![[QUĀY.jo]](https://theartofonlinebusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/AOOB-Logo-White-150x118.png){kind=logo}
Achieving six figures while only working four days a week sounds like an impossible feat for most business owners. But for entrepreneurs who have a proven system and determination, that reality isn’t too far from them.
Our special guest for today’s episode is a perfect example of this achievement!
We’re fortunate to have Jill Wise here to tell us how she was able to make a six-figure income through her online entrepreneurial ventures.
And here’s the surprising part—she doesn’t even have to grind 24 hours, 7 days a week. She effortlessly makes time for vacations and gym workouts. On top of it all, she manages to do what’s most important for her now and that is to be a mother.
Now, you might be thinking, ‘How is that even possible when I have so many things on my calendar?’
The answer, as Jill puts it, is to create your ideal calendar. It all boils down to designing the life that you really want and creating a system that will help you get there.
If achieving six-figure years without sacrificing the quality of your life interests you, then you need to pay attention to Jill Wise. Tune in to discover her secrets to developing efficient systems, building strong client relationships, and optimizing your 6-Figure Calendar.
In this episode you’ll hear:
- Why you need to cut out things that don’t matter in your life
- How to design your ideal calendar
- Systems to help you achieve six-figure years
Links & Resources:
Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:
- Become a Facebook Ads Lead Gen Cheat Code Founding Member!
- Visit Kwadwo’s website for Facebook Ads help
- Say hi to Kwadwo on Instagram
- Subscribe to Kwadwo’s YouTube channel to learn with him as he learns about personal finance, financial freedom, foreign languages and enjoying life!
Jill Wise’s Links:
Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction
04:30 — Running the business while working as a mother
07:45 — The need to create an ideal calendar
11:00 — Envisioning the life you want
14:10 — Flexibility in calendar
17:35 — How Jill’s calendar influences everything
22:53 — Systems to help you achieve six figures in a year
24:43 — Reflections on tough times in doing business
28:57 — Why entrepreneurship was the route Jill took
32:29 — Means and ways to connect with people
34:51 — How to follow Jill Wise
35:55 — Episode wrap-up
Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!
Jill Wise [00:00:00]:
So I ask my clients to start here because this is how we actually shape our offers from it. Because if you are offering, like, you coaching, and from what I know, you have meetings every other week. But what if you want to go on vacation on one of your meeting weeks? You have to figure that out. But if you changed your ideal calendar to be a certain way, maybe that works for you, and then that’s good. But maybe you’re like, I don’t know what I want from here. So if you make your ideal calendar fit that life you want first, then you can develop an offer that fits into the time that you have.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:00:33]:
This episode is good, and it’s worth your time. And here’s why. I interviewed Jill, who’s a conversion copywriter, a brand and marketing strategist, but she actually has achieved six figure years. I know because she’s a coaching client of mine, and she does that in four day work weeks, and she’s a new mom with a 15 month at home. And this blew my mind. But she had already achieved these, what’s called a milestone goals, the holy grail of having an online course and being an online coach before she took maternity leave. Then she came back from maternity leave with Baby Brain. If you don’t know what that is, listen in on the episode and worked even less than she was working before and still made more. My name is Quaidjo. I’ve coached with Rick for about three years inside of his program, and I am the new co host of the Art of Online Business podcast. It’s an honor to be able to be here and share with you. Go back to the episode that Rick aired on September 1, 2023, and you’ll listen to his reflections on his sabbatical and some of the decisions that went into bringing me on as the co host. And I want you to enjoy this episode. I know you’ll get a lot from it. We’ll chat more soon. Enjoy the episode. I want you to tell me, please walk me through how you actually got to six figures a year in four day work weeks and then coming back from your maternity leave. How in the heck did you figure out how to do that less with the kid at home? The listener would like to know. I want to know personally, and I feel like we all hear about people achieving this, so can you just let us behind the scenes?
Jill Wise [00:02:25]:
Yeah, I love to let you behind the scenes. The biggest thing is cutting out the shit that doesn’t matter because we waste a lot of time in the days, and when you realize that, everything changes. So before, when I was overworked, underpaid the typical struggling freelancer, just, like, really busy all the time, a lot of it was just by distractions or making things harder than they needed to be or fixing my lead magnet for the millionth time, but not with an actual strategy or reasons behind it. It’s just because I saw something else, right?
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:02:59]:
Yeah.
