What It Really Takes to Work Less and Earn More [Episode Takeover with James Wedmore]

We’ve been conditioned to believe that the more we work, the more we earn. And often we use "busy" as a badge of honor – we equate success with working more hours and how hard we put effort into our work.

But I bet, there’s not a single person in the world who wouldn’t like to work less and make more money at the same time. And maybe like me, you probably started your business because you wanted to have ownership and control of how you spent your time. You do not have this dream to be chained to your desk all the time and work ridiculous hours.

So what does it really take to GROW YOUR INCOME and INCREASE YOUR RESULTS while actually WORKING LESS? And Is it really possible?

Listen to today’s episode – it’s a podcast takeover with my business coach, James Wedmore. He shares with us what it really takes to build a thriving online business from different angles, how to MAKE MORE and WORK LESS. I love how he approaches business and makes things super tangible and tactical and I wanted to share this because it speaks to exactly what I wanted when it came to my business. 

I hope this episode improves your relationship with time, moves out of the hustle mindset and encourages you to take action and scale your business that’s aligned with your life.

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Transcript

Well, hey, friend, welcome back to another episode. You are in for a real treat this week, because we are doing a podcast takeover from my business coach. Yeah, let me give a little bit of context on this one, because you're gonna want to buckle down for this one because it's real, real good. But let me just give you a little paint the picture of what's going on in my world right now. I just stepped off of an airplane flying back from New York City and I spent an incredible week at I mean, one of the most amazing events I've ever been to. I cannot wait to tell you more about it. I was in New York City. I met with over 200 top media producers from CNBC, from the Wall Street Journal, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and so many more like, Oh, my goodness, I'm so so excited. So I'll fill you in on that a little bit later but my brain is quite frankly a little fried so I'm not able to record an entire podcast episode for you, but hadn't planned on doing one anyways because my business coach so graciously offered to record something special for you today. 

Now, why did I go into an event this week? Why am I talking about my business coach? Well, a couple things. One of the things that I want you to hear loud and clear for me is this thing with entrepreneurship can be very confusing sometimes. We're blasted with information from all of these different people online and I don't know about you, but especially early on in my business, I had a hard time filtering out who actually knew what they were talking about and who just got really good at marketing and could get my attention. And while there were a lot of people in the second category, I really focused on how do I find the people that are not only getting results for themselves, but getting epic results for their clients. So I really heavily invest in my learning, I heavily invest in programs. The event I went through this week, oh my gosh, it was the most money I've ever spent to go to an event. But I do it because I put myself around the people who are doing really big things, people who are doing the kinds of things that I want to do. 

So what I wanted to do on the show, it is part of my mission here on this show is to expose you to people who are doing really big things, have really incredible stories, who keep it real and don't do BS marketing crap. I want you to to not have to go searching for whatever the latest tip and tactic is. I want you to trust your own gut, right? Be able to be clear around the kind of business that you want, but then be able to rely on mentors who know how to get your results. So I want to introduce to you my Business Coach, James Wedmore. You probably have heard about him. I've talked about him multiple times on the show. I talked about it on social media. I started following James, not to be confused with my husband James, by the way. This episode James Wedmore, who just for the record, no is not my husband. My husband is James Sager just to be clear. But I met James Wedmore back in 2019. I was fairly new into my business full time. I started my business in 2018. I was doing speaking, I was doing consulting, I was generating money and I'd already generated enough money and replace my my executive salary at my job, but I really wanted to shift into the online space specifically to have more scalable options. And I know that's kind of like a buzzword that a lot of people use but specifically I wanted to know how do I create programs that did not require my time? 

