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Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
The Hidden Costs of NOT Using Business Systems
Are you ready to take your productivity to the next level while avoiding the pitfalls that come with neglecting essential business systems? In this episode, we unpack the hidden costs of not implementing structured processes in your business. Many entrepreneurs experience burnout and frustration when they attempt to juggle numerous tasks without a reliable framework. If you relate to feeling overwhelmed or stuck in a cycle of busyness, then this episode is for you.
We discuss how not having systems can lead to missed opportunities and limit your growth—both personally and professionally. You’ll gain insights into how organized frameworks can help streamline your operations, making space for new opportunities, creativity, and fulfillment. This podcast episode encourages listeners to rethink their approach to productivity and demonstrates how simple adjustments can lead to profound changes in your entrepreneurial journey.
Join us for an enlightening discussion packed with actionable tips and relatable stories that can help you unlock the effortless productivity you've dreamed of. Don’t forget to check out our masterclass, “Scaling Without Sacrifice,” to learn more about aligning your systems with your goals. Subscribe, share, and leave a review to show your support!
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Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in.
Speaker 1:On today's episode, we are going to be talking about the hidden costs of not using business systems. So if you didn't catch my last episode, make sure that you go back and you listen to that if you are wanting to understand why business systems and scaling methods have not worked for you in the past. If you are a creative, spiritual entrepreneur, a healer, a coach I hear so often business systems just don't work for me Scaling my business. It just feels so inauthentic it doesn't work. I've tried it before. I had no results. So my last episode really dives into why. That is why these traditional scaling methods don't work for entrepreneurs like us. Today, we are going to be shifting our focus a little bit and we are going to be talking about the hidden costs of not using our business systems, of not setting that stuff up. Like I shared at the beginning of last episode. We're going to have a little brief recap. So when we are talking about business systems, these are things that we put in place to make our business run more efficiently maybe organizing, maybe when you are launching your programs.
Speaker 1:If you do not have a business system, every single time you go to launch a program, it's like recreating the wheel. Right, you are having to remember what were all the things that I did last time that worked so well and you're having to pull that all out of your memory. And then you're having to go recreate all of that bit by bit, piece by piece, because you don't have the systems in place. An example of a business system in this case may be that you have a launch plan that is laid out, week by week, of the exact things that need to get done in order to make that launch a success social media posts and the email marketing and the stories that you shared. And then setting up automations, maybe things that you're delegating and outsourcing. Maybe you don't do your own graphics and that is something you have to outsource. We have to remember to outsource that. We have to reach out to our graphic designer and have them create those graphics. Maybe we have some automated systems, like people are able to register for our program online. Maybe we're doing a workshop or a masterclass to help promote that paid program. So we are launching that in the process of this bigger launch.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of moving pieces and so if we sit down every single launch and we're like, oh my gosh, okay, I have to remember all the things I did last time, I have to make sure I don't miss anything. Or maybe we're just kind of winging it and doing something different every single time, and then we have that question of like, why did it work so well last time and this time it wasn't as big of a success? Well, maybe we missed some pieces along the way. So an example of a business system could be that organization of week one I do these things. Week two, I do these things. Week three I do these things to help pace you out and make sure that you're using the same success path that worked so well for you before, so that would be an example. We can also think about all of those automated processes, or outsourced processes, as well as business systems. So maybe it is having that sales page, maybe it is having an opt-in form, maybe it is having an email sequence that's automated to follow up.
Speaker 1:What I have found, though, is so many creative spiritual entrepreneurs, coaches, healers. They shy away from business systems because they either have not worked for them in the past or it just feels inauthentic, or maybe in their head, they're thinking I'm just not tech savvy. I'm going to do an episode coming up very soon about that, so keep an eye out for that. If that is you, it's always like I'm just not tech savvy. I don't understand how to set this stuff up. So we have a whole host of reasons why we might not be using these business systems. Maybe it's just that things are moving at such a fast pace in your business and you're like I literally don't even have the time to get this stuff set up. I don't know where I'm going to find the time or the energy to even put this stuff in place, because things are just moving and moving and moving. You're literally. It's like whack-a-mole, right. You're moving from one thing to another and what I have found is that we can use these reasons of why we are not setting up our business systems, but they actually have hidden costs. They are actually costing us huge amounts in our business.
Speaker 1:The first thing that I find so often, when people do not get business system set up and again these can be very small, up to full complete systems as well when people do not get these systems and automations and processes set up in their business, burnout is likely coming right, because as our business grows, we are managing more clients or maybe our business is not growing the way that we want it to and we're trying to talk to more and more and more people and reach more people and go viral and do reels every single day and all these things are to-do list. Grows and grows and grows, and we're just stuck in this mode of busy, busy, busy, moving, moving, moving Again that whack-a-mole moving from one thing to another, to another, without having a time to breathe, to reflect, to restore and renew ourselves, and we can sustain that for a while, right, especially if you are somebody who's a very high performer. We can sustain that level of activity and energy output for often a very long period of time. But unfortunately, what I have found happens in the end is I was going to say nine times out of 10, I would say probably like 999,999 times out of a million. What happens is we are headed for burnout. We get to the point where we start to have a story in our head, or a belief in our head of oh my gosh, like if my business gets to this next level of growth, I literally don't even know how I'm gonna handle it.
