List Building Challenge: Why Your Day Is Unique

The true reason that we feel it is of the utmost importance to build an audience (your email list) with people who actually want your offers and buy from you instead of just people who only want your free samples and then head for the door is . . . your time.

This is part five of the list building challenge Check out the full series at the further reading section at the bottom of this post

What I mean is, you have important things to share with the world and you probably don’t have the time to cater to and nurture only people who aren’t taking your offers seriously.

This is not to say that they are terrible people 😂, this is just to remind you that there are other people who really want you have, and it’s better to spend your time getting in front of them and helping them.

See. There’s an (in my opinion) unhealthy mantra that looks great on Instagram but is a complete lie:

“You have the same 24 hours a day that Beyoncé does.”

Should we hold ourselves to the same productivity standard as Beyoncé, or Richard Branson, or Martha Stewart when we’re trying to build a business from scratch or scale up our 1- or 2-person operation?

I would like to go with a hard “NO.” here. Why?

There are at least 7 key factors that influence our time and productivity (which kinda happens to matter when building or growing a business):

1. External Help
2. Skill Level
3. Other Responsibilities
4. Day Job
5. Mental, Emotional, and Physical State
6. Travel and Commute
7. Work Environment

When we take these factors into account, do we really have as many hours in the day as Beyoncé? Let’s examine this a little more closely.

1. External Help

Beyoncé is an entire brand herself. A brand with staff helping her manage everything. I was doing research to make this point and I just gave up after reading about 6 nannies for the twins, 2 nannies for their older child, a team of legal/PR people who are reserving social media handles and trademarks for all the children, the multiple personal assistants, the security team, the stylists, the people who do her hair and her makeup. I didn’t even get to her own private chefs, private transportation, advertising/PR people, choreography/production people, her on-site personal trainers, and everything in between.

So, if you REALLY want to calculate how many hours Beyoncé has in a day, she has:

24 hours–of her own time (which is somewhat distraction free since people are taking care of things for her)+

320 hours–of her staff members’ time (I don’t have the actual numbers, so I’m just going with 8 hours x 40-ish staff members; note: she owns multiple companies that do various work so I didn’t even get deeply into that–this number could easily be 100 people–call me too lazy to continue my research)

344 hours per day (lazy estimate)

She not only has the sum of her all her own hours but she also has the sum of all the working hours of her staff to help build her brand and support her lifestyle.

So, a non-Bey person might have 8 hours in a day where they’re not at their 9 – 5 or taking care of their children . . . however, keep in mind they need to sleep during that 8 hours.

Where as a Bey person has at least 344 hours in her day.

Does 8 = 344?

The last time I checked, that was a difference of 336 hours. Every single day, Beyoncé gets at least 336 more hours than we do.

That’s an extra 122,640 hours she gets each year. And again, I probably grossly underestimated her actual staff hours due to laziness . . . or really due to the fact that I didn’t want to spend one more of my limited hours today calculating them to make a point that is clear: We do not have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé.

This is not a knock on her. Or us. We have to maximize the hours we do have, consistently, and become increasingly efficient at growing our businesses from scratch, and in doing so, we will create more hours for ourselves.

I’ll keep the other points short:

2. Skill Level

There’s a difference between creating a month’s worth of images for Instagram in an hour and taking 20 hours spread over multiple days.

3. Other Responsibilities

Some of us raise little humans, spend an hour cleaning up after dinner, or spend 2 hours doing laundry every other day.

Some of us don’t have an extra $1,000 each month to pay for ads, or software that saves time . . . we’re paying rent and childcare expenses.

4. Day Job

I used to have to work on my side hustle from 7 PM to midnight (or even until 4 AM sometimes) when I had a full-time job and other responsibilities.

Some people work 12 hour shifts in addition to their family responsibilities. Other people are busy doing their grocery shopping at 7:30 AM after working a night shift at the hospital.

5. Mental, Emotional, and Physical State

We can’t always be “on.” Our mental state, energy levels, and emotions affect that. Obviously this goes for everyone, celebrity or not.

Every single person is operating at different levels of efficiency, clarity, and emotional support every single day. Not only do we as humans need support in our daily lives, but the process of starting and growing a business requires a different kind of support and guidance.

And note: The person who has 2 hours to get ready in the morning, then meditates for another hour and has a green smoothie made by a chef waiting for them when they are done, is in a different state of mind than the person who rushes to work and stresses all morning before showing up at the office . . . for a job they hate.

6. Travel and Commute

The same work is not getting done by the person who has to drive themselves to work vs. the person taking the train vs. the person who has to take multiple buses vs. the person in a private car vs. the person who doesn’t have to leave their house to start work.

7. Work Environment

I’ve worked in cramped, dark spaces before (because I had to), I’ve worked in loud places with slow Internet before (because it’s all that was available to me), and I’ve worked in well-lit, comfortable, warm spaces with free coffee/tea and blazing fast Internet.

The work I was able to do in these spaces, the audio/video quality of my calls or webinars, and my amount of focus or my overall feelings differed from location to location. I’m sure you’ve experienced a lot of this too.

So, you get it. Even our work environment makes the hours of our day different from someone else’s.

But, it’s not time to get discouraged … there IS something we can do about this whole “We don’t have 344 hours in our day every single day” thing.

And that is . . .

Use skills and smart strategies to get the most out of your time for where you’re at right now.

Every few months of focused work (this has been the case for the last several years, and is still the case), I’m able to make additional changes and improvements in my schedule and workflow so that I can reclaim more hours in my workday to focus on both the areas I’m most effective in (content creation and teaching/coaching) and my balanced lifestyle (I do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and yoga . . . and I spend time with friends and family).

I started many a side hustle on the floor of a cramped room (no real furniture to speak of), at the wee hours after a stressful job, but focused on the thing I could control the most: my skill level.

I simply wasn’t in the place where I could make many changes in my day job, daily commute, or other responsibilities, so . . .

I scaled with skills.

I knew that if I couldn’t afford to outsource, I had to get better and faster at connecting with potential customers, creating my own graphics, publishing content, delivering customer work, and putting up sales pages.

You can get faster too. Increasing your skill level in meaningful ways means that you can attract and keep better clients, make more sales, and earn back your own time.Whether you’re building an empire or working on a side hustle that you hope to go full hustle with, the principle is the same:

You don’t have a lot of time to spare on building an audience of people who will never actually buy from you.

List-building with people who DO actually buy from you and mastering your best sales techniques are skills that you can use today to buy back your time and grow your business.

People actually connecting with you and spending money with you means you can get external help (from people or better software), improve your self-care routines, and more.

How will you feel when you’ve done the focused work that gives you one extra distraction-free hour to work on your business each week? What about if you had that every single day? How would that feel? What could you get done?

Either way it goes, what you definitely do not have time for is people who only want your free samples and then head for the door.

We hope you have enjoyed this 5-day email course. We will follow up in the next few weeks with more action-packed info and steps you can take to start earning (more) money with your skills, experience, and knowledge.

Further Readings:

Part.1: The Hidden Starting Line Of List Building

Part.2: Free Offer = Money

Part.3: The Reason Behind Your Business Failure

Part.4: Attract And Sell Formula

Part.5: Why Your Day Is Unique