I would bet that if you're listened to show, similar to me, you do not have this dream to work ridiculous hours all the time. You probably started your business because you wanted to have ownership and control of how you spent your time. That's exactly what I wanted. And I knew that in order for me to build that kind of business, I could not be committed to stages. I could not be committed to one on one clients or to big giant consulting contracts, even though those things pay very well and I could book them. I knew that in the short term, know the medium term, like the short term, I was okay doing those things, but the medium term, and definitely not the long term, I did not want to work myself into another job. So I was introduced to James Wedmore and I learned more about what he did, I fell in love with his podcast, which by the way, if you've like podcasts, which, if you're listening to this, I think you like podcasts. It's called Mind your Business. I used to binge that all the time. My kids knew who James Wedmore was and we'll talk about him frequently, wanted to do updates around him but that's a really good show to listen to. But the thing that I love about how he approaches business is he's super tangible and tactical when it comes to how to market, right, how to design programs and all those things, but for him, it's really focused around how do you build your business from the inside out. And that always resonated with me, because personal development is something that I'm really passionate about, you know, I talk about when it comes to speaking, we have to make sure that you have the competence, you have the knowledge, you have the skills in order to be able to present your content. It's not about your talk, it's about how you talk. 

So the way that he teaches really resonated with me, and I've been in his programs ever since and I'm now part of his higher end coaching program. That sounds fancy when I say it, but essentially, it's a coaching program. It's your long, we have access to him and coaches and live events, and all these other amazing things. And when he gave me the opportunity to be able to share his content here on the show, I jumped at the chance. So this is a podcast episode that James recorded special just for some of his clients. It's not going on his show. So you're getting like a secret, a secret sneaky episode from him. And this episode specifically, I wanted to share it because it speaks to exactly what I wanted when it came to my business, about what does it really take to work less and earn more. So without overtaxing it, I'm going to let him do the work here. He's going to talk a little bit about himself and his business. So I want to invite you to come with an open mind this episode whether or not you've heard about him before the information in this is so freakin good.  if if that's the kind of business you're looking to build. It all starts by building your audience and not just people but actually finding and attracting people that want to work with you and want to buy the types of things that you will be creating and selling. So he also has a free mini course that you can grab right now. It's called your first 100 leads, please do not be dissuaded by the title. If you already have an email list, this is going to amplify your email list. James actually goes through the very specific step by step process that he uses inside his high ticket program, Business by Design. It is the exact same step by step process that I used when I launched my program, Speak up to Level up in the fall of 2019. And that program, I talk about it all the time, the very first time I launched was to an email list of 136 people and I brought in $24,000 which is crazy town bananas. But there's a specific way that James helps people put together their messaging, put together their offer and he's teaching it for you totally free in your first 100 leads. So if you want to grab your free ticket to that it is a digital little mini course it's got, I think 11 lessons, super quick to go through and he's also doing a live challenge right now but if you go to the link in my bio, you can get a special link it all this indicate to James's team that you came from me and that you love this podcast episode. So go there, grab it now and let's jump into this special podcast takeover for my business coach, James Wedmore.

James Wedmore  9:47  

Hi there, my name is James Wedmore, founder of Business by Design the rapid growth system for online experts that want to rapidly scale and grow their digital product based business and host of the Mind Your Business podcast. And I was asked to do an episode for you specifically on the topic and the big, big question of how do you make more and work less. So that's exactly what we're going to talk about in today's episode. And we're going to approach this from several different angles because that's what I've been able to do. Today, I have an eight figure a year company for several years now. I've been running an eight figure a year company and have really whittled it down to just a couple of hours per day. That changes here and there, you know, there's busier seasons in the air, but I don't have to be working 14 hour days, or sleepless nights or anything of that nature. In fact, as I reflect back on my earlier days, I was working far, far, far more. Pushing myself way harder to generate a fraction of a fraction of what our business does today. And this is a process, this didn't happen overnight, I've been running an online business, selling digital products for the past 15 years. I've made just about every mistake in the book qnd it's a pretty big book and I've learned a lot along the way. I've also been able to coach thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs at every single level. And we do everything in the realm from, you know, strategic business growth, to increasing performance, building a team, advanced marketing, sales, as well as personal and spiritual growth as well. So there's a long laundry list, because there's a lot that I've learned and a lot of it the hard way, but it keeps coming back to this same question, which is how do I work less and make more. 