Speaker 1:We also start to envision our future and it's like is this what this is going to be like forever and a lot of the time, what we are doing at the beginning of our business or in a middle stage or a season of really hitting things hard and growing, can use the word hustle, a hustle season. I've used that word. I don't particularly love the word hustle, but if you want to think about it that way, if we're in a hustle season and we are doing all this stuff and really trying to explode our business. But we get stuck there because we're not using business systems, we're not using the organizational stuff, we're not automating so that we can scale our business with effortless ease.
Speaker 1:What happens is we start to think, oh, oh, my gosh, this is going to be my life forever and for most of us, the vision we have for our life especially as a creative, as a coach, as a healer we don't want to be stuck in that season forever. That's not what we want for our lives. I find most creatives and healers that I talk to and coaches, the life they imagine for themselves is one of peace, it's one of having space, it's one of being able to lean into their own spiritual practices, to have time to create, to have time to learn new things and develop new skills and try a different kind of creativity. So when we start to realize that this season that we are stuck in is going to actually compound and really be the rest of our business life, a lot of the time we don't want to do that. That's not the vision that we actually have for ourselves. So we hit that burnout and a lot of the time it's very sad. I see people just flat out quit. They vanish off the face of the earth and nobody hears from them for maybe 10 plus years. So that is one of the hidden costs is that we can actually hit this place of burnout or realizing that that's not what we want for the rest of our lives, that our current state does not match that future vision, and we just quit. We're just done Right. So that is a huge hidden cost.
Speaker 1:Another hidden cost is that we miss opportunities. Lost is that we miss opportunities. If we are so stuck in, like just taking care of what is right in front of our face, we are actually missing all the opportunities around us to take our business to the next level. Maybe you love speaking and you would love to speak on stage, but right now you're like I don't even know how I would do that because I literally am just going through the paces every single day. I literally don't even know how I would go out and find speaking opportunities. I don't know how I would have the time to speak for people on stages. I don't know how I would have the time to travel. Maybe public speaking is not your thing and you're like that sounds awful and terrifying and I don't want to do that, but there are all these other things. When we don't have these systems in place and when our business is not able to scale and grow in the background, it's that being able to scale and grow in the background that allows us to be able to go out and pursue all these other opportunities that are out there and even just be able to literally see those opportunities that are in front of us. That is another hidden cost. Is all of these things that you are dreaming of, that we don't have the time and energy even to have a download? That that is what we want in our life, much less actually going out and seeking that.
Speaker 1:The last hidden cost that we are gonna touch on today in this episode is not having the business systems in place and the scaling systems in place. That actually puts a ceiling on your growth. It puts a ceiling on your own personal growth. It puts a ceiling on your business growth. It puts a ceiling on how many clients you can serve. It puts a ceiling on your income because, like I said, our time and, even more so, our energy, those are the things that are our most limited resources, and so, if we are doing everything manually, if we don't have any organization, if we don't have any system that we are following and any approach that we are following, there's only so many clients that we can work with, only so much income that we can bring in before we hit that cap, before we hit that ceiling.
Speaker 1:The only way to remove that ceiling is to somehow be able to take our limited energy resource and our limited time resource and compound them to basically take our energy and our time and be using it on the things that are going to grow our business and push it forward and have all those other tasks in our business and even just the organizational side of it as well. We need to have that happening without our time and energy expenditure, so that we can take our time and energy and use it for our creative pursuits, for serving people, for creating new programs, for making that impact that we want to make. So not having the business system set up, having the business system set up, not having the scaling system set up, is actually putting a huge ceiling on your growth. It means that you don't have the time to go take a course or a certification, to learn new skills, to grow yourself as a person, to go on retreats in order to refuel yourself. You can see how this actually kind of spirals back into the burnout side of things. Right, if we're not recharging, that's that limit on our personal growth as well. And then, obviously, if we are having to do every single thing manually and pull it out of our memory every single day, there really is a limit to how many people that we can help, how many people we can impact around the world. Those are just a few of the hidden costs of not implementing business systems and scaling systems into your business.
Speaker 1:So I hope that this shed maybe a little bit of light on some things that you were feeling, but maybe you weren't able to really verbalize it. Maybe you are feeling a little bit stuck around some of these, or you're like that's great, but like business systems organizing, that is not my jam. I am not tech savvy, I don't know how to do this. That's okay. Make sure that you keep tuning into my episodes, because we are going to be diving into some of this the next few weeks. I also have a masterclass called Scaling Without Sacrifice, if you are ready to dive in and learn actually how to do some of these things, how to do it in a way that feels aligned for you, that feels good for you. That is, systems that you can manage and tech that you can learn. Make sure you tune into that. I cannot wait to catch you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day.
