Make more money... by working less? (Here's how)

Read time: 4 mins

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Crazy but true: I added $4980 p/m+ to my bottom line, working less than 10 hours a month.

Here’s exactly how I transformed a stressful side hustle into a passive income machine:

2 months after starting my agency, Grow Solo, and the enthusiasm for starting a new venture had started to wear off.

I was exhausted.

I was working 40 hours a week in my full-time job role and an additional 20+ hours a month on top with ghostwriting.

I was firefighting 24/7, on a one-way ticket to burnout city.

I felt like I was drowning.

Until one day everything changed…

My old CEO, Tom Hunt bought me a book that changed everything.

It was called “Sam Carpenter - Work The System”.

When it arrived, I stared at the front cover of the book through bleary eyes, clocking the strapline…

“The simple mechanics of making more and working less.”

"Oh great, another platitude", I thought to myself.

But I was out of options. It was worth a shot.

Little did I know my little world was about to be blown wide open…

In today’s newsletter, I will walk through the process I used to set up a side hustle that allowed me to make more money with less work.

So if you're:

• Struggling to set up a business

• Feeling like you're drowning in work

• Anxious about building an unscalable business

Today’s issue will be a game changer for you…

The Art of Making More and Working Less:

The author, Sam Carpenter, describes life as nothing more than a series of ‘systems’ that give specific results.

Arguing that if you can identify the systems you have and record them, you may then optimize them.

The result: engineering the life you want…

How?

Step 1 - The Systems Mindset: “Red Pill or the Blue Pill?”

Remember that iconic scene in The Matrix where Morpheus sits on that bejeweled chair in that clapped-out traphouse. He opens his hands and reveals two pills and says:

"You take the blue pill... the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill... you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

This is the equivalent mindset shift that Sam Carpenter hammers home in 'Work The System'.

He explains life is made up of many connected systems that we can either control or let control us.

There are two ways to think about how to live a happy and full life:

The Freudian view: Our past experiences shape our happiness now.

The cognitive view: Our current thoughts decide our happiness.

The author posits the cognitive view is empowering because it means we have the power to change our lives.

The main consensus: Keep things simple when trying to understand something. Break down big problems into smaller steps.

Your happiness is tied to how much control you have over your life.

To take control, you need to think differently and focus on what you can change.

The truth is, successful people think about the small parts of life and how to make them better.

They see their lives as a series of interconnected systems, which either have them inching 1% towards victory or crumbling towards damnation.

The graph of "1% better every day" from James Clear’s Atomic Habits illustrates this idea perfectly:

Where are your current systems taking you?

When life feels out of control, it's often because we're not managing the smaller parts of our lives well. In other words... we have faulty systems.

The author argues the world naturally wants to be stable and orderly. Our job is to accept and work with that. Failing to acknowledge the systems theory is a direct denial of the laws of the universe it's self.

Step 2: Your Route to Freedom - Create an Operating Principles Document

How can you hit a target if you don’t know where it is? This is the importance of mapping out the operating principles for your business.

The operating principles document is your guiding constitution, mapping out what you stand for as you carve your path through the world.

Before creating this, the objectives of my business were a muddled mess. I needed to distil the swirling mess in my head.

To craft my business Magna Carta, I set about imagining the values that would move the needle most for my business. It looked a little like this:

As I mapped out the more intangible elements of my service onto one document. I felt a sense of immense clarity during and after this task.

The result: a clear vision and focus, ensuring that my work within my business would align with my overall goals.

Step 3: Map Out Your Systems:

The author introduces the concept of ‘Work Procedures’ for everything you do more than twice.

A Work Procedure, also known as an SOP, is essentially a document outlining a step-by-step process that helps you achieve a desired result.

Up to this point, I had no documentation. The only systems I had were a disordered email inbox and a Slack channel packed to the rafters.

I set about like a madman over Christmas, mapping out the main areas of my business following these steps:

a. Wrote out the step-by-step processes that were critical to my business, for example:

• A Post Master Work Procedure: The full ghostwriting process from client meeting all the way to releasing posts.

• Engagement Work Procedure: An in-depth look at how to build a network for my clients on LinkedIn.

• Upload and Scheduling Work Procedure: The complete process to upload to LinkedIn.

b. Used Otter.ai to dictate the process, speeding up the creation of these Work Procedures.

c. I then copied and pasted each of these transcriptions into ChatGPT4 and used the prompt:

“Act like an expert project manager, you have the knowledge to apply the concepts of Sam Carpenter's book “Work The System” to create detailed work procedures that a 12-year-old could follow. Please take the following transcription and turn it into a step-by-step work procedure to help the person following it to {desired result}: {insert transcription}”

d. Edited the output from ChatGPT and copied it into a Google document for easy access in a folder called “Work Procedures”.

Over the last few months, I have continuously reviewed and improved my systems, removing unnecessary steps, adding details, and creating new work procedures for new processes.

The result?...

Step 4: Delegate, Eliminate, and Remove Everything Else…

As my business grew, I found myself buried in countless tasks, leaving me with little time to focus on what truly mattered.

It became clear that mapping these systems into work procedures was going to be the only way I could scale this project without losing my mind in the process.

Slowly but surely, I started to unshackle myself from the daily grind of running ops in my business....

I hired a Social Media Manager and ghostwriter who rolled on with ease…

The ship hadn’t sunk! The systems were working.

That month of hard graft crafting the work procedures had paid off…. I could now focus on the bigger picture and empower my team to handle the rest.

I hit my days with renewed zest, focusing on what I loved: client fulfilment and business development.

The maddest part?... I worked less, and the business made more money.

My side hustle work hours were reduced to just 10 hours a month. Stress levels dropped significantly. I took on new clients, and I went from working in my business to on my business.

And that all came down to one thing…

Systems > Everything

Hope this helps.

Thought of the day...

When you are ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. CXOs: Wanna become an industry thought leader, drive revenue and authority with LinkedIn Ghostwriting? Book a personal branding strategy call here to explore how Grow Solo can help.

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Peace,

Luke Shalom