So let's start at the beginning here with what I think will be the most important thing that I share. And if it's the only thing that you hear, may just be the most powerful thing. I believe that 90% of if not all 100% of the people that ask this question. There's something behind this, that is actually causing the asking of the question which is that they're connected. It's almost presupposing that they're connected. What do you mean by that, James? Well, how do I make more and work less means that we are still operating from some time money connection. Most of us have been adopted and indoctrinated into a paradigm that I call the employee mindset where making more means I have to work more. If you don't believe me, you can pause this episode right now and see what answers your unconscious mind give you when you say in order to make more I must blank, or I believe that in order to make more I must blank. And for most of us it's work harder, work longer, work faster. For most of us it's struggle, sacrifice, push, hustle, right. And if I do more, I'll make more. 

So the first answer to how do I work less and make more. You cannot pass go, you cannot collect $200 and you definitely can't make more and work less, if you don't do this first piece. We must once and for all break the time money connection. We must once and for all, if you are an entrepreneur, we must once and for all shed the identity of the employee paradigm and step into the world of entrepreneurship. The moment you do that, and truly are in that world, you recognize that money and the ability to make money and attract money is not contingent upon work. That doesn't mean when i by the way, when I say this, that it means you just sit on the couch all day and collect checks. No, work is still required. I'm saying it's not directly correlated which means if you're an employee and I hire you, and you work one hour, I give you a certain amount of money. Let's say I give you 30 bucks. You work for an hour, here's 30 bucks. So you want to make 60 bucks, you want to double your money, double your time. You want to spend more hours? Yeah, you're gonna make more. Some of us, most of us are still doing that in our business. And when you do this in your business, two things are real big problem. Number one, it's total fact that you are running your business, just like you fuel your car, you're fueling your business from a finite resource, which means you've already decided there's a cap, there's a limit, there's a constraint to my business growth. There's a ceiling. And for some of us, it's pretty low ceiling. Why? Because there's only so many hours in the day. There's only so much energy you have, hours and output of work and so now you're limited to that. If working 10 hours a day, which is a lot is all you can do and that makes you 1000 bucks a day, then you're limited to 1000 times 365. If you could maintain that for the whole year, which most people can't, right? But there's another problem, it was that when we run from this paradigm, we've completely, utterly convinced ourselves that money is more valuable than time because we're willing to give away a finite precious resource for money. And every single successful entrepreneur I know today has flipped it. It may not happen overnight for you, I understand. But they know that time is more valuable than money. Why? Because money is an infinite resource. You spend time, you can't get it back. You spend money, you can get it back, and then some, and sky is the limit. 

So what I want us to understand here that we cannot go any further in this conversation, if we're still operating our business that making more money means I have to work more. You'll never be able to work less and still make more. We must break the chains of that connection. And I'll give you an example that's just a drive at home because number one, look around, do you know at least one person that is working really hard and working like 12 hour days but they have very little to show for it? Some of you might be like, oh, that's me. Okay, so you're working really hard, you're working the full days and someone that you know, is doing that, and they have little to nothing to show for it. Proof in the the plane right there, right? You know, here's an example does nothing to do with business. You and I are neighbors and we both decide at the same time, hey, we should build pools in our backyard. You're like, that's a great idea. And I start grabbing my shovels and I get to work and I'm digging, digging, digging. And then you look at me, like look at this knucklehead, shovels. Then you go rent some big earthmover and in two days, you've dug a hole and I've got like a, like a little ditch in two days and you're done. Okay? 

So the reality is, the fact is, I worked harder than you. I work way harder than you. You just had to control some levers, but you got the result. I didn't. So if the outcome and results that we want, we believe are only contingent upon how long and how hard we effort then we're always going to fall short and we really run the risk of burnout because how many pools can you dig with a shovel, right? And how long is that going to take you before your blisters on your fingers, your sore, your know, sunburned in the sun, all that stuff, right? So that's what I'm talking about. Now, here's another example of this. My little sister just launched her product and she did the same launch twice. She quadrupled the price. She took it from 100 to 400 and doubled her sales. Boom! Overnight. That's amazing, right? So yeah, conversion rate went down but she did no additional work, except change the price. She doubled sales. And so these are examples like that wasn't because she worked more, she didn't work twice as much. She worked the same. And so we need to break free from that time, money connection. We don't want to keep running around saying I want a certain amount of money but I don't believe I deserve it so I must sacrifice and work harder and longer to prove to myself that I deserve it because that'll never happen. It's like chasing mirage, right? It's just not going to happen. 

