Special Content
Find more freedom in growing your business with FLOW
When you first started your business, you may recall the excitement and the energy that flowed into your work. It felt like everything was coming together and moving forward — and it was thrilling!
As your business has grown, however, you might find yourself in the messy middle. You have more clients or customers, more specific offers or more popular products, and there is much more to do in a day just to keep things running.
Now, you might find yourself at a point in your business where everything feels a bit chaotic. Like you don’t know what you’ll find when you sit down at your desk and you have no idea what fires you’ll need to put out today.
What you need is a way to streamline your work and focus on what’s most important so that you can continue to grow your business. Let’s create calm from the chaos by seeing how FLOW plays into it.
What is FLOW, exactly?
FLOW is one of my own creations; a framework that helps overwhelmed female entrepreneurs feel more confident and capable in their daily work, thanks to four elements of FLOW:
- Free up your time (structure)
- Leverage systems (systems)
- Own your CEO role (strategy)
- Work on your terms (support)
As a business owner, I know you want to find flow, that state of being where you are focused, centered, and productive — but you find yourself in constant hustle instead. That’s why I created the FLOW Framework, to help you figure out which areas of your business you need support so you can stop feeling scattered.
Let’s break down what FLOW stands for and what each point means for your business.
Free up your time
To get out of the ever-expanding constraints on your time, you want to think about ways to free up your time. And in my experience as a Business Growth & Systems Strategist, the best way to do that is to create structure.
Structure is the foundation of your business. It is what allows us to stop spending precious time on things that don’t actually need our time or attention. Structure might include:
- Filing processes for documents or assets
- Standard operating procedures, or SOPs, for your most important tasks
- Contracts that clearly state the scope and nature of your work
- Invoice standards, including how you get paid and when
- Creating boundaries around your calendar and schedule
Leverage systems
Systems are the backbone of your business, the tools that will allow you to dedicate more of your resources toward growth. Systems might include:
- Onboarding tools, like a call scheduler or a CRM (like Dubsado or HoneyBook)
- Project management tools and calendars to organize projects and tasks (like ClickUp and Asana)
- Inbox management, including tags, folders, canned emails, etc.
- Invoicing tools and bookkeeping systems (like QuickBooks or Wave)
Own your CEO role
Your business strategy is how your business is going to grow. Owning your CEO role means having a plan for growth, and being able to pinpoint what does and doesn’t work for your business. When you own this role, and make decisions from a strategic, high-level point of view, you’ll find that you can stop getting sucked into small tasks or projects that don’t allow you to be the CEO.
Strategic thinking as the CEO might include:
- Creating specific goals for the business
- Mapping out marketing and content strategies to help you reach new audiences
- Establishing new connections and developing new relationships
- Delegating work in line with the strategic goals of the business
Work on your terms
To work on your terms, you need support. You need help from other people or other skilled team members to actually work the way you want to work, focusing on your zone of genius. In order to do work on our own terms, we might not need the kind of support we think we do; it may not be a business coach but rather longer hours of childcare, a meal delivery service, or a housekeeper. Business support might look like hiring a copywriter, tech VA, Kajabi expert, and so on.
Once you find the supports that help you do your best (and most focused) work, you’ll find that you have:
- More time to spend with your family (or alone!)
- Clients or customers who respect your boundaries and time
- More energy to focus on big ideas, instead of small tasks
- Space to collaborate with team members or partners who bring new ideas to life
- Time to take a vacation (maybe even without your laptop — gasp!)
- The ability to log off without guilt
Want help establishing flow in your business?
To learn more about my FLOW framework and how it can help you thrive in this current phase of business, please visit kristenwestcott.com/blog