Jill Wise [00:03:00]:
So when you focus on what matters and you systemize things, then you can start to free up time. But the way that I actually look at it is following a few pillars. So getting your sales pipeline in place first, then that frees up time so you can look at your systems and your processes so that you can make more and fewer hours because you have all these systems and processes in place. And then that opens up the space for you to actually play in where you can start tweaking with things because you have the time. Okay, so that’s kind of the process. And then I just took it one step further after maternity leave.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:03:36]:
Took it one step further. So you didn’t have any setbacks after birthing a human and getting back into the business game?
Jill Wise [00:03:44]:
No, I booked projects before the baby came out and got back to it. I was booked out months in advance. I had to start hiring more team members to help me with everything, to juggle all the things, because that’s a part of it too. Right. We’re not just cutting out things in general from your business, but from your list and delegating it to others and getting a good team around you. So there’s definitely trial and error. It wasn’t all super easy. There were weeks where I was deep in training mode or rewriting something because a writer wasn’t a good fit, but this needed to be done for a client. But overall it was an upward trend of working well and just getting more.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:04:24]:
And more clear on what matters is baby brain. Was that even in a thing for you?
Jill Wise [00:04:30]:
Yes, it was a huge thing that was like mentally was very hard. And I don’t think enough people talk about that, but I know that not all of the listeners here are moms. I won’t get too far into it, but right afterwards I said that I operated at like 14% of a brain and I was very thankful for my assistant who would literally make me weekly checklists. That was her job. What do I need to do? Because we have everything organized in ClickUp. But even that was just like kind of overwhelming for me. So she would put it in like a note for me and I would just go through my list and I would turn my brain on as I could for those specific things and I didn’t have to worry about the rest. And slowly it starts to come back. But the systems that I had in place made that helpful because now I don’t waste a ton of time. Like, what am I working on this week? My automations tell me. My ClickUp tells me, my team tells me.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:05:23]:
Wow.
Jill Wise [00:05:24]:
An example is that every Monday they check in with their priorities and specifically what they need from me, if they’re waiting on anything from me, if I’m the bottleneck for anything. So then I’m training them to tell me what I need to do so I don’t need to sit here when I turn my computer on. I’m getting, like, straight into focus work or client calls.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:05:40]:
Yeah. Wow. Let’s break it down. Let’s break it down for the listener who is a man, maybe unmarried, and the woman listener who might not have kids yet, because I say baby brain, and I understand because I am supported by a wonderful wife with two kids at home and I’ve seen this thing in action. But for the person who does not know what baby brain means, how would you describe it?
Jill Wise [00:06:09]:
I’m like, when is it all going to come back? I’d repeat myself. I’d lose my train of thought. I’m just so focused on the baby or exhausted from being up all night that it’s just you’re not operating at your highest level, which is really frustrating when you’re an overachiever. Like a lot of us entrepreneurs are. So that’s how I would describe it in the entrepreneur world. Okay, you’re just a little really tired all the time.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:06:31]:
No, I feel you. And I think, who cares if not everybody that listens right now is moms? I think moms are amazing. And I know that I’m here because of my mom and because she put up with well, actually, I was a perfect kid. That’s the first thing I do now.
Jill Wise [00:06:50]:
I want to ask you questions, right?
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:06:53]:
No, but I mean, week not even week. I don’t remember because my eldest is seven now, but it had to have been the first week I called up my mom and thanked her profusely. And I didn’t even know the half of it, not even the 1000th of it, but I just knew that, oh, good Lord, this lady did a lot for me. So for sure I will talk about being a mom and definitely praise mom. Like, I think moms don’t get enough praise. So you came back from maternity leave with baby brain to working even less and making more. And it’s because of these systems. Okay, so I know the listener is like, jill, tell me these systems. What’s your favorite one to talk about?
Jill Wise [00:07:45]:
My ideal calendar. Okay, first one, it’s like I created rules or boxes to fit into, which I do not. Like when somebody else puts me in a box. But I will make my own rules and I will follow those to a T. But the ideal calendar is like, I have set up what I want my day to look like, and then I actually put it into a Google Calendar and I try to follow that and then that’s. Okay. Like, how am I going to prioritize my work? I’m obsessed with my business and growing in it. And while, yes, some priorities shifted, I thought I would want to work more, I realized I wanted to have the same growth, but also more time with my baby. So I had to make that fit into these boxes, that’s one thing. And constantly revisiting that system. It’s, like, super simple, right? People think systems, and they think, like, automations and SOPs but this is just like an exercise of a calendar that I use to check myself with when I’m capacity planning and when I’m booking my meeting times and when I’m setting up all the other things it needs to fit into the calendar. If it doesn’t fit, then it’s not important.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:08:53]:
Slow up for me. Slow up for me. And maybe the other two. I won’t call them basic. I’ll say I’m a basic listener myself. What the heck is capacity planning?