So, don't focus on making money. Smart entrepreneurs focus on making a machine that makes money and that's what you want to do. You want to build the machine. You want to do what it takes effort, time, energy and money to build the machine and then we need to get that machine to work for you. So when you're doing that, you're thinking more strategically. So to make more, we want to be more strategic in all of our thinking. In other words, we want to be leveraged. You want to understand the model that you're working from. There's a lot of bad business models for people that want to make more, work less. Here's a great example, running a restaurant. You're like James, I really want to make more money and work less. I think I'm going to start a restaurant. Do you know how much time money and stress being in the restaurant industry would be for you? Omg, right? So that's not a good model. You say, James, I want to offer social media one on one consulting for $50 an hour, probably going to have to work long hours to make the money that you want so there's no leverage there. Okay, so when we do leveraged, we mean, we're going to do the work once but it's going to have multiple outputs. 

I'm gonna give an example of this. Years ago, I promoted someone else's program. When people bought it through my affiliate link, I included a live event in person. So I got paid a commission to host this live event, two days in Southern California. So then I host the event so I got paid by the commission's to host the event, I recorded the whole thing. Boom, all of a sudden, now I've got a new training program. I got a new course because I recorded the whole thing. And I sold that in the future. I sold those recordings. Number two, I got testimonials from people that were there that I could use those testimonials in my marketing and number three, I made an offer there. So I had four benefits from one three day event. I got commissions from a program, I got to record it, I got testimonials, and I made an additional offer and I think I generated like an additional like 20, 30,000.  Okay, that's leverage thinking. And when we're being smart and strategic in our business, obviously we want leveraged offers. Every single online business and online expert needs to have a leveraged offer. 

Now a leverage scalable offer means whether one person buys or 1 million people buy, it does not matter. It's no different. You could have a thousand people go in it tomorrow. I know it's kind of hard for some people to fathom, like, oh, my gosh, is 1000 people going through my course, like, I'm freaking out, right. But it's two people, it's no big deal but it's the same thing. It's all 1000 unique individuals. So we all need to have that if we want to be making more. So it's gonna be really hard to work less, but continue to make more if there isn't a leveraged offer. And so any type of leveraged offer, online course, a membership, any digital product of sorts, is where it doesn't matter how many people buy it, your time doesn't go up and your cost doesn't go up. So if you went from one member in your course to 1000, you wouldn't spend any more time, you know, generally speaking, right. But if you had one client, coaching client, one on one, and all of a sudden, you got a thousand on one coaching clients, that's an example of not a scaled or leveraged offer. So we need to have that in place. Okay, so that needs to be there before we go any further, then we need to have a strategic way of getting that to as many people as possible and understanding that once you've built that machine to sell that leveraged offer, the machine should be built in such a way so that the more people that see the offer, the more people buy. So if you don't have a way where a thousands of people can see the offer at once, you're not really doing something to make more work less. Does this make sense? In other words, if the only way you sell your course is you get on a phone call with someone, or they have to fill out a form or send you an email, you don't really have a scaled sales system. But if you go live on Facebook at a certain time and there's 2,000 people watching you live, all right, now we're on to something. Does that make sense? 

So the offer and the sales process has to be leveraged and scalable as well. And it doesn't mean all of your offers have to be this way. I have offers that are not as leveraged or scalable. But I do have offers that are, so I have both. And next we want to look at your pricing. Always have what we're going to call premium pricing. If you don't have premium pricing, then I have to ask why. And I'm assuming that the reason is, you think that if you have it priced lower people will choose you over your competition. That means you're playing the price game as your unique positioning in the marketplace. And that's a price war. If you play a price war, you know, if your USP, your unique selling proposition is based on well, I'm cheaper, then you lose. You'll lose, okay? Because now you're associated as being just a cheap product. So what you do you attract cheapy people, they're just the freebie seekers. That's crazy, because you're saying that's the only benefit that you offer in the marketplace is that you can do it a little cheaper. Why not offer a premium service, a premium product and charge what it's worth which means it's a premium price. 

