The 80/20 Rule of Solo CEO Success



Hey Reader,

You and I talk a lot about how overwhelming entrepreneurship can be and the importance of simplifying your business. Hell, we talked just last Sunday about T-shaped skills and the way focusing on a single micro-niche can help you make a lot more money, a lot faster and easier.

But you and I both know that entrepreneurial overwhelm doesn’t only come from trying to appeal to too broad of an audience. Sometimes (okay a lot of the time), it comes from doing too many things just to keep the business running.

We know we’re running ourselves ragged, but when we still feel like we’re scrambling to make enough to pay the bills and live to fight another day, what other choice do we really have? Right?

Wrong.

Probably the most personally life-changing lesson I’ve learned in the last year (and I’m now mildly obsessed about teaching to The Solo CEO group members) is that you really can make more money by doing less. No really, you can.

Let’s talk about the Pareto Principle.

Okay, so the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, argues that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort. And while the numbers might vary depending on the person or situation, in my experience, this rule is pretty spot on.

Most of us are wasting a bunch of time and effort doing a whole lot of busy work that isn’t leading to the results we seek.

But when we’re so far from being able to consistently produce the kind of business results we dream of (and know we deserve), it’s hard to tell what’s working and what isn’t. And we sometimes have to admit that none of it is working, so then what? What do we keep and what to we let go.

Using the pareto principle to earn more revenue in less time

Using the Pareto Principle to improve your business requires evaluating the good, the bad, and the ugly in your business today. Now, before I continue, I want to caution you to ask your inner critic to sit this one out. Don’t let yourself use this as an opportunity to be mean, judgy, and self-critical.

Be curious, not cruel.

Step One: Get clear on your goals—short term and long term

It’s important that you never sacrifice your long term goals for short term gain, but also, you need to take care of yourself in the short term to ensure you can stay in the game long enough to get to that longer term vision of the future.

If you’re anything like most of my clients, your short term goal is revenue. Hell, your long term goal might have some other details that go along with it, but I’m guessing you want to make enough money to finally have the entrepreneurial freedom we all seek.

Step Two: Evaluate your spend

Now, we want to look at where you are spending your time, energy, and money toward achieving these goals. No need to be truly exhastive, but you should be thorough.

Spend an hour or two mapping out how you spend your time, money, and energy. You want to look at every activity you undertake, every expense you incur, and all the headaches or frustrations you wind up dealing with.

I typically assess these in 5 major categories, but you may identify other areas where you are significantly investing time or money. List all of these out and include some numbers around the time and money you’re spending on each activity and then in each category.

Marketing efforts

Posting on LinkedIn, writing a newsletter, hosting your podcast, attending networking events, sending/responding to DMs, teaching workshops, truly anything you do in an effort to bring in more business.

Selling

Sending prospecting messages/emails, having sales calls, creating proposals, anything you do that turns a lead opportunity, and turns them into a customer.

Servicing Clients

Having calls with clients, conducting research on the project, creating deliverables, anything you do to serve the clients you have.

Admin

Sending invoices, managing your books, dealing with lawyers or accountants, anything you do to keep the backend of your business running from an operational perspective.

Learning & skill development

Not everyone will engage here, but take a look at the courses you’ve bought or taken and the overall expense you invest in growing as a person, professional, and an entrepreneur.

Step Three: Assess their output

Next, we’re going to look at every task or activity and evaluate how much it is contributing toward your goals — revenue, impact, joy, satisfaction. Anything that really counts in your book.

This part can be a little tricky, so I recommend creating a few criteria that you will evaluate.

  • Revenue is the most obvious one
  • Client results or experience
  • Personal joy or satisfaction
  • Skill development, brand awareness, credibility building, or anything that is relevant for your particular goals

    For example, if you want to eventually become a published author, anything that pushes you to develop your writing skills and build a following that will appeal to publishers—even if it doesn’t generate revenue yet—may be worth doing.