Jill Wise [00:09:06]:
I mean, how many clients I can take on reasonably and how far I can book out. Like, I have processes. I know that projects are going to start on X days each month, and I can take on certain ones of specific sizes, and it’s easy for me to do that because my offers are refined and really streamlined. And while, yes, everyone’s getting custom work, at the end of the day, it’s following the same process every time. So it just all kind of, like, comes together in my ideal calendar.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:09:35]:
In the ideal calendar. What else can you tell us about this ideal? Like, I’m being very selfish right now because I’m almost about to share screen with my Google Calendar. So you can help meld it into an ideal or a more ideal calendar.
Jill Wise [00:09:51]:
The thing is, you don’t look at what you currently have, because then you’ll be limited. All of us just think that, well, how do I change this here? And then we get stuck in the how. But that’s less important, is figuring out what you want. When, you know, have the clarity on what you want, then you can start to take simple steps to get there, and it’s less overwhelming. So I do this with my clients, too. They get stuck on. They’re like, well, that’s not anything like what it looks like right now. No, of course not. But we need to figure out what it is that you want first. So I put in blocks that are, like, focused work time, meeting time, based on when I do that type of work best, but also in the schedule that works for my family.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:10:32]:
Okay.
Jill Wise [00:10:33]:
We don’t have childcare.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:10:34]:
Okay. That’s key. You don’t have childcare? No.
Jill Wise [00:10:39]:
Sometimes we might have a grandparent that helps, but none actually live in our city, so it’s just if they come.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:10:43]:
To visit for a bit, 50 something. How many weeks old is your he’s?
Jill Wise [00:10:49]:
18 months.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:10:50]:
15 months? No child. Sorry. 18 year and a half. No childcare.
Jill Wise [00:10:56]:
Yeah.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:10:56]:
This just got even more intriguing. Keep going, keep going.
Jill Wise [00:11:00]:
I like to push back against people who think that they can’t do it. You can do it. You totally can do it. I am, I guess, blessed in a better way of saying I don’t know, a better way of saying it in just that my husband also works remotely, so I’m not by myself all day. But he does work a set schedule all day and needs to be connected. But at least he can take a lunch break so I can shower. That’s helpful. But I do have to work around nap times or before he starts his day, and we work together on it, so that does help. It’s not the same as somebody who has a partner who has to actually leave the house. But yeah. With the schedule, though, it’s like coming up with what you want, not just your business to look like, but your life. So, like, I’ll put in gym times or just I like a lot of white space there. Some people might like to fill that with activities or things, depending on their style. It’s just not just the business, but.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:11:58]:
How does it fit with your life but four days? Because I feel like just my life alone outside the business is not going to fit in four days. So that’s the very selfish question for me, which is, all right, first you said don’t start from your current calendar. Start from the calendar that you want and then put in basically what I heard was the personal stuff that’s non business to establish the balance. But what’s the next step?
Jill Wise [00:12:27]:
I mean, it kind of depends on what you want. The process is that you think of the life that you want. Like, how much do you want to be working? Is that four days a week? Is that 20 hours a week? Is that 15 hours? What is it that you want, and what do you want from your life, too? Do you want to have meetings every day, all day, or do you want to try to get them all into certain days so you can have more freedom? Do you go on trips a lot? Are you going to have to be rescheduling things? So I ask my clients to start here because this is how we actually shape our offers from it, because, oh, okay. If you are offering, like, you coaching, and from what I know, you have meetings every other week, but what if you want to go on vacation on one of your meeting weeks?
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:13:14]:
Good question.
Jill Wise [00:13:15]:
Exactly. You have to figure that out. But if you changed your ideal calendar to be a certain way, maybe that works for you, and then that’s good, but maybe you’re like, I don’t know what I want from here. So if you make your ideal calendar fit that life you want first, then you can develop an offer that fits.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:13:30]:
Into the time that you okay, all right. I don’t think the listener knows that we coach together, so if you don’t know, like, Jill is a client of mine. I do have this service where I coach and consult basically how to fix funnels, like, if you need help with your marketing to bring in more leads or convert the leads into sales or just team or systems and that kind of dynamic link in the show notes below. All right. Little selfish plug. Okay, so you start to fill that in, and then you had said something that I want to go back to. If you want to take a vacation, you build that into your calendar.
