How to Choose a Niche and Free Up Your Time with Jenn Neal

Kathi: Hi everyone, this is Kathi with Organized and Energized. I'm here with Jenn Neal. Jenn has been working in corporate America and running her own agency for the past decade. She knows what works and what doesn't in activating content, the key to online success. Today we're going to talk to Jenn about her recommendations for the best use of our existing content. Hi Jenn, thanks so much for joining me on the show.

Jenn: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Kathi.

Kathi: Yeah, absolutely. So you've been in corporate America. You were there for a decade. What did you do then?

Jenn: So all I have ever done in my entire professional career is marketing for small businesses. So I worked in corporate fresh out of high school for about 15 years, and then I've run my agency now for 13 years.

Kathi: So sweet. Okay. And what's the main challenge that you solve for your clients at your agency right now?

Jenn: Oh, the main challenge that we solve, honestly, is leads, because we all need traffic and leads, right? And the number one go-to that everybody does, that I know you're even doing yourself, is, "Hey, I have this program, and then I'm going to go run Facebook ads." And that's how you get leads. And I myself have done the same thing. And Facebook takes a big cut. And I think that that's the biggest pain, right? So I've figured out a way to cut your ad costs in half at least, if not more.

Kathi: I love that. We've got to hear about that for sure. So we're all entrepreneurs, and we've been entrepreneurs for a long time, both you and I. When you start feeling a little bit bluesy or a little bit overwhelmed, what do you do to regenerate and re-energize yourself and your business?

Jenn: That's a great question. So for me, it comes down to a couple of things. One, I make sure that I take care of myself. So to re-energize and reinvigorate, I literally calendar out time to spend time with family and friends, and to be creative, and to go connect with nature, and to meditate and exercise and all those things, because otherwise it's just all work and I totally burn out.

Kathi: Yeah. Work-life balance is so important. And when we're so enthused about our business, sometimes it's really hard. People around us can say, you're looking a little bit stressed out, and it's like, really? I'm all happy. But no, you've got to stop and regenerate yourself. In fact, I just did an hour meditation earlier this morning. I had a back-to-back-to-back-to-back schedule. I'm like, okay, let's zen out a little bit, right? You've got to take care of yourself. Go on.

Jenn: Oh, no. I was just going to say one other thing that I love, because I live in Idaho as well. So when the weather is permitting, if I get to a place where I'm just like, man, I need that meditation or that escape or whatever, I just go stand in the middle of the river for a good 15 minutes.

Kathi: And you live right by a river?

Jenn: Yeah. Well, pretty close. I have to drive, but that's a good invigorating thing for me.

Kathi: Yeah, no doubt. So it's usually pretty cold, isn't it?

Jenn: Well, we have all four seasons here, for sure. Right now it's winter, and it definitely feels like winter, but late spring through early fall, it's all river weather.

Kathi: Wow, that almost did not come out right. I love, love, love floating down a river in a canoe. It's one of my favorite things of all time, so I'm with you on that. My husband does the ice baths, so he goes and sits in rivers. Right now he'd go in your river in Idaho and sit in it for a little while, because he's a madman. But to each his own, right?

Jenn: Yes.

Kathi: Okay. So let's talk about hacks. What's your favorite hack for entrepreneurs who want to create more freedom within their business? What do you do, or what do you recommend that people do who need more free time and more ways to expand themselves?

Jenn: Such a great question. I'm not going to take credit for this. Plenty of other people do it. It sounds like more work, but doing a time audit, and literally recording every single thing that you're doing in five to 15 minute increments. And my favorite hack for that is I actually just use a time tracker, and I literally put in there eating, sending emails, calling family. And so whenever I'm working on these different things, I hit that time tracker, because what that allows me to do then is look and see where I'm spending more of my time, and what I can delegate, or what I know becomes a roadblock that I need to focus on, and say when I'm in that mode, okay, get off of social.

Kathi: Yeah. Oh, I love the time tracker. So is it a time tracker app that you use on your computer? Is that what it is?

