Episode Summary

If you enjoy learning how to optimize your schedule, today’s podcast is for you! In this episode of Make Space for More, Melissa Swink discusses the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, which theorizes that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts. 

You’ll learn about the importance of auditing your business to identify the most impactful clients, services, and marketing strategies. Tune in to discover how to focus on what drives results, eliminate unproductive tasks, and automate processes to enhance your efficiency. You’ll also hear tips from Melissa’s firsthand experience for prioritizing your time effectively, so you can achieve more with less effort.

Key Highlights:

• The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of results come from 20% of efforts.
• Identifying your top clients can have a significant impact on your revenue.
• Auditing your business helps you to focus on what is actually working.
• Eliminating unproductive tasks can free up valuable time.
• Automation can streamline processes and reduce manual work.
• Time blocking is essential for prioritizing important tasks.
• Learning to say “no” is crucial for maintaining focus.
• Marketing channels should be evaluated for effectiveness.
• Understanding your best-performing products can guide business decisions.
• Regular audits can help you adapt to changing business needs.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're gonna talk about the 80-20 rule. We're gonna dive into exactly what it is, how did this even come about, and most importantly, how we can use it to work less and achieve more.

So I have a question for you just for a bit of reflection before we dive into the meat of today's episode. What if 80 % of your results are coming from 20 % of your effort? So think about that. So 80 % of all the things that you've achieved or maybe phrase it as 80 % of the revenue that's coming in or maybe 80 % of the clients that you're attracting are coming from

20 % of your effort. So only 20 % of what you're actually spending your time on is creating the most results that you're seeing. So if you understood this, and we're gonna dive into how you can kind of audit your business and figure out what that 80 % result is and the 20 % of effort is, if you were confident that this were true, how would you shift your day-to-day priorities?

What would you be spending your time on if you knew exactly what that one thing is that's driving so many of the results that you're bringing in? So before we dive into doing all of that, let's talk about the 80-20 rule for a moment, because I feel like this is something that is talked about a lot, but not everybody quite understands it. And so basically, this is based on the Pareto Principle, which is named after an Italian economist.

who observed that 80 % of the land in Italy was owned by 20 % of the population. So he made this observation and then over time we started to see this become true to a lot of things. So this also applies to your business. It also applies to your time management. So think about it this way, 20 % of your clients, so let's say you have 10 clients, two of them,

are likely, your two largest clients are likely bringing in 80 % of your revenue. Or if you're a product-based business, approximately 20 % of your products, let's say you have a retail store and you have 100 products, and your top 20 products are generating 80 % of the revenue. And so we've seen this apply over and over again to a variety of situations. So if you truly understood

what that 20 % is in your business, like what is your top 20 % that is generating the vast majority of your results, how would you do things differently? What would you do differently? So what we wanna do is we want to audit your business through the lens of the 80-20 principle. So what we wanna do is take a look and you might wanna pull some reports, whatever that looks like for you and determine

Who are your most profitable clients? If you made a list of all your clients and you figured out about how much they are spending with you throughout the course of a given month or a given year, and you kind of line them all up from largest client to smallest client, who are your top clients? Similarly, you could do this with your service offerings. So if you have three different types of services, I'm just making this up.

cup, obviously, like your lower package, your midsize package and your large package, if you added up how much revenue is being generated in each of these categories, what does that result in for you? Same thing with products. If you line up all of your products and you make a list and say, okay, these are the ones that are generating the most revenue or this is how much revenue each one is bringing in over the course of a given week or month or year, whatever.

parameters around time you want to set, what are the best performing products? So we want to determine who are our best clients, what are our best performing services and products? So that is something that we want to focus on first. The other thing that we want to consider when we're doing kind of this audit of the 80-20 principle in our own businesses, also ask yourself what marketing channels are actually working? So maybe you're doing Google Ads.

and those are performing really, really well. You're getting a lot of new business coming in through those Google ads, and maybe you're also advertising on Pandora and streaming ads, and from what you can tell, those aren't doing a whole lot for you. You can take a look and figure out where am I marketing and what are the results coming in for that marketing? Now I realize that sometimes,

marketing can be difficult to determine at ROI. We have this conversation a lot with clients, particularly when it comes to organic social media content, because we know that social media content helps to build trust and credibility. And it's getting to a point now where even if the vast majority of your clients are coming in through referral, like we certainly see in our business, you have to believe that

potential client is checking you out online, looking at your website, looking at your social media presence, and seeing that and making sure that you're a legitimate business. They want to learn a little bit more about you before they reach out and have a conversation with potentially working with you. So we know that all those things are important. So I'm talking about your marketing here, getting new eyeballs on your content on your business. So that might be ads.