Now I understand I can be talking to people in many different niches so this is all relative. So what premium price means is you're in the top 10% of your market and your price right up there at the top. I don't want you to see, okay, everyone, let's see, I'm in the fitness space and most fitness memberships are like $30 a month. screw it, I'm going for 300 a month. Probably not the best unless you're like you're very skilled in what you do as a sales and marketer to do that, to make that jump. I'm not saying you can't do that. I would say probably not the best place to start but you should be premium priced. Premium price means you're in the top 10% of your market for comparable type products and services. Okay. And sometimes it's even going higher than that, that's fantastic. You know, I offer premium services. I always over deliver and my stuffing cheap, you know, and because of that I attract really committed serious, awesome people that I love working with. I think you should be doing the same. 

So when your prices are higher for a leverage scalable product, you're gonna make more by working less. Period, right? And I won't get into the whole world of numbers and fun stuff, but some people go, but James will my conversion rates go down if I raise my prices. Of course they could totally go down. But the higher price still tends to offset the dip, the minor dip that happens in conversion and it's usually it's pretty minor, so food for thought. Final thing in my make more column, that needs to be in place here and that is an ascension model. I talk about this heavily in my training for Business by Design in my free workshop, the Rise of the Digital CEO, The ascension model is understanding that this whole concept of Lifetime Customer Value, LTV. The higher your LTV is in your company, the more successful your company is going to be your business. So what's an LTV? LTV, is the total dollar amount of a customer over their lifetime with you. In other words, you've heard the stories or the little facts floating around that getting a yes from an existing customer is up to 10 times easier and cheaper than getting a yes from a complete stranger. And I don't know if it's 10 times, it could be 11 times, it could be 25 times. I don't know what the exact number is but it is definitely history to it. It is absolutely very accurate to get someone to say yes again, to continue working with you than to go chase new people. And think about that, so now we have a leveraged offer which means we can bring in more people, we have it at a premium price and we've brought them in through a leverage sale system at a high price and now we stack that with a second or third offer so that it's easier to sell to existing people and keep them in our world. And I have many, many, many examples of this, but I have an ascension model where people can join my program and then they can upgrade to coaching to work with me and my coaches at a more intimate level. But then we have opportunities for people to renew and we ask people to stay in our program. Say it's a 12 month program, they get to the end of the 12 months. You want to come back for another 12 months. And we see anywhere from 40 to 80% Not just going from one product to the next product, but staying another year or a third year.And this is one of the most effective ways, when you put them all together, that's the most powerful, but this is one of the most effective ways that you can be making more, free from your efforting is when you have a back end offer or what we call putting the essential model in place where one product leads to the next one. Now that you've learned this, how would you like to learn that? Now you've completed this, we've learned this, gone through this, here's the next thing to graduate to, or here's how to renew or stay another year, come to the next one, you know. Many, many different ways for this to manifest. But I just I wanted to lay these out a big picture process. 

So these are all ways that we can start to leverage break free from the efforting in order to attract more revenue, but there's also ways to work less. In fact, we have to focus on these because this is so important, so many ways that we could be working less, so I'm gonna go over a lot of them. First of all, this is the one that people are gonna hate the most but this is the one you're gonna need the most and that's hiring. Hiring any kind of team to delegate, to outsource, to get it off your plate. And if it means just starting with your first virtual assistant, you know, because just getting a couple of hours a day back is going to be such a difference for you. But if you're sitting here and that's fine if you are but I'm just gonna call you out and you say, James, I want to make more and I want to work last but I'm unwilling to hire anybody, then good luck to you. I don't know what to tell you because that's the easiest, most powerful way to work less is to attract your team and to start with one person even a part time virtual assistant, just take a few things off of your plate. 

