When women come to work with me they’re often shattered. They’ve tried everything they can think of, they’re working every spare minute, and they’re still not making the money they want.
Nearly always, they’re spreading themselves too thin. A bit of everything, spread over too much, and not enough of it anywhere for anybody to notice. That’s where the saying comes from. You’re not made of butter, and there’s only so far you go.
Here’s what it tends to look like. There’s the main business. There’s the little Etsy shop. There’s the bit of freelance work they took on to tide them over in 2023 and never stopped. They’re on five platforms, posting on all of them when they remember, doing none of them well enough to get anything back. Every one of those things takes a bit of thinking about, and thinking about things is the part that wears you out.
So I’d sit down and ask which part of it makes you the most money. And then which part you actually like doing. If something’s on both lists, that’s the one.
Then I’d look at everything else and be honest about what it’s costing you. The Etsy shop that brings in thirty quid a month is still a shop you have to photograph things for, list things on, and post parcels for. The freelance work you don’t enjoy is taking up the hours you’d need to build the thing you do.
You don’t have to burn it all down this afternoon. But you could pick one thing to stop, and one platform to leave alone for a month, and see what happens with the time you get back.
Give it a fair go before you judge it. Two weeks isn’t long enough to tell whether focusing works, because you’ll spend the first one feeling guilty about the things you’ve put down.
Pick the thing that pays you, spread yourself over that, and see what happens.