Marketing Advisor, Mentor, & Educator

Kevin C. Whelan

Marketing Consultants

Nine tips for greater energy, output, and income

There’s a good chance you’ll run out of energy today before you run out of time to get everything done.

And because of that, we need to manage our energy as or more closely than our time.

The better you do that, the more successful you’ll be.

So how do you manage your energy so you don’t deplete yourself and stunt your growth?

We’ll start with the obvious ones:

  1. We know good sleep is important. If you can get eight hours with no alcohol in your system, you’re golden. Nap if and when you need to as well.
  2. Exercise also helps—a LOT. I aim for 20 minutes per day which usually turns into 40 minutes once I get going. Big energy boosts and mental clarity.
  3. Diet is critical. I try to avoid a lot of carbs that might spike and then crash my blood sugar during the day. I also avoid big meals before dinner if I can.
  4. Meditation helps a lot. Using the Calm app for 20 minutes a day can give you a massive boost to your energy and focus.

These are the obvious ones (but important to work on).

So what else can you do in your businesses specifically to manage and enhance our energy?

For me, these are the big ones.

  1. Remove toxic clients. They’ll drain your energy, cause you stress, and reduce your ability to focus on the things that matter most. Stress is an energy drain that costs you money.
  2. Do work that lights you up. If you can find a way to spend most of your time doing work that actually gives you energy, you’ll be a lot more productive. That’s a choice you can make.
  3. Hire support. The more you can offload admin support and task work, the more time and energy you will have to do the work that matters most. Outsource the stuff you do often that anyone can do.
  4. Work with fewer clients. Sure, you might want to be booked completely solid, but without margin in your day, you’ll burn out. Doing higher value work for fewer clients frees up your time to create assets you can sell at scale and the bandwidth to do your own marketing. Don’t over-book your client work.
  5. Leave time to tinker. You’ll be a better consultant and human if you give yourself time to explore your interests, both professional and personal. Keep tinkering, learning, and exploring in your calendar.

Those are my biggest tips to help you gain more energy and be more productive.

The biggest is keeping room to think and breathe. It helps a lot to have buffer in your day.

So what’s your biggest tip for maximizing your energy and getting more done?

Hit reply and let me know!

Knowing you exist is half the battle

Typical real estate agents rely on word of mouth and relationships.

They meet people at barbecues, schools, sporting events—wherever they happen to be.

They also do door knocking, cold calls, and marketing, but a lot of business comes via referrals and relationships.

Consulting doesn’t need to be much different.

Yes, you want to do marketing. What better way to prove you have skills than by marketing yourself effectively?

But you also want to simply meet people. As many as you can. And ideally, within the niche you’re focused on.

Some may become clients, some may become partners, and some people just may refer you. Some don’t do any of those things, and that’s okay too.

There’s no special magic to it, either. It comes down to making a connection with people, letting them know what you do, and let the relationship happen naturally after that.

Half the battle is getting people to know you exist. Don’t over-complicate it.

Start conversations, meet people, and yes, keep marketing.

Don’t niche too quickly

Our ancestors ate what they had to in order to survive.

But as food became more abundant, they could afford to be more choosy.

They stopped wasting their energy looking for dangerous or difficult food sources.

They ate the more nutritional food they could collect more easily. The chose the stuff that tasted best.

It’s the same with specialization in your business.

In the beginning, you might not want to be too niche. Especially if you don’t have enough on your plate to sustain you.

Niching takes time and you need to stay in business long enough to gain traction.

Which means you might want to stay a little broader and take on any business you can at first.

Chances are, it won’t be the best business out there. But it will keep you in the game.

Over time, you’ll find the patterns. You’ll see where your biggest opportunities are. You’ll notice what you do best.

Around then, you can start to tighten up your positioning. Maybe you only work with a handful of industries. Or a broader section of companies.

You start to become more selective. You begin to focus on your advantages.

You’re not married to that focus, but it is efficient and enjoyable to live there. It’s also highly profitable once you get momentum.

Do what you need to to survive, but keep looking for your strengths, interests, advantages and opportunities. Double down on them when you find them.

Eventually, you’ll have more than you can handle.

How Tim Ferris does his year-end review

I took the entire week off last week to relax and enjoy the holidays. It was the first vacation time I took in a while. Much needed.

I plan to take a few spread out weeks this upcoming year to relax and think. I’m much more productive and have more perspective on things after a week or two off.

Anyway, during the week I did spend time listening to podcasts and thinking about how I want my 2022 to look.

One of the podcasts I listened to was on just this topic by Tim Ferris. It was a short but insightful one.

His approach is to look back at your past year’s calendar, week by week, and see what was things were a net positive or negative in terms of how it made you feel.

Using two columns, one for positive and one for negative, he lists the highs and lows of the year as a way to eliminate the things that he shouldn’t continue into the new year and focus more on the areas that were a net positive.