Next, once we start outsourcing and delegating that goes into a whole world. It really really does. We can start looking at automating things. How can you automate more in business? There's so many tools out there like we use Monday.com and Zapier that allow you to automate things that normally don't whether it's calendar invites, or you know, certain emails or weekly processes and check ins and reminders, all these little things that five minutes here, 10 minutes there and if you're not looking at it, they all add up and they eat wager day. So when we get to automate those things, we get our time back. Next, I want you to look at ways in which you can rinse and repeat. How can we repurpose and reuse? You know, if you're doing a launch or promotion, are you starting from scratch every time you writing all those emails again, all that copy again, redo the sales page, redo the messaging, or are you saying let's keep it as it is. Let's use those same emails. Let's use that same ad. Let's just tweak it here. Change it here. Let's use the same thing here. Let's repurpose. You know we do a ton of repurposing and a ton of leveraging which means I can record a podcast episode like this and I can take a clip and I can go boom now it's on Instagram. Now it's on Tik Tok. So how can we repurpose and reuse our existing content because you are the bottleneck as an online expert. We have to create so much content as it is so you might as well leverage it. You might as well reuse it. 

And then the last thing here is really around deletion. If you want to work less, yeah, we got to hire and outsource. We got to automate, we got to repurpose but what about deleting. Some things we're doing, we just have to be honest with ourselves. It's time to stop doing. The things you want to delete, the things you need to stop doing, or the things that are not scalable. So some people say, you know, James, I'm doing pretty good but I still want to work less. And I am working with one on one clients, I have two one on one clients is kind of dragging me down, I'm kind of tired of and dah, dah, dah. And it's like, but I make a couple thousand extra months with it so it's like hard to let go that money. And I've been there, I totally get that. But if you're feeling that call, I can guarantee you. When you let that go that old unscalable money go, if you feel like it has time to go. It's a gas kind of draining me feels heavy now, they will just open you up for more scalable, smart money making opportunities. Guaranteed, does how it always happens, but sometimes we hold on to those things that keep us busy, and they drain us a bit. If you're still doing some low value activities that in your heart, you know, that you shouldn't be doing, it's time to get them off your plate. And sometimes we're just doing things in the business that we just have to be honest with ourselves, anchor on the business, like we spent a lot of time on Pinterest. And then one day I just say okay, guys, it's not really doing anything for us. Let's cut our losses and we'll go to Tiktok. And you guys got to be honest, you got to be really honest with yourself, is this serving the business? Is this growing the business? Is this moving the needle or am I just staying busy? And a lot of people just stay really, really busy in their business. 

So I love this conversation. I love this question, how do I work less and make more because what I've found is when you are very intentional and strategic, what you will find is that when you do less, you end up making more and that's what I want for all of you. I hope this episode was of value to you.  I hope it opened your eyes to something that maybe needs to go or something that you have been putting off in your business that will help you in order to increase revenue without increasing your workload because that's what's possible for you. That's what I've been able to do. That's what my students and clients been able to do and now it's your time. And if you'd like to learn more from me and my system and approach for building a very scalable and very profitable online business, I invite you to come join me for my three part live training workshop, entitled The Rise of the Digital CEO happening this June 2nd. I call it the Digital CEO because the moment we got into business, we created an organization even if it's just you, that organization consists of several roles. There's the role of customer support and tech and invoicing and your marketing in your sales department, your social media manager, your copywriter and the CEO. And what I tell my students over and over again, is it's the role that you fill in your business determines the results you receive. And it's time to fill the role that your business needs from you the role of the digital CEO, so you can start getting the results that you definitely, definitely deserve. So I hope you'll come join us for this powerful three part training that's designed to completely and radically transform your business from the Inside Out. We've had students say that this free training was more valuable, more eye opening and more mind blowing than most paid programs they've ever been a part of. And that's because I've been doing this for over 15 years and I've been able to help thousands of online experts like yourself, grow and scale. And yeah, today people call me the Millionaire Maker. I love that title and that's what's possible for all of us to grow our business. Yeah, to make more money, and most importantly, to help more people. So come join us so that you can do the same in your business, that is the Rise of the Digital CEO, coming June 2nd.