Typically I pick 3-6 categories that I can use to evaluate the impact of each activity and then rank each one on a scale of 1-5, totally each score to determine which activities are adding meaningful value to my life and business and which ones aren’t.

Step Four: Evaluate their potential

Now, you want to look at all of this and start to figure out how to proceed with each activity. You’ve got a few options from here.

  • Stop doing something altogether
  • Delegate it to someone else
  • Automate, templatize or systematize in some way
  • Find resources to improve its results (skill development, training, or coaching)
  • Double down to drive results

Opportunities to delegate

First, let’s look at the activities that simply must be done, but they take up a lot of time and you find them particularly frustrating or tedious.

For me, this is stuff like bookkeeping, back-end administrative work like sending invoices or scheduling calls. It needs to get done, but I routinely drop the ball and kind of hate it.

Consider investing in a bookkeeping service (I use and really like Fincent for only $199/mo) and/or hiring a VA to help you.

Opportunities to automate, templatize, or systematize

I guarantee there are a bunch of aspects of your client delivery and sales process that can at least be templatized, but at best be automated.

  • Automate client onboarding
  • Create templates for proposals and deliverables
  • Create templates and automations for messaging throughout your sales process
BTW: If you haven’t already, and you’re interested in learning more about automations and systems to make your entrepreneurial life easier, I highly recommend signing up for my fractional COO, Dr. Monica Rysavy’s newsletter. She’s the pro at this and is constantly delivering serious value to help you do it for yourself.

Opportunities to Stop, Pause, and/or Get Help

Now, this is where it’s going to get uncomfortable for a lot of you, but let’s look at where your’e spending time and money that isn’t leading to measurable results. The likeliest culprit here are marketing activities.

In my personal experience and seeing similar trends with my now 100s of clients throughout my career, this is the area where your time and money is most likely being wasted.

And I do mean wasted.

So take a look at where you’re spending time and money while never, rarely, or sporadically have generated meaningful revenue. In my view, you want to assess these in a few ways.

Option One: Do you think, if you’re being honest with yourself, do you feel like this is a waste of time? It hasn’t worked and you really don’t want to put the time or effort into figuring it out.

It’s genuinely okay to admit that writing your newsletter every week is a grind that you don’t enjoy. And since it’s never brought in any qualified lead, you’re just going to stop.

Option Two: Do you think, despite the lack of past success, there really is opportunity to make this project or activity work for you?

It’s also okay to admit that what your LinkedIn content isn’t working, but that you believe in its potential and you want to get help to figure out how to make it work.

If this is the case, you can consider pausing this activity and coming back to it when you have more time or, as many of my clients ultimately choose, to invest in help getting the training, coaching, and accountability they need to really nail it.

Opportunities to Double Down (This is your 20)

Lastly, we want to look at all the activities that have led to meaningful results—revenue, client success, and satisfaction—and find ways to do even more of them.

Let’s say you realize that in the last few months you landed some interviews on industry podcasts that led to inbound leads. You could put together a campaign to reach out to a bunch of industry podcasts for interviews.

Or maybe all of your inbound leads have come from connections in your network. You could craft a new and compelling offer for your ideal client profile and reach out to 30-50 people in your network to ask them if they know of anyone who might be interested.

Maybe you have landed some opportunities from your LinkedIn content, but in the last few months as you’ve gotten busy servicing clients and focused less on your content, the volume has decreased. You could decide to allocate some extra time to create content and engage on the platform to get those numbers back up.


I know this is a lot. It can feel exhausting to even consider assessing your business this thoroughly, but I promise you it’s worth it.

Improving the results of absolutely anything is damn near impossible if you first don’t take an honest look at where things stand today. Once you do, figuring out what to do next suddenly feels kind of obvious.

If you wind up using this method, I’d love to hear how it worked for you.

In love and growth,
Kasey

P.S. If you want help assessing your business and crafting a killer plan to take a big leap forward, reply to this email and let’s talk.


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