That might be your podcast. That might be, it might be speaking engagements, all of these different things. Like how are you getting new eyeballs on your business? And can we bring that back to figuring out how leads are coming in? What is performing the best? And then lastly, if you want to take a look at your time and how you're spending it versus what you're seeing results. So maybe you realize that

You're spending two hours a day in your email and just keeping up to date on all the communications and answering questions and doing all the things. Or maybe, depending on what level of business you're in, you're spending a lot of your time simply servicing your customers. Maybe you're a small web design company and it's primarily you doing the work. Maybe you work with a copywriter, maybe you work with a graphic designer for some custom things, but you're building the websites.

you're spending the vast majority of your time actually doing the client work, but you're not necessarily generating new business because you have such a small amount of time reserved in order to do that. So take a look at where you're spending your time versus what is actually seeing results in terms of new business coming in the door. again, identifying your best customers, your best products and services, marketing channels that are actually working.

and where you're spending your time in terms of new business coming in. So we want to take a close look at this to determine what we need to do next. Because again, we want to be working less and putting in less effort and yet also achieving more. So once we have kind of an analysis of exactly what's working and what our best performing services are, who are our best clients, we want to focus on the impactful 20%.

and we want to release the other 80%, particularly when it comes to the way that we're spending our time. So the simplest way to do this before I kind of walk through our, wait for it, make a space for more framework, which I talk about frequently on this podcast, is double down on what's actually working. So this is kind of low hanging fruit to apply the 80-20 rule. So if you know that your very best customers say are

Realtors, I'm completely making this up. But let's say you know that you've identified your best clients and you found that your top five, three out of the five of them are realtors. Fantastic. What we want to do is we want to spend more time meeting more realtors who need our services. Similarly with services, if you know that your most popular service is X, we want to promote, spend more time and effort

promoting that particular service and maybe less on some of the others, which we'll talk about in a second. So double down on what's working. If you know that your Google ads are working really, really well and you have those keywords dialed in and you're seeing results, double down on it. Maybe pull back on some of the other marketing that you're investing in and double down on the Google ads. Again, I'm using these as examples, but you get the idea after you've done your audit.

low-hanging fruit, let's double what's already working to bring in even more. So that also leaves us with really how we're spending our time, right? Because that's the overall goal here is we wanna be working less but achieving more. So first things first, maybe there are some things that your audit revealed that need to be eliminated completely. And I talk about this a lot. So this could be certain revenue streams that maybe just aren't profitable or even more importantly,

you don't enjoy offering anymore. And that's hard because we also need to tune into what's aligned with us, what are our goals, what brings us joy, because that's also how we're able to maximize what we're doing in our business. And that gives us the freedom, right? We can figure out, what are the things that we enjoy most? What do we want to create? What do we want to offer? That's the awesome thing about being entrepreneurs. So really tuning in, are there revenue streams that just need to be released?

Or maybe there are some products that we need to discontinue making, or maybe we need to discontinue carrying in our retail store. Because we've done this audit and we're realizing, you know what, some of these things, just doesn't make sense to continue doing anymore. Similarly, service offerings. Maybe you're realizing that very few of your customers, I can give you a personal example.

that offering from our website, we're no longer promoting these services. It was relatively simple to do. We also made sure that we did some networking with other website designers that we could refer our clients to and collaborate with when these projects came up. So there are definitely ways to discontinue something without leaving your customers hanging and leaving them with a bad experience. There's always solutions to these.

situations that don't necessarily mean you having to go through the effort and just continuing to do it anyway because that expectation has been put upon you and your customers are relying on you, if that makes sense. Other things to consider when we look at elimination, it could even be some groups that you're a part of or maybe some collaborations that just are not fulfilling in some way, shape, or form. Maybe the

working relationship is feeling a little bit stale. Maybe you sense that you and your former collaborator are going in different directions and there's not as much opportunity for the two of you to work together anymore. All these things are natural. Businesses evolve over time. Relationships evolve over time. We evolve over time. So maybe it's time to reevaluate some of the things that we are involved in. So looking at elimination. Automation is another part of this.

