Pursuing an Adventurous Life with Uncaged Life founder Rebecca Tracey

Pursuing an Adventurous Life with Uncaged Life founder Rebecca Tracey
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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How conscious scheduling allows Tracey to time gaps to be “out” of her business and travel
  • Why careful cash flow management is imperative when you sell fewer products or services
  • How experimentation was key to helping her business evolve

This week on the Profit. Power. Pursuit podcast I talk to Uncaged Life founder Rebecca Tracey, and the insights she has for building a business that allows her to pursue her personal adventures in rock climbing and traveling the world are incredible. Rebecca helps solopreneurs, life and health coaches, virtual assistants and more who are just starting out build an online business they can run from anywhere in the world.

Conscious Scheduling

I take a lot of time off. To the point people ask, ‘Do you work at all?’

– Rebecca Tracey

Even though Rebecca first started her business while living in a van while on an 8-month rock climbing trip (something she doesn’t recommend by the way), she soon realized that for her to live the life she wanted it would be important to not have client time during the climbing season. She has created a business model that allows her to run one main program that launches twice a year that are strategically scheduled for right before or after climbing season. When she’s traveling, she doesn’t have anything in her business that consistently needs her time, although she admits it did take some time to experiment and figure out what would work.

Careful Cash Flow Management

My lifestyle is adventurous and awesome, but also pretty cheap.

– Rebecca Tracey

Rebecca used to run her program six times per year, but has gone down to two times. It’s her second year trying out her streamlined business model and she’s still getting used to it. It’s definitely a bit scary and a little stressful being reliant on only two launches a year to make the money she needs. To ease that stress, she has a financial buffer in savings to cover her personal and business expenses if one of her launches doesn’t hit the numbers, but so far, things are working out well. Her operating expenses are also quite low.

Evolution of a Business

As her business model evolved Rebecca wasn’t afraid to experiment. The program that she runs is really fine-tuned and gets results, and it’s the thing she loves doing most in her business. She decided that her program was going to be the thing she would sell, and she stopped messing around with trying to create new things all the time. She decided to just give it a go at her program being her main thing. It was working and feeling pretty good, so she decided, why not just go for it.

When she realized that running the program six times a year wasn’t very “uncaged” of her or good for her sanity, she experimented with reducing the frequency. As a result, even though at first she didn’t want to increase her group size and it was a little scary to do so, she had to if she was going down in frequency. So, she doubled the group size and when everything seemed to run smoothly, she doubled the group size again. She did have to make changes to the program to accommodate more people and she’s still adjusting her marketing efforts to be sure she gets the number of participants she needs for each launch. She knows that she will continue to evolve her business model in the future, as the program she runs will eventually expire.

Be sure to tune into the full episode where you can learn more specifics about Rebecca’s adventurous life and her formula for success at juggling her business and her personal passions.

I invite you to subscribe to the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast on iTunes to join our community of like-minded entrepreneurs and learn my guests who share the nitty-gritty details of forging the life and business you want.

The 3 Kinds of Work (including 2 you should be doing less of)

There are three kinds of work you do a regular basis.

First, there’s work that gets immediate results. It might be actually delivering the service you provide or creating the product you sell. It could be writing on your blog or updating product descriptions. It could be ordering supplies or promoting your work.

Second, there’s work that should be done by someone else. This varies depending on your business and your strengths within that business. It could be fiddling with your website, sending out emails, or scheduling clients. It could be writing copy or creating advertisements. It could be shipping packages or bookkeeping.

Third, there’s the work that contributes to long-term growth. Often this is work that requires your expertise but that isn’t the hands-on work that you sell. It’s systems work. It’s process work. It’s relationship building. It’s working on the vision (and the byproducts of it).

You probably do a lot of the first and second kind of work. You are constantly after immediate results (they feel good, right?) because immediate results are better than no results. And you do a lot of work that you really have no business doing because you have chosen not to invest the time or money in having someone else do it.

That means that the work that contributes to long-term growth gets the short shrift. When you don’t work towards the future, you leave yourself in the hamster wheel of constant hustling. Sound familiar?

…while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.
— Michael E Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited

If you’re beginning to lose faith in the dream of having a business that takes care of you (instead of you taking care of it), then it’s probably because you find yourself doing so much of the first two categories of work. When that type of work is disproportionate to the results you see, frustration is the natural byproduct.

When you exercise your responsibility to long-term growth work, even if you’re not seeing immediate results, you can better weather the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. If a particular idea doesn’t work out, you have the systems or relationships in place to get you through. Or you have the comfort of knowing your next idea or opportunity is already in the works.

If you’re ready to do more long-term growth work and less of the rest, you need to schedule it. Put it on the calendar. Honor it like it was a client appointment or a project deadline. This is the work that will keep your business in business – respect it.

Once you’ve got that kind of work on the calendar, make sure that you’re creating systems that reduce the amount of other work you’re doing. Use your scheduled time to create a training or on-boarding process for an assistant or business manager. Also use that time to plan for new products or services that require less effort or active time from you. Plan to shift your business model to one that leverages your time & talents.

Bottom line: how would you spend your time if doing work that contributed to long-term business growth was your primary responsibility?

‘Cause it is.

— PS —

Kick Start Labs designed a brand-new Lab to help you get out of this rut and into strategic product development. It’s call Product Development 101. It’s available for a limited time on its own or as part of a Kick Start Labs membership. Click here for more info.