Build, Run, and Deliver: How should I spend my time?
We’re often sold an image of entrepreneurship that feels like a fantasy: working a few days a week and delegating client work and marketing, all while magically scaling the business.
But here’s the reality—sustainable businesses require thoughtful allocation of your time, energy, and focus across key areas. There’s no shortcut around it. We need to match that time allocation to our business model to ensure we have the ability to meet our revenue needs with the time we’ve allotted to delivery.
Trying to contort yourself into an ideal weekly schedule that doesn’t honor each of these needs means you’re going to be overwhelmed and burned out.
Your time is your most valuable resource, but how you allocate it depends on your business stage, model, and goals. Here's a general guideline for allocating your time, focusing first on delivery-based businesses.
Deliver the Work: deliver your client work, projects, or run your courses and communities.
Run The Business: The repeatable activities that run your business system and lead to clients. Think routine marketing, sales, task and time management, invoicing and bookkeeping, scheduling, writing blog posts, etc….
Build the Business: The business-building tasks and projects you implement to make running and delivering the work easier, higher-value, or more effective. Writing new sales pages, doing market research interviews, setting up your CRM or Notion database, investing in new courses.
And for service-based businesses that need to bring on roughly 1 new client per month (like coaching for example), that this is where I advocate spending your time.
50-60% Deliver the Business (at max, and you’ll see why)
25-35% Run the Business
15-20% Build the Business
(If you have a different business model, such as a Craftsman with a handful of long-term clients, or a Creator business, the time ratios are different. Learn more in my Deeper Business Model Mini-Class, free for newsletter subscribers).
So if you’re running your business in 30 working hours per week, that breaks down per week:
15-18 Hours of Client Delivery
8-10 Hours of Run the Systems work
4 Hours of Build the Systems work
The anatomy of that 8 hours of Run the Business Work
Here’s a sample breakdown of what I commonly see for those 10 hours.
Basic Admin, including email, scheduling, and task management: 4 hours a week
Weekly Newsletter or Podcast: 2 hours
Coffee Chats: 1 hour
Sales Call and Follow Up: 1 hour
Social Media: 2 hours, including posting and “engaging with your comments”. (And this time is probably wildly underestimated if you’re making reels or graphic content).
And that’s it.
I didn’t even get to the Run the Business tasks for other systems beyond marketing and sales, like business operations and strategy/financials.
But Jessica, there’s so many more things we’re suggested to do! You’ve even told us to do other things!
Just in marketing alone, here’s a number of things you could do, just in running your marketing and sales process:
Join communities
Write a daily newsletter
Send personalized follow ups to your pipeline and past clients
Host workshops
Run a free community
Have a podcast AND a newsletter
Launch a YouTube
Guest on podcasts
Pitch newsletter collaborations
Engage with angry people on X or Threads
Write blog posts for SEO
Pitch conferences
… and the list goes on and on.
Reality? The core parts of running a business take more time than you think, and you cannot do it all, especially as a soloist service provider.
The people you see doing all of those things have at least one of these to be true, including me.
They are a creator, where their business is not built on hands-on client delivery
They have a team to help execute either the work or the marketing/sales
They have a backlog of content they can draw from
They work more than 30 hours per week
They don’t have a full client load at the moment
This is not to discourage you.
This is to encourage you to be radically intentional with your time and attention.
To be honest with what activities - and the time you spend on them - are effective for you.
To avoid dispersing your effort amongst too many things, and not making the most of each of them.
Because there’s an infinite number of things you can be doing… and a finite time for you to do them.
Make the most of your Run the Business time
So if you cannot do it all, how do you really make the most of the time you do have?
I’m outlining three principles.
Think multi-purpose assets, not re-purposed content
Nothing I do to run my systems serves a single purpose in my business, and none of it is depreciating, disappearing after some time into a newsletter archive or the void of social.
Almost every one of these newsletters is also posted on my blog, and the best pieces are part of a welcome sequence for subscribers. And the content over the past 2 months has informed my Business Systems Assessment.
The class I taught this week was informed by a client question, and led to this newsletter, a future YouTube video, and a client template.
Every guest podcast I appear on? Is put on a playlist for future clients to binge.
Every social media post? Is either a 15 minute instant reaction to something I heard that day, or is an idea I’m exploring for or from a newsletter.
And all of this content is making its way into my book.
Trying to take the same piece of content and chop it up into material for a different platform? Splits my focus trying to be too many places, without being effective at any.
But multi-purpose assets? They compound over time.
Maximize the return on investment for the effective activities we do
When we’re maximizing the return on investment, we’re either getting more from the same amount of time, or reducing our investment.
Maybe you make activities more effective:
If you’re joining a community for networking, don’t just log in and linger. Get the most out of that investment: have coffee chats with everyone, follow up regularly, and deepen those relationships.
If your best marketing channel is referrals, be consistent and personalized in your follow up cadence.
If you’re guesting on podcasts, make sure you have a high-converting place for them to land afterwards, and stay in touch with the host.
If you’re going to be on social, master ONE platform. Get to know the rules, the players, and go all in on the rules.
Or maybe, it means reducing the time you spend on activities that aren’t actually working:
Publishing a newsletter bi-weekly or chopping it in half if it’s not converting for you
Dropping a social media platform (or all of it) entirely from a posting perspective
Winding down your free community, if you don’t have the capacity to really make it an effective marketing tool
I personally am spread way too thin. I joined a ton of communities, had an Instagram AND LinkedIn AND Twitter, wrote this newsletter every week, and taught a free class every month. I didn’t know what worked, but now I’m committed to too many things to do well. Which is why I’m paring down.
Have radical restraint on what you build
You could build a lot of things to do in your business.
But running those things well? Over time? And making sure they are effective? That’s a whole different effort.
It’s incredibly difficult to focus on doing a few things really well. Because when we sign on to the internet, we’re simply bombarded by all the things we could - or should - be doing.
We’re modeled this by people who have different business models than we do.
And we feel the pressure to go fast. Without stopping to think about what we need to do next to build our particular business.
Which keeps us always context switching, diffuses our efforts, and keeps us from doing the deeper work and getting really good at the few activities we choose to do.
So if you’re a soloist, take heart in the fact that you cannot do it all. And you certainly can’t do it all well. And that focusing on fewer, better activities in your business is the sustainable answer.