Jenn: It is. I actually have Time Doctor, because my whole team uses that. But whatever it is, just track your time so you can look at stuff. I even played at one point with, somebody else did this as well, but there are these little, it's like a fidget cube.

Kathi: The Pomodoro cube.

Jenn: Yeah. And it's like, I don't know, 16 sides or something like that.

Kathi: Oh, okay.

Jenn: And they actually have custom stickers on there, and it tracks to an app. So literally you can put on there, oh, I'm eating. So you can customize each of your own things, and whichever side is face up tracks your time and just sends it right to a spreadsheet.

Kathi: Sweet. Oh my gosh, that's so sophisticated. Okay, I have to find that. I'll put the link down in the show notes for everybody, because I even want to check that out. As a time management coach, I help people all the time try to figure out what they do with their time. And if you don't know what you do, you don't know what you shouldn't do.

Jenn: True. It is so true.

Kathi: Okay, let's figure out. Oh, yeah, I probably shouldn't be doing that for that long, right? So I love that. That's a really, really good hack, Jenn. Thank you so much. And that's a wealth of information. In fact, I think I'll put both the links in there: the app that you use, as well as the little cube. I have a Pomodoro cube, but it's only four sides. But the time tracking thing is perfect. Okay, so you've had your business for 13 years. What's the one lesson that you'd say your business has taught you personally?

Jenn: Oh, this is so good.

Kathi: If you had to say one, right?

Jenn: Yeah. Well, I will actually say this one is life balance. And this has been a hard lesson to learn for me. And so it's so, so important. And I have a therapist as well, and she's always like, "I challenge you to work less," and I'm like, "I have to work all the time." Right? No. And what I found is actually four-hour workdays make you so much more productive in all aspects of life.

What I found is actually four-hour workdays make you so much more productive in all aspects of life.

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Kathi: Yeah. Would you say the four-hour workday, so that you could actually get off, spend time with your husband, have dinners and that type of thing, was that your ticket?

Jenn: Well, yes, but also in the fact of giving myself permission to work on myself, right? So I'm still working for six to eight hours a day, easy. But part of that work time is I build in, okay, this is when I'm going to meditate. This is when I'm going to exercise. This is when I'm going to read and journal. And so I'm doing work, but to me, in order to be a whole person, I have to schedule these things in, and then I'm done working at this point. It's so hard to do, but it all becomes so much easier once you do.

In order to be a whole person, I have to schedule these things in.

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Kathi: And the more in the zone we are, the more we get done anyhow. There have been all the studies with all these virtual people now working four days, and the four-day worker actually gets more done than the five-day worker, and I think it's the same thing. I remember Tim Ferriss when he came out with The 4-Hour Workweek. It was like, whoa, blow our minds, right? And it's not necessarily something that you can do easily, but I think it's a really good key. That's the path forward, right? And then to have two to three hours to work on yourself. Oh, yeah, I really like that. That's a golden piece of advice. Wow. Okay. So if I have missed asking you anything, what would be the one thing that I should have asked you that I did not ask you?

Jenn: I would say mistakes learned from, or lessons learned.

Kathi: Okay, let's hear them, girl. Let's have a couple.

Jenn: Oh, well, in fact, I'm working on a co-authored book, and so I was having to write my chapter, so this is definitely front of mind. But working with all these companies through the years, I always preach to them, you're doing too much. You have to niche down. What are you focused on? Who are you serving? Focus, focus, focus. When it came time for me to do that for myself, I'm like, oh yeah, I totally got this. But I didn't. And then I'm like, "Okay, no, this is my niche." But it wasn't a niche. And it literally took me a good two years, because I kept pivoting my business from doing all things automation, and building funnels and websites and all these things, to saying, now this is all I'm going to do. And I went through the roller coaster of emotions of, no, I'm niching down, what am I leaving behind? And once I finally just conceded and said, okay, I really do have to niche. Pick something.

Kathi: Yeah. Something. How about that one? No, that one. No, maybe that one.

Jenn: Everything became so much easier. And it took me two and a half years to finally learn this and really adopt it. So I would say really identify: are you really niched as much as you should be? It makes business life and personal life way easier.