Jill Wise [00:14:10]:
So I know that I like to have december is very light and also June because it’s my birthday month, so we might want to do vacations around then. So I will build that flexibility into my ideal calendar. In my actual Google Calendar, it’s called ideal Calendar, and I can toggle it on and off so I can check myself. But by putting in these things, like when I do meetings best or when works for my family, like right now it’s lunchtime, so it’s not going to be disruptive for my husband’s work that I’m doing this because he’s having lunch with the kid. So I put those things in, and then I know when my focused work is, and I know how much I can get done in, like, a three hour focused work block on client work versus the business stuff versus managing the team, then that helps me develop offers and do capacity planning that fits within those. So I can sell day reservations or I can sell retainer clients or massive projects. And I know exactly how many I can take because I’m really clear on my schedule and how all of it fits together.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:15:10]:
Wow. So as a copywriter who has a copywriting arm to your business, right? Like, people come to you to get their conversion copy, be it sales pages, ads, what have you written or email sequences. And then as a brand and marketing strategist, I want to come back to this calendar. But I also got to ask, you took your offers and you developed those around the type of time that you wanted them or at least delivering on them to fit into?
Jill Wise [00:15:40]:
Yeah, like, the work that I’m doing.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:15:43]:
Do you know how rare that is?
Jill Wise [00:15:47]:
I don’t know if it’s rare, but it’s a necessity for me. Survival.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:15:53]:
I don’t know many people who did that. Most people I know developed their offers more like, say, like an offer stack, if you will, and then once they became successful, figured out how to make it all fit together or maybe paired things back or figured out like, they needed to not work 80 hours a week. Been there myself. Wow.
Jill Wise [00:16:17]:
I’ve been there too. You just start doing stuff. But then when I got really clear on these things and it started with four days, I was like, how much work can I actually do in four days? Well, then how much do I need to make in a week in order to hit my sales goals. Well, then how can I develop an offer that’s going to make me X amount per week that I can layer on other clients with? And it just kind of grows exponentially from there. And then adding in the team is this whole other aspect because frees up even more of my time or changes how I’m spending my time so I can layer in more revenue without adding on more copywriting time specifically to my list copy teething time. But that’s a little bit like it doesn’t take me as long. So it’s just like in steps, I guess. Which is why you start with your ideal and you work backwards rather than staring at what you have right now and going, I’m working 80 hours and I don’t know how to fix this.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:17:10]:
Start with your ideal and work backward instead of staring at what you have and just getting stuck because you don’t know how to fix it. Okay. All right, tell me more.
Jill Wise [00:17:26]:
About what so, yeah, this is how I refine my offers and the processes within them. So this is why, even though it’s a calendar, I still consider it a system because the calendar influences everything. And every time I change my ideal calendar, things in the business have to change, whether that is like, office hours, what’s included in certain things, how much engagement with me, if I need to hire someone new. All of that is influenced by when and how I want to work.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:17:57]:
When and how you want to work. Okay, next question. What you’re saying is so it just makes so much sense, and yet it’s so succinct. And I’m like, but there’s at least 46 details in my own life that aren’t even on my calendar that I’m like, how do I iron those out?
Jill Wise [00:18:21]:
You need to take as much as possible out of your brain and document it, because this is where maybe this is where the baby brain comes back in. If I don’t write it down, it might not happen. If it doesn’t fit in my calendar, it’s definitely not happening. So anyone can take that because the more that you can free up space in your mind from all of the busy and all of the stuff that you don’t need to be doing, the better you’ll be for it, the less you’ll work. Think of how much time you’re just like, switching tasks and thinking about what you’re going to do next. Or like scrolling, I can’t scroll anymore. I don’t have time to scroll.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:18:58]:
I’m guilty. Okay, so having a baby, figuring this all out, but you didn’t figure this out after you came back from maternity leave. You already had it together before. Maybe having baby brain forced you to get even better, which is how you somehow came back, working less and making even more. But was it easy to figure this out on your own? I mean, it all sounds so sweet, so succinct, so put together. But the ideal calendar maybe back up. What were some lessons you learned as you were developing this ideal calendar for yourself?