I’m paraphrasing, but sounded like a helpful approach to review your past year and plan for the new one.

So, I plan to do the same process next week when I get back into work mode. I’ll report back on how it worked.

Give it a listen if it sounds interesting to you: https://tim.blog/2021/12/27/past-year-review/

Most people don’t need you right now

One thing I learned about selling consulting services is that people don’t buy when you want them to.

They buy when they’re ready.

The vast majority of people who encounter you won’t need your services in that moment. And even if they do, it takes a long time to build trust.

Eventually, though, something happens in their business. You’ll come to mind first.

You’ve been consistently showing up on their radar. They know what you do. They have built some familiarity with you.

So they reach out. Maybe it’s a month later. Maybe it’s several years.

The point is, your work won’t pay off in some cases for a long time. The best thing you can do is keep showing up, adding value, and let the results compound over time.

Sure, you can do what you need to do to get short-term results. But don’t depend on them.

You’ll reap what you sow if you can wait for the harvest to mature.

Keep sowing and good things will happen.

Was this year a success?

Chances are, you accomplished a lot more this past year that you think.

You never realize it until you stop and reflect.

Look at where you were in January of this year. Now look back two years. Five years. Ten years.

How far have you come? Are you happy with the direction you’re going or do you need to make some changes?

A lot can happen over a decade. It’s hard to think that far into the future, but doing so keeps your direction in line with your values and interests.

Think about what business you want to run for the next ten years. Now’s the time to dream it up in vivid detail.

You can accomplish far more than you think with some longterm thinking and consistent effort towards your goals.

Happy New Year.

Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself

Most of us need to hear new ideas a few times before they sink in.

Sometimes we’re ready for new ideas and sometimes we’re not. Timing is everything.

Even your most read books have new ideas every time you read them.

So if your goal is to help your clients create new ways of thinking, don’t be afraid to repeat yourself.

Tell new stories that make the same point. Say things a different way. Come back to your core ideas often.

That’s the best way to make them stick, whether in your content marketing or your advisory work. People do appreciate it, even if they’ve already internalized and implemented your idea.

Repeat yourself as often as it takes. We all need reminders.

How to create a new productized consulting service

It’s almost impossible to know what features to include in your productized consulting services until you’ve sold them a couple times.

You may have ideas on what it should include, but almost always, people’s needs will differ from your imagination of what someone might need.

On top of that, how you sell it will be completely contingent on talking to people who have real need for what you do.

Without knowing the nuanced context behind why real people might buy your service, your sales copy won’t resonate with anyone. It will be dry.

That’s why I try not to productize my services until I’ve sold a standard scope at least once or twice.

Instead, I either create custom proposals for inbound prospects that later become productized services, or I put out the feelers to see if anybody is interested in an idea I have.

The sales process is where the magic happens.

It tells you what things people care about, where they want to go (outcome), why it matters to them, and therefore scope and value of the service in the first place.

Any time I try to make up a service from scratch in my head, it inevitably doesn’t fit anybody. It’s too theoretical and lacks the necessary specificity. 

Better to sell a service once or twice before productizing it. If you can’t wait, keep the service page lightweight, outcome-focused, and have people inquire for more info.

Then, let the sales process write the sales page.

Have the guts to stop doing it

Being happy is as much about removing the things you don’t like doing as it is about doing the things you do.

So, as you go into planning for this new year, ask yourself what you need to stop doing in your business next year.

It might seem difficult to stop things that aren’t working, especially if there are heavy sunk costs. But there’s nothing like the start of a new year to make an important change.

Have the guts to stop doing the things that no longer serve you. Phase it out if you need to. But make the choice this week.

I promise, it will make room for better things.

Buying credibility with ads

Today, while driving, I heard a radio ad for a longterm disability law firm.

I found myself noticing that if I needed to hire such a firm, a rightly-timed radio ad might just get me to call them.

Effectiveness of radio ads as a strategy aside, it got me thinking: some forms of advertising can create an impression of credibility

I figured if they advertise on radio, they must have reasonably big budgets. It’s not the kind of thing you do once, nor is it cheap to keep running them.

And if they can afford to advertise on the radio for an extended period, I also figured they must be reasonably successful at what they do. At least successful enough to do mass-media advertising (albeit at the local level).

This experience made me realize how advertising can, in some cases, create a level of implied credibility. 

Another example of this might be seeing a company’s ad on an NHL hockey rink’s boards. They’d have to be reasonably credible to do that, right?

Or let’s pretend I was looking for a new coworking space. If I visited five local coworking spaces’ websites and one retargeted me with ads on all platforms but the others did not, I would probably assume they are at least a market leader worth considering.

Funny how you can buy some degree of credibility. Not a lot, but potentially enough to get an inquiry or two.

What other ways do people “buy” credibility?