is no fatigue. The fatigue of constantly telling people, no, I'm sorry that doesn't work. No, I'm sorry I don't do that. No, I'm not going to hit that deadline. Uh, no, I'm sorry that doesn't hit my order minimum. No, no, no. No fatigue is real. You just get so tired of telling people no all the time. Because that's not why you started your business. In fact, and then what happens, you know, if if it's this is kind of starting to feel like one of those uh prescription commercials, which how on earth is it still normal for them to have to list off every single possibility of a side effect? I don't know. I don't watch a lot of uh TV with commercials. Well, the only because we have to we're watching we watch Dancing with the Stars now and uh we watch it live. Oh, you watch it in real time as it airs on Disney Plus. Oh, wow. Uh-huh. And you so we have to sit through the commercial. So old school. Very old school of us. I know it's so weird. It's such a throwback to have to sit through the commercials. But you watch these medication commercials and how side effects may include vomiting, diarrhea, severe death. And it goes on. They talk about the actual medication for 10 seconds, and then the next 20 seconds of the commercial are listing all the side effects. So side effects of no fatigue may include feeling like you need to change your mind and wondering if maybe you're being too strict. You start to question, huh? I wonder if I should start to compromise. You start to wonder if, well, maybe my processes are too strict. Maybe I should let up a little bit. And we're here to tell you please do not. You have to stay the course. Stay the course. Don't allow a week where you said no so much to allow you to revert back into saying yes all the time. Saying no has to become a part of who you are, what your business is. And saying no has got to feed into your goals. You're not just saying no for saying no sake. You're saying no because taking this on or doing this doesn't get you closer to this point. It doesn't align with your priority. And your priority, remember, is what you've reverse engineered your entire business to look like. So if it's not going to feed this priority, it has to be a no. And I do feel as though when we're running a business, and this is this is true of me for sure. And I'm curious if it's true of you. When you're running a business, you do have a tendency to think a lot more about the no's than the yeses. You focus on the things you did wrong versus the things that you feel like you did well. And those are the things that replay in your mind. You're not replaying all of your, all of the wins. You're focused on the things that you should have done differently or better. And unfortunately, the negative things carry much more weight in our headspace than the positive things. Like we, we don't spend a lot of time when we feel like we had a win in business. We don't celebrate that for very long. But if something feels like it didn't go well, it replays over and over. And you're constantly, man, how can I make sure this doesn't happen? All hands on deck. You know, we let's stop what you're doing. We need to figure this out right now. And it's like, it's not even a big deal. It's just like this thing that was a bummer or this month that was a clunker. Like, who cares? Move on. Like, don't don't you remember the great month you had right before where you had this amazing thing happen and then this awesome thing and you made this sale? And it's like, no, I actually don't remember that. I'm only focused on this clunker month. But it is interesting that how much more weight negative things carry. So just keep that in mind as you are operating from a place of working smarter, not harder, it's going to require you say no. If you feel as though you're in a place where you're experiencing severe symptoms of no fatigue, just stay the course because you're about, you're about to say yes. And there are there are a lot of pros that come with operating this way too. In our business, since 2021, every year we look at our reports and we're keeping up with them monthly as well. But every year we've worked with fewer clients and our financials are up. And that's the trajectory that we set for ourselves in 2022. We don't want to be in a position where we're we're working with so many people that we're not able to give them the time of day, that it feels transactional, that any of these things are going on. And that's a real positive thing. Like for us, it's a real positive metric where we've worked with fewer people, but our dollars have gone up. And I know that that sounds like it could sound like an ignorant uh statement where, oh, I actually think it's great that we work with fewer people. And to some of you, that feels like a real negative thing. But remember, the things that we're doing and the things that we're not doing are to feed the goals and the priorities that we have set for ourselves. For us, that's a win. It's easy to look back at the metrics and as you're looking back, you know, taking actual scientific data and saying, okay, yes, I was able to work smarter, not harder that month or that year. But every once in a while, something will happen where you get kind of a real life example of, oh, this is actually working really well, or oh, this is not going well at all. We're gonna we're gonna tell you a story here about something that happened, uh, I believe it was, I don't remember what year it was, but it was something that happened and it was such a, it was such a good example for us that things were working in the right direction. So the business we're in is we sell custom suits. And one thing that is something that we do because it's working smarter, not harder, that a lot of custom clothiers do not do is we require commitment up front. We do not schedule no obligation consultations, free consultations. We are not open. So you can't just wander in and take a look and leave. We're appointment only, right? As you know. As you know, appointment only. You're regular, you know. So because we're appointment only, we have to guard our time, which is working smarter, not harder, which means we require a commitment up front. And our expectation is that everybody who comes in is ready to go through a process to do something custom, which means they're ready to buy it. That's how custom stuff in general works. If you place an order for a couch, you buy it. It's not a hypothetical, you you buy it or you don't. Yeah, well, we'll see how it looks in my in my room. And then I'll decide to buy it if I like it. That's just not how it works. So, in our business, and like I said, this is Not really industry standard. It's something that we implemented and we teach uh other custom clothiers how to implement this too. It's pretty simple. Get a hint, it's through email. Yeah, exactly. So that's something that we do that is not industry standard, but we take it very, very seriously. We had someone in the calendar who was coming in to do a wedding suit. It was a green wedding suit, you know, nothing crazy, very, very standard. If you know anything about the way that a fashion has gone over the last few