Jill Wise [00:19:35]:
That I overcomplicated everything. I made it so hard, just unnecessarily. Just because you stress about it and you want it to be perfect and recovering perfectionist. You just have to start doing stuff or like, you get stuck on the how instead of what do I want? And being busy with things, thinking that you need to. Yes, I really believe in over delivering with clients, but you also don’t have to stress yourself out about it. Right. And some people, just the people pleasing scope creep. Like, all of this stuff adds in. So I made all of those mistakes, and it wasn’t super easy, but I’ve just been doing it for a while, and it’s been a growth process. Before getting to the four day weeks and then after, the plan wasn’t to come back with 15 hours until my son was born. Then I was like, well, I can’t go back that much. I thought that we would get childcare and I’d be like, right back into business lady mode. But it shifted. So I just had to work with what I have and refine processes more and get more help and get more clarity and just keep shifting and evolving. Like, it’s not linear.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:20:45]:
Wow. Okay, we’re going to kind of pivot. I got another question for you. This is more to the brand and marketing strategist side of you, but I noticed in the document that we’re working from, I noticed you wrote something, and it’s quite intriguing.
Jill Wise [00:21:07]:
I can’t remember it’s on my calendar.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:21:09]:
You can’t see you have no idea. She has no idea what I’m about to ask her. No, it’s just that you said that you hadn’t cold pitched for work since 2019, and obviously right now at the recording of this episode, it’s 2023 and that you’re landing projects that are eight to 15K. So how everything’s inbound?
Jill Wise [00:21:37]:
Yeah, everything. Well, first, I have a very strong aversion to pitching. Just the worst. It’s the absolute worst. I literally would cry about it. I cried to my husband about it so many times because I just felt like I’m sending out all these pitches. I’m not that great at it. I’m getting some jobs, but they’re really low paying. Like the $25, maybe $500, not good. This was like early days of freelancing getting into copy, terrible stuff and wow, okay. I was still serving on the side. I was still in school, so it’s fine, but it just didn’t feel great.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:22:18]:
You said serving on the side, or did you say surfing serving?
Jill Wise [00:22:22]:
I was like, working in restaurants and bars and stuff, like while I was still in school. Because another thing is I’ve never had a real job. I just did this straight out of university.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:22:30]:
I beg to differ. Hold on, I’m going to say working at a restaurant is probably the realest job ever.
Jill Wise [00:22:37]:
I never had a corporate job, desk job. I’m not very employable in that way. I’m great at talking to people and selling them things.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:22:46]:
None of us are employable with the kind of businesses we operate. Right.
Jill Wise [00:22:53]:
This is my crowd, so the cold pitching wasn’t for me. So I started to study more of marketing. That was what my continuing studies were in Emperor Strategy and just like, how to actually connect with people. Part of my undergrad was philosophy, and I did a little bit of psychology, too, and a lot of English. So like, storytelling and getting to know people and what makes them tick and all of that kind of comes together in this cool way of like, I feel like I’m really good at connecting with people online. So I started sharing more of the personal side of being a freelancer on the Internet, and then that is how I grew the messaging and the marketing to start attracting leads. So once I went full time in my business, I didn’t cold pitch for work since then. So I’ve gotten leads from networking events, just from actually connecting with people, not pitching myself to them, and from showing up on the Internet consistently and having a solid pipeline in place. Like my website does the converting. I don’t get on a ton of sales calls. Like, I don’t want to talk to them if they don’t have the budget. I don’t want to talk to them if they’re not a good fit. And now my sales calls are more like, do we like each other? And when can we start? Rather than the other stuff? Because my pipeline does that for me. Instead, also referrals because I’m really into the client experience and making sure that they feel good and guided and supported and we become friends. So then I have clients for years. I’ve had some for like 18 months, three years. They’ve gone through this journey with me. And then that way I don’t have to send any gold pitches anymore and just send out an email to my list or reach out to a client. And it’s not like a pitch. It’s like a, hey, how’s it going? And they’re like, oh, I was just thinking of you.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:24:43]:
Okay, all right. Wow. Which is so intriguing. Let’s take a step back to a I’m going to set up this question to give you context. One thing I want for the listener to have is what I wish I had three years ago. Well, at least from this date. So we’re 2023. So what I wish I had right now in 2020, when my life was completely and utterly falling apart, when I was stuck outside of China, everything I’d been working for for the previous twelve years in my previous business, teaching people in China how to learn Chinese. This would obviously be foreigners in China how to learn Chinese and speaking on stages and all that jazz was disrupted and destroyed and decimated and all the other bad d words by the Pandemic. And I needed motivation to help me get back up on my feet, to take the strategic steps that I knew because I was listening to podcast and YouTubing how to do the things. But before I could take those steps and walk, I just had to get back up on my feet, and I needed this, which is what I’m about to ask you. Pick a spot. I’m sure you got a couple, but if you’re comfortable with sharing a hard spot, a dark spot where you thought at whatever point in your business that you might not make it or just want to continue another two weeks, I mean, a kind of on the brink spot. And I want to know what got you through it. But first, can you describe that spot, what you were feeling, what you were thinking, and what was going on? Circumstantially, if that’s a word, to the listener, and me.