Kathi: It does. It's so much less confusing, but it's very scary. I think when you first start a business, you want to be all things to all people, because you just want business, right? And then you've been in it a decade or so, and then you're like, oh, you never took the time to niche down. And then you have clients where you're like, I'm not sure if we're even a good fit. Niching down is a hugely, super important thing. I totally agree with that. And in my profession as a professional organizer, we all start as generalists, and then we figure out what we want to do, who we want to help, what we want to organize, and take it from there. And I think if you out there have not niched down, and you're kind of new in your business, definitely think about it. What I think, and you probably agree with this, is: what was that client you loved to work with? Who was that ideal client? And that's a niche, right? And what kind of project were you doing? Was it making you excited, or was it making you feel drained out? Well, then that's another niche, to do or not to do. So do you agree with all that as far as how to determine your niche?

Jenn: I totally do. I just love that you said that, because when I was starting, it was, okay, how do I figure out what I want to do? Because I'm a total super nerd, and so I can do all these things. Someone's like, "Oh, go figure out Infusionsoft." Cool, no problem. But just because I can doesn't mean I should. And that was a big, saying no, huge thing for me. And so the way that I actually personally said, okay, here's where my niche is going to be, is I had to go back to the data. And so I looked at all those clients. I literally created a spreadsheet, and I ranked all of our clients on how much did we like working with them as a team, on a scale of one to five. How profitable was it? What all did we rank on? How profitable was it, lifetime value of the customer, how much we liked working with them, type of project, and then level of success that customer had. And so I just looked at all of that, and looked at the numbers, and then we picked who are the people that we really liked to work with, and what are the commonalities that they had in between. And then that's where I narrowed it down, and really, I just landed. I'm like, it all comes down to content, effective content distribution. So that's how I landed here. But it all came from data.

Just because I can doesn't mean I should.

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Kathi: You are quite the nerd, aren't you? If you're going to have me do Infusionsoft, there's no possible way. Thank God for people like you. That sounds really good. But I think that's the takeaway for today, really: just because you can doesn't mean you should. That's such a huge thing to think about. Because a lot of us as entrepreneurs, that's what we do. We create, create. We can do a whole bunch of stuff. When we first start our business, we're doing everything anyhow, until we learn how to delegate or have the funds to delegate. But there has to come a point in our life, in our business, where we stop and figure out what we should not be doing and who we should not be helping, that that's not the ideal client. And it's something to fire clients, but we all need to fire clients from time to time, because they either stress us out, freak us out, or we can't help them anyhow. So that's a true sign of professionalism, saying no, really, I think.

Jenn: Yeah. And it gets to be a lot of fun, too, when you're like, yeah, I know where this is going. I'm saying no now.

Kathi: We are going down the trail that we do not want to go to. You're killing my zen, man. Hey, well, this has been really, really fun. Now, I know you have something to give the audience that's listening, and I'm so interested in what you do. So I cannot wait to discover more about you. But what are you going to give the listeners today?

Jenn: So I actually have a free link here to a paid masterclass that I used to do. And what it does is it literally walks you through the process of what we're doing, from the point where I said I had to figure out all that data, and then it shows you the journey that I took. It took me about two years to really perfect this model. And it's not rocket science, and it's nothing new, but literally, instead of just using paid traffic, or just trying to use organic social, or writing a blog, combining all of those things together increases the effectiveness and decreases the cost of all of them. And so I walk through this entire process of how all of this works. And there are video trainings and downloads too, so that you can actually walk through all the steps and figure out how it applies to your business.

Combining all of those things together increases the effectiveness and decreases the cost of all of them.

Kathi: That is a huge gift. Wow. Thank you. That's very, very generous, Jenn. I so appreciate it, and I'm sure everybody else will. Make sure to grab your download, gang, because that's very valuable. I'm going to check it out myself for sure. So hey, thank you so much. I have so appreciated this conversation, and I know that there are a lot of really good takeaways that our audience has taken away. So take it away, girls, and I will see you on the other side. Thanks a lot, Jenn.

Jenn: Awesome. Thanks, Kathi. Have fun, you guys.

Kathi: Okay. Bye-bye.