The Difference Between Working IN Your Business vs. Working ON Your Business

You know, it can be really hard to tell the difference between working IN your business and working ON your business.

Sometimes we’re running around like crazy trying to take care of EVERYTHING. We’re juggling all the tasks and responsibilities that come with being a small business owner–from marketing to customer service, accounting…you name it! 

But there is a big difference between working ON our business instead of IN our businesses.

In this video, I talk about what it means to work on vs. in your business and the challenge that can happen when you’re continuing to do everything yourself. 

Are you working IN your business or are you working ON your business?

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro
01:28 What it means to work IN your business
02:24 What it means to work ON your business
03:21 The problem with doing everything yourself

Transcript

[00:00:01.150]
Hello. I’m Carin Kilby Clark, a life and business coach of Carin Kilby Clark dot com and cofounder of Mixed Media Pros, which is a digital marketing agency. And I’m a mom, and I work full time, and I’m going live every day. And this is Day 19, which is awesome.

[00:00:19.710]
And today I wanted to talk about a topic that has come up a couple of times when I am talking to clients who are running a business that they’ve started probably less than a year ago for the majority of them, and they feel like they’re doing a lot of busy work and not really doing the right tasks in their business. And I have been talking about this concept of do you feel like you’re working on your business or in your business? And that question sometimes gets a confused look.

[00:01:00.590]
And so I thought it would be a good topic to talk about today because there is a difference between working on your business and in your business. And if you’re spending the majority of your time working in your business, then you don’t have enough bandwidth to work on it.

[00:01:19.270]
And that’s a problem. So you need both. And so the difference between the two working in your business is doing anything that has to do with execution. So it might be creating content for social media or doing the posts or setting up systems or actually serving your clients delivering your product or service. All of that is executing.

[00:01:49.190]
And so it’s actually working in and not on. And also if you have a team. So if you have a virtual assistant or anyone who works for you and you have to oversee them and the work that they’re doing that’s also working in your business, not on it because you have to manage them and manage the execution. So it’s still related to actually executing on the things that need to be done. So that would be working in your business.

[00:02:21.340]
And then working on your business is anything that is related to the strategy coming up with the vision, setting the direction being the leader and setting the tone. If you have people that work with you, if it’s just if you’re a solopreneur, then it’s still the time that you spend visioning strategizing kind of mapping out what you want to do. If it’s like you’re going to create a new course, then it’s like the ideation of that course. And like coming up with the content and how not the actual creation of content, but what that content will be.

[00:03:01.790]
So anything that’s developing, like doing kind of like market research, talking to your potential clients or your actual clients about your products or services.

[00:03:17.190]
All of that is like working on your business. And the problem that happens, especially if you’re a solopreneur, is that you’re doing everything yourself, right. So you’re trying to work in you’re trying to work on you don’t know what’s what anymore, because you’re just like running around and everything is crazy. So it can just be a little bit chaotic and problematic to run a business like that long term. So I know it can be scary to think about bringing someone on to help you, but that is literally the best thing you can do if you feel a little bit spent and you don’t have the bandwidth to both think of everything that needs to be done and then also be doing everything that needs to be done.

[00:04:03.900]
So hiring like a virtual assistant, and it could be a contractor if you are not ready to put someone on payroll, that’s totally fine. You can have a 1099 contractor who runs their own virtual assistant business or find an agency of virtual assistants that you can hand those tasks off to so that you have more time to work on and not in, because that is what is going to take you from essentially being like an employee of your own business to being able to step more into the CEO role.

[00:04:40.890]
And so when you hear people say that kind of stuff like, oh, you need to be the CEO of your business. It’s like, what does that mean? It means that you primarily spend your time working on doing the strategy, the visioning, setting, the direction, leading the people that work with you to execute.

[00:05:00.610]
So that’s probably what I would suggest if you’re kind of like, I can’t do it. All. The first thing you need to do is have someone come on that can help you with working in so anything that’s related to execution and actually carrying out the vision that you have set forth for your business.

[00:05:25.030]
Hi, Cathy. How do you feel about interns versus VA’s? I am actually a fan of interns. It depends. I know right now, like, COVID in person is not really popping, but I had a client before COVID that did have, like, she went to the local College and was able to actually get someone who I think she was like a marketing major.

[00:05:52.510]
And so she interned in her business and was carrying out some of the marketing tasks, and it worked really well because that person needed to do real world work for their studies for school, and then my client needed someone to help with their tasks. So it was awesome. I think she was managing social media stuff and was able to really help her grow and had a really awesome. I don’t know if it was a report or whatever she had to do for school, but definitely I’m actually going to look into that myself as well.

[00:06:29.540]
I’m not sure how that would work with COVID.

[00:06:32.230]
I’m imagining that everyone has a computer now and they’ll probably be able to do some virtual stuff. But I think it’s an excellent strategy because it gives that student a chance to actually work on a real business and use the things that they’re learning in a real world way. And then it’s a win for you as a business owner, because especially if there’s not a big budget for hiring a team, then you can still get the help that you need for the execution without breaking the budget.

[00:07:05.520]
So if you’re thinking that I think it is worth exploring and trying out if it doesn’t work out, it’s not really a loss.

[00:07:19.530]
But I definitely would suggest check that out. So that was it for today. I just wanted to talk about the difference between working on and working in. And then I figured tomorrow I’ll talk a little bit more about how I manage the balance between in and on as a soloprenuer who, like I just mentioned, I am looking to bring in some help, and I do have actually one person that works as a VA, but it’s like 5 hours a month. So that is another strategy before I go like, if you don’t have a budget for a lot or a full time or even 20 hours or any, it doesn’t have to be a lot.

[00:07:59.080]
I have someone who does 5 hours a month, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s enough to execute the things I need her to do so that I don’t have to do them myself. So you can start small. A lot of VA’s will do. I think the minimum I’ve seen is 5 hours a month. Probably.

[00:08:18.580]
I don’t think anyone would go lower than that, but you can try that too. So definitely look into interns. And also if someone that might can do 5 hours a month. But yeah. So tomorrow I’ll talk more about how I manage in versus on.

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