Jill Wise [00:26:37]:
There’s been a few times throughout my business, often that includes losing all your clients. That happened to me when I was still freelancing part time, and then they just disappeared one day. Right. Because they weren’t as consistent then, of course, with the pandemic, like anyone else, I worked with a lot of travel industry people and wedding industry people, and so I lost, I think, all, if not almost all of my clients when that hit, and that was scary. But every time that that’s happened the next few months, it creates space for something that’s double, like, way better. So I just know to trust the process every time and that everything’s temporary and that it’s way scarier to get a job and have to work for somebody else than to navigate whatever this is. When we have a business, we have yeah, it’s terrifying. So when we have a business, we have this tap that we can turn on and off and that control over it. And maybe that’s, like, a tough moment right then, but we already have the skills and the foundations in place to go and change and realign and make it fit into our new ideal calendar. And maybe the tough stuff helps me realize, okay, maybe that wasn’t for me. Maybe those clients weren’t for me. Maybe I need something bigger. I need to raise my rates. Maybe I need to learn something new.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:28:06]:
Okay.
Jill Wise [00:28:07]:
It always comes back better.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:28:08]:
Okay. So you said it’s scary to have to look at getting a job again. That happened to you?
Jill Wise [00:28:17]:
Oh, I’ve never had to get a job.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:28:22]:
Were you thinking about it at one point?
Jill Wise [00:28:25]:
So when I was freelancing part time and serving, I thought that I needed to, so I would apply for jobs, but I would not call on the first day or turn down the offer at the last minute or, whoa, I lasted two. Weeks at one point, but it’s just like it’s not for me.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:28:44]:
Okay, so hold on, there’s more there.
Jill Wise [00:28:48]:
So I’d just go get more freelance cakes instead.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:28:51]:
But you applied for jobs. What kept you from going in on the first day for the job that you got?
Jill Wise [00:28:57]:
I think it was more like that it stopped me from doing something that wasn’t for me. You’re supposed to go to university and get the fancy job. And my friends were doing that right? Like, I went to a nice university. They all started making money right away and I started freelancing and serving, and I was good at serving, but it still wasn’t the same. I didn’t have the corporate email and that, so then I would sometimes get caught in like, oh, maybe I need to do this, maybe this isn’t going to work for me. Especially because I struggled for so many years to just figure it all out, but then I wouldn’t. I started right after I graduated, like 2014, but I didn’t go full time until 20, 18, 19, because that’s when I was serving and went back to school and figuring out all of the things. So that’s when I was like, applied for the odd job just to got you see if that’s what I was supposed to do. And then I’d realize, like, no, this isn’t for me, I have to keep going.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:29:52]:
Okay, so you applied for the odd job, but then you also got the odd job, which to me, I’ve been there. Like, I got this quota I will apply to. Well, for me it’s super low, but like five or six jobs. But that’s mentally draining to fill out that many applications and then push yourself past all the mental baggage from not getting the calls back from the other jobs and then looking and stitching together your resume because you’ve been doing the entrepreneurial thing, which doesn’t quite fit with what a job resume should be. So you went through that, got hired, and then something was just holding you back from actually taking the job or even just getting there and you went back to your business.
Jill Wise [00:30:42]:
But the business I still had freelance, like jobs on the side the whole time. That was always consistent. There was never a time where aside from the few times that I’ve lost all of them, but that was only for maybe a month long period max. Somebody else comes.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:31:01]:
That’s scary.
Jill Wise [00:31:01]:
Okay, this is where it always like when something bad happens, something good happens right away. So I’d be like crying one day and then have a bunch of leads the next day because it I don’t know if it’s like woo woo, but there’s space for better stuff to come.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:31:17]:
Okay?