years, green wedding suits, very classic. So we sent this person the email that we came up with after identifying the most work that we do, the hardest work is with clients who are getting married. So we need to communicate to them in a different way. So we created a specific email template for them. Okay. Just wanted to say that. It very clearly spells out our expectation, which is you've got to be ready to make a purchase of the things that we talk about. He emailed us back and he said, Hey, I'm not 100% committed. I'm like 90% committed though. So we should be good, right? And what most people would have done is they would have said, Yeah, come on in. Yeah, we're 90% of the way there. I trust myself enough. I know myself well enough to know that I'll be able to get him to the finish line. But when we got this email, I'm not hearing or seeing or reading 90%. I'm fixated on the 10%, the 10% of his mind where he doesn't want to buy something. So we had no choice but to cancel him. We said, you know, listen, you if you can't get the rest of the way, where there's even, you know, a small fraction of you that is curious if you actually are going to buy anything or not, then we we just cannot commit that time to sitting down with you. You've got to be ready. And we canceled him. Bummer, but also not really. Remember, needle moving. It always feels we always feel it's a little bit of a bummer when you have someone in your calendar and then they cancel because of a rule you have. Yeah, because it wasn't a it was an appointment that you had that all of a sudden you don't have and you feel that you feel the money slipping through your fingertips. But we always tell custom clothiers, someone who wants a consultation, they're not they want a consultation. That's what they want. They don't want to buy a suit, they want to have a consultation. So at that time in our business, just to be very transparent, he was probably, if he decided to buy, he probably would have landed on something and it would have been about 2,000 bucks. Yep. So just for what that's worth. So we canceled him out. We, I don't know if it was 12 hours later, we got an email from a guy who we'd worked with previously. He was actually one of our best guys, but he is an impossible guy to schedule. It was like uh anytime he emails, you got to just hope that it works in your calendar, otherwise, you're not gonna hear from him for another year. So he reached out to us. He, you know, this is so ironic, but he he actually wanted to come in in that time slot that we had this other guy scheduled for, but we had since canceled. So we were able to very effortlessly put this guy in the calendar. Uh, we we saw him, we went through the process. It was a piece of cake because we'd worked with him already. And he came in and he spent over $20,000. So, what probably in all reality was likely about 10 times what we would have made had we gone ahead and said, Yeah, you know what? We're gonna go ahead and convince you to buy what you what you think you might want to buy. Even though you're only 90% sure you're gonna buy something, come on in, we'll we'll make sure that we can get sell you on it. Yeah, we'll sing and dance, we'll work hard for your business. And that was a great example for us. That this working smarter, not harder thing, I think there's something to that. Not only can it be much more profitable, but it is so much more enjoyable. And for many of us out there, I think working smarter as opposed to harder feeds much more in line with the priorities that we had and still have. When we started our business and this idea of I get to be my own boss, I get to do these things, like working smarter is the way that feeds that. Working harder takes away from that. And doing things just because you want to say yes and it's easier to say yes, does set you up to have to work harder later, where learning how to say no and deciding that here are the things I say no to because it doesn't serve my priorities or my goals, that allows you to work much more smarter, or much more smarter. Oh boy. Here's some things not smarter. Nothing sounds smarter than talking about what's more smarter and what's more dumber than that. You'll have much more funner. But it's so much more enjoyable to work smart when it feeds the goals that you have set for yourself. These are the types of things that we work through actively every single week in our call. We have a mastermind mentorship group. It's called Luxury Clothier Collective for custom clothiers who are looking to run uh businesses that are high-end, smart, not hard, super profitable, high value custom clothing businesses that resemble the one that we run. We have very rare openings right now. We're taking on a few additional custom clothiers. We're either going to take three or we're closing the enrollment again the day before Thanksgiving. So whichever comes first. And if you're a custom clothier who listened to that story and you would have taken the guy on and try to sell him to get him the 10% of the way there, you probably should be a part of the group. Yes, exactly. These are the types of things that we talk through. And uh if you're listening now, and we'd love to have you in the group. If you're catching this a little bit later, there still is a link where you can sign up for a wait list if we ever do open enrollment again. But it's it's kind of a way for us to work through specifically with you and help you implement some of these things that we've learned. And these emails that we talk about that we implemented that kind of do a lot of the heavy lifting for us, we share those inside the group. So if that's something that sounds like you might benefit from it, I think you would benefit from it. And you have a very rare opportunity you can take advantage of right now. But for those of you who aren't custom clothiers and who are just listening to appointment only because you found other things about it helpful, I hope that talking through the specifics of smarter, not harder is something that you can take away and implement in your own business in whatever way works for you. And smarter, not harder is going to be something that means something different to you than it means to us. There's not one way to work smart and only one way to work too hard. This is just our examples, our definition, our experience that we put into words. And when we say work smarter, not harder, this is exactly what we're talking about. Don't forget to like and subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. Go ahead and leave us a five-star rating or a very nice, kind affirmative review. We would appreciate all of those things. Thanks so much for showing up to your appointment. We'll see you for your next one. And that's that. Today's appointment is over. This has been appointment only. Your time is valuable, and we're very appreciative of you spending some of it with us. Thanks for showing up. Thanks for being on time. Thanks for being receptive to what we have to say. And if you have a question you'd like us to answer here on appointment only, please shoot us a DM. 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