Today, we talk with Holly Haynes about what it means to run a full-time business on part-time hours so that you can focus both on professional fulfillment and motherhood. We chat about the systems and routines that need to be in place in order for you to function well, and the top three steps you can take today to make this your reality. You can find Holly HERE.

How To Run A Full Time Business Part Time with Holly Haynes

Holly is a productivity coach and business strategist who helps female entrepreneurs take back control of their time with proven productivity techniques, systems, and structure to create a business strategy that scales long term. She is an industry expert, host of the Crush the Rush Podcast, and featured Thrive and Entrepreneur author with a 20-year consulting background. She runs her strategic coaching business and the Crush the Rush planner company while raising her twin daughters with her husband in Columbus, Ohio.

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Show Notes:

  • What does “hustle like a mother” mean to you?
    • I actually don’t like the word hustle. I feel like for a really long time the word “hustle” was like you have to hustle to succeed. I got my master’s degree and then I had twins and then I was working up the corporate ladder and was like hustle, hustle, hustle, hustle. And then at some point, it’s like, well I don’t wanna hustle every day. It’s a lot and it’s not super healthy and no one is really happy when they’re doing that all the time time. And so for me, “hustle like a mother” is actually like, I wanna ditch the hustle mentality and really figure out a way to strategically have a business.
  • Tell us a little bit about how you started and your journey. You said you were working full-time and you started your business. So what did all of that look like?
    • I dabbled in network marketing for a little while. Right after my girls were born and I feel like it wasn’t the path that I wanted to be on forever, but it was the path that sort of introduced me to entrepreneurship. At the time I didn’t have Instagram. I had no idea what personal development was. But it introduced me to podcasts and all these things and so it triggered me to think bigger. 
    • As I was growing my career, I ended up getting to this point where I was like, okay, I have a master’s in strategy. I have a 22-year career. I have like the window office, I’ve got the team and this is nothing that I wanted. I wasn’t seeing my kids – at the time my girls were two – and I was like, I don’t wanna be gone 10 to 12 hours a day. This is not working. So I sort of dabbled in network marketing. And then at the beginning of 2020, I gave myself a one-year challenge. So I was like, I am going to create my own business. I’ve taught fortune 500 companies for 15-plus years. Now I’m gonna teach female entrepreneurs. That’s something that I’m passionate about.
  • We’ve mentioned several times running a full-time business on part-time hours, but what does that mean? What does that mean to you? What does that mean for a business? What does that mean financially, income-wise? What does that actually look like?
    • I think it depends on where you’re at in your business. I would say at the beginning, for me, I was sort of burnt out on what I had been doing before, which was network marketing. And I was like, I only have about an hour a day to give, so if I only have an hour a day, what is that going to look like? [I decided] I’m gonna put together a framework and I’m gonna follow this framework. So I put together this eight-hour work week and basically in a really short summary, Monday through Friday was one hour. And then the weekends, I usually had two to three hours and I called that my creative time.
    • So instead of working, you know, four hours at a time and completely burning out, I was like, I have an hour. I’m gonna give it everything I have. And then I’m gonna show up every single day and do the same thing. And because it was strategically spaced out, I didn’t get burnt out. And I was excited to have time to work on Saturday mornings. And then I was planning strategically on Sundays. So that’s what it looked like at the beginning. Now my ultimate goal is to work three days a week, two hours a day. So six hours a week. We’re not there yet. I would say currently right now I don’t take meetings on Mondays and Fridays and I probably work two to three hours a day. So we’re getting there.
    • I think that’s kind of been my key to success is knowing already what I’m utilizing my time for before I sit down.
    • I think the magic of the equation is that it is simple because otherwise, you wouldn’t follow it. I think we need simple. It doesn’t have to be this multi, huge process. Now we have funnels and all these systems behind the scenes, but I built them very slowly over time, in a very simple way. I think that is really important, especially for moms who are trying to do all of the things, you know, run a business, be a partner, have self-care, take care of mental health, and all those things that sometimes get pushed to the back burner.
  • So what are your main systems and routines that you put in place to kind of make this a possibility?
    • Before I go to bed, I look at my calendar and I’m like, what’s happening tomorrow? And I literally time block every single hour – that doesn’t mean every single hour I’m doing something, but it’s like, what is the day going to look like? And what is my morning gonna look like before everyone’s up?
    • From a like longer-term approach, one of the things that is probably more visual than strategic is what do you want your dream schedule to look like? And when I say dream schedule, it’s not like sitting at the beach every day, although I would love that, but it’s like, okay, your kids go to school, what do you want to happen?
    • I always say, put the boundaries around your schedule first and then other things will fit in and it’s not always perfect. You might have a meeting come up or an opportunity come up that you’ll adjust for. But 90% of the time it is. And what that does, is it trains your brain to show you that it’s possible.
    • I would say the number one thing I did at the beginning was to create an email strategy. And when I say email strategy, it’s everything from what you’re sending out to your email list every single week to making email, help work for you. So once somebody signs up with you, what is their client experience? What happens when they give you their credit card and enroll with you? How are they feeling welcome? How are you following up? How are you upselling them, or down selling them? Yeah. And so all of that is automated now because that is time, that was being taken away from what I could be doing. So that was probably my first big jump into systems and automation. And then really thinking about from a product perspective, like how do your products flow together and then how are they not confusing your audience?
  • What would you say your biggest tip would be to leave everybody something tangible they can do right now to kind of put their best foot forward when it comes to running their full-time business on part-time hours?
    • My number one tip is when are you going to work on your business? Because I think so often people are like, oh, I’m just gonna work in pockets of time. Okay, great. But when is that? If you want the one-hour-a-day method to work, you can’t have a thousand tabs open – you have to know what you’re doing during that hour. And then you have to be really consistent about doing it. 
    • And then I love to use themes. I just had a client that was building out her website and I was like, okay, well, every Tuesday is website day. On Tuesdays, you are doing everything you possibly can for your website. And if something comes up later in the week, you just put it on your Tuesday list and you get to it when you have time to work on your website. So it’s not like shiny object syndrome. It’s like, what’s the theme and what do I need to get done?
    • That’s kind of a novel idea for a lot of people because we exist in a world where if you get an email, you answer right away. If you get a text message you deal with it right away. Then if you have an issue, everything stops to deal with that problem. And I’ve found that’s not the best way for me to operate and you either.
    • I think so many of us have these like really big goals. And then it’s like, well, what are you gonna do with it? And so really like thinking about how can you use that one hour a week to just like break it down and just take like one step, like one step each day you can make a lot of progress. 
  • Where can everybody find you on the internet? Where are you hanging out and how, how can we support you, as well? 

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