Jill Wise [00:31:18]:
And thankfully, I did not stick with any of those jobs or accept them or apply for more because this, I think is way better.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:31:26]:
Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. So I think the final question I’ll ask for this segment and then we’ll wrap up is, how did leads start coming in? Because this was earlier on in your social media. You had lost a number of clients. How did leads start just coming in?
Jill Wise [00:31:48]:
So at the beginning of it, I posted on Instagram every single day for a year. I gave myself that challenge.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:31:53]:
Oh, damn. Okay.
Jill Wise [00:31:55]:
I stuck with it. It was like a feed post, and it was back when it was pictures, and it was great to put the odd time lapse on, but it was like a square, not like a real.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:32:06]:
The algorithm was kinder then, too. Well, it was hard.
Jill Wise [00:32:11]:
I wish I started before 2014. That’s when it don’t we all?
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:32:16]:
I wish I had a YouTube channel back in 2008.
Jill Wise [00:32:20]:
I would have been, like, 14.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:32:25]:
You’re a little bit younger than me.
Jill Wise [00:32:29]:
So yeah, I did that. At first, I had a blog. I didn’t do as much with it, but it was mostly just showing up on Instagram and directing them to my website and then starting to think of what I wanted to say on my website to get them to fill out the contact form. And then what happens after the contact form and just guiding that process? So I find that a lot of the time, people are like, here’s my offer on Instagram, and people scroll path because they don’t want to see that. But if you’re, like telling a story and getting to know them, and then you’re like, go look over here for more information, then they go over there, and then they keep reading the story because they’re learning more about you on the website. And then they’re starting to see like, oh, this is me that she’s talking to. And then even then, I don’t even share all the offer details. I just give, like, high level overview. So I paste information and get those micro conversions. Zing is the official term for them. I put on my copy hat to get them to go onto my account or get into my inbox, fill out the contact form, and we keep going from there. So by the time that I get on the call with them, they have all the information they need, but they’ve gone through this journey, and so that’s how leads started coming in. I just picked a channel, focused on it, and got them to go through my pipeline, and now my job is to fill the tub.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:33:44]:
Okay, well, great. First, thank you for sharing a bit of that. And since we’re at the end of the episode, people must be able to know how to go and get this ideal calendar from you.
Jill Wise [00:33:57]:
So I have the six figure schedule, which is just a snapshot of my calendar itself, along with so they can see what my Google Calendar looks like at the time of uploading, which I think is the most relevant one we update it periodically because my ideal changes and I want to be transparent with them. So that’s the six figure schedule. It also includes things like my tasks from my ClickUp and my job description versus what’s on my team’s list and an overview of the building growing and scaling process as I see it and how it fits within these pillars. So it kind of gives them to not just a calendar. And here’s some steps to go about that.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:34:38]:
Cool. Where’s the URL? We’re going to link it up in the show notes, but can you tell us what that URL is, please?
Jill Wise [00:34:45]:
It’s Jillwise.com six figure schedule.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:34:51]:
Cool. All right. It’s Jillwise. Not Jillwise.com, but your website is its. And then Jillwise.com, of course, we’re going to link that up in the show notes. And thank you for selfishly I want to say thank you for walking me through that. You’ve given me some hope. I’m looking off to the side for those of you listening who are also watching, either on the website@theartofonlinebusiness.com or looking or just like on YouTube, I’m looking at my calendar, and I’m thinking, dang it, it’s about time I fix this bad boy. And so thanks for providing me with that motivation and then send it to you so you can be like, it ain’t fixed yet. You got work to do.
Jill Wise [00:35:38]:
I honestly I love to see other people’s calendars and what they want. It’s cool.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:35:43]:
Okay, cool. Well, thank you for being on this episode, Jill, and I look forward to the next time when we can chat during one of our strategy calls.
Jill Wise [00:35:53]:
Thanks for having me.
Kwadwo Sampany-Kessie [00:35:55]:
I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Jill. And if you want to get her six figure schedule, the link is in the show notes below. Here’s one more ask from me if you could leave a rating, a review on Apple podcast and let me know. What do you want to hear more about? What did you love from this episode that would mean so much to me as the new co host of The Art of Online Business? Because I’m here to serve you. I want you to get tons out of these episodes. So until next time, take care, be blessed, and goodbye.
