Ep. 359 How to earn more without working more

Are you working tirelessly in your business, only to feel underpaid and overwhelmed? In this week’s episode, Anna Lundberg breaks down the real reasons independent experts find themselves overworked yet under-earning – and what you can do differently. Discover actionable strategies to design a business that pays you what you deserve, protects your time, and keeps you energised.

Key moments:

[00:00] Introduction: Why working harder isn’t the answer

[02:11] The “Frankenstein Offer Problem” and how to avoid reinvention burnout

[05:16] The trap of undercharging and overdelivering (and how to set boundaries)

[07:58] Why volume isn’t value: Move away from chasing thousands of leads

[09:28] The myth of marketing ‘busy work’ vs what really brings clients

[12:23] The “Effort vs Reward” framework (and how to apply it)

[13:28] Finding your integrity and resentment rates for pricing with confidence

[16:24] Five strategic shifts for earning more (without adding hours)

[19:53] Your invitation: Redesign your offers with Anna in the Accelerator

Resources mentioned:

• Free workshop: onestepoutside.com/simplesystems
• Business Accelerator Programme: Next cohort opens in September for an October start. Apply now at: onestepoutside.com/accelerate

How to earn more without working more

This one is for you if you are working hard, you’re delivering great work, posting content, saying yes to clients, but still feel like you’re earning less than you should. Maybe you’re undercharging, you’re constantly reinventing offers, or saying yes to projects that drain you just to keep cash flow steady. In a tougher market, it can feel like the only answer is to work harder. But the truth is, earning more is not about adding hours. It’s about designing a business that lets you do focused, high value work. Charge with integrity, and stop carrying the resentment that comes from doing too much for too little.

Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mom of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility, and the fulfilment you’re looking for, ready to redefine success and build a business that you love. Let’s get started. Okay, so we’ve been talking a little bit about the. The tougher market, and I don’t want to sort of hammer home that point because I don’t think it’s. It’s even necessarily true. But it’s certainly a perception that some of us have had.

And whatever the reason for it, it’s an opportunity, as I’ve been saying, to be intentional about how we design our business, to take that step back to possibly redesign offers, pricing, marketing, to really work harder for you. Because it’s not about how many hours you work. It’s certainly not about working more hours. The difference between earning well and scraping by is not in the number of hours we’re working, and that’s for sure. And that’s also why we break free from the Monday to Friday 9 to 5 job. So let’s not recreate that and make ourselves the worst boss we ever had. Okay, so why are you working harder than you need to? Let’s look at that one.

So the first one, and there might be some repetition here from the last few weeks, but there’s some really important points that I want to hammer home. The first one is kind of the