Are there repeatable processes that are happening in your business that could be automated with a system? Now, I have plenty of podcasts on systems and automation, so check those out because that is an episode in and of itself. But what we want to be looking at is are there some things, is there some software, are there some tools, are there some automations, maybe even some AI that can be brought in

and therefore saving you and other team members who work with you manual work. So think about different things that we can do to eliminate some of that manual work. And then we wanna delegate all the work, all the rest of the busy work that is necessary but doesn't necessarily have to be done by you. And I have my download 101 things to delegate to a VA if you're interested in some of the high level ideas of

here are some things that you can delegate because we want you again to be spending your time doing that 20 % that actually determines 80 % of your results. Okay, the last thing that I wanna touch on here is once we've done your audit and once we have determined what do you need to be focusing 80, you want to be spending your time focusing on that 20 % that's really driving the business forward,

and then we're talking about releasing the rest of maybe what's not working or what's not profitable or what you personally don't need to be spending your time on. We want to use time blocking to set yourself up for success. Once we know what your 20%, what your needle movers are, we want to reserve as much time in your calendar as possible in your day-to-day schedule to prioritize these things. And so...

I've talked a lot about the podcast how I've structured my calendar, how other clients have structured their calendars, but you want to make sure that you are prioritizing this 20 % of effort that yields 80 % of your results. So once you know what those most important things are, we want to reserve time for them. And the reason we want to reserve time for these things is because it is so easy to fall into the trap of being in reactive mode or doing busy work. It's like

one of those things, if we don't reserve time for it, everything else is just going to eat up our time. And then, you know, the end of the day comes and you're like, today I didn't get to record that podcast episode or today I didn't get to come up with that ad for you know, that new thing we're going to be promoting. And these are the things that are most important. It's so easy for our day just to evaporate based on kind of what's coming at us. So we want to reserve that time first, because inevitably things are going to sneak in.

to those open areas that we leave on our calendar. So we want to prioritize this. The other thing that we want to think about here when we're prioritizing this 20 % that yields 80 % of our results is to learn to say no to distractions. So, and there's part two to this. We want to eliminate as many distractions as possible, but we also want to determine what are truly opportunities that are aligned for us and what is just

noise and busy work. So we'll talk about that. We'll break this down a little bit. So eliminating distractions. When you are heads down and focused on your most important 20 % that yields 80 % of your results, you want to eliminate distractions. So this could look like closing out of your email completely or putting your phone on silent or do not disturb. What we want to do is make sure that we are

focused on doing those tasks because they are truly the most important. So we want to eliminate distractions. The other thing is we need to get better about saying no to things that maybe seem like an opportunity, but they aren't quite aligned with ultimately our goals and where we're headed in business. So one example of this could be someone inviting you to speak at their networking group or their event.

And as you do a little bit more digging into the opportunity, you realize that the audience is just typically not who you tend to work with. Or maybe you've worked with this type of clientele in the past and it's not maybe something that you prefer, or maybe it was just a little bit clunky because of industry reasons. One example I can give you, and personally in the VA world,

Sometimes when we're working with clients who are in highly regulated industries like financial managers, like financial industries, like finance managers, investment managers, financial, what is the word I'm looking for? Financial planners, that's what I'm looking for. Couldn't think of my words today. Financial planners, people who are in the finance space or even in the healthcare space.

Sometimes there are just so many regulations that can make it challenging, not impossible, but challenging for us to truly be able to collaborate and support them and their businesses. And so, you know, if I'm brought forward or if I'm invited to come forward and present to a group of people in the healthcare space, it's something that may cause me to pause a bit and see if this is something that's truly aligned for me or if I want to pass on the so-called

opportunity. The other thing that comes up sometimes is invitations for coffee meetings. And this is going to make me sound really harsh, but there are plenty of times where I have gone to virtual coffee chats even, or in-person coffee chats where I wasn't exactly sure why the person was interested in meeting with me. Did we have anything in common in terms of our business goals, our audiences? And so it just kind of was

You know, a nice time to meet another person in the community or in the business world, but it wasn't necessarily something that made sense for either of our businesses. so learn to run things through the filter. Is this aligned? Is this going to contribute to by 20 % which is yielding 80 % of the results. So be very, very protective of your time and put a high priority on those most important activities. So

All of that being said, I would love to hear from you. What is the number one thing that you're going to focus your time on this month? Do your audit, take a look. Maybe it surprises you and you're like, I've been spending a lot of time trying to make this work over here, but this over here is working fantastically and it requires very little effort on my part. Fantastic. How can we encourage more of that to come through? I would love to hear from you. Send me an email.

hello at melissaswink.com and I would love to just get a sense of what everyone in our community is going to be focusing on in the upcoming month. certainly if you have questions on this topic, feel free to email me those as well. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'm looking forward to another episode next week of Make Space for More. Take care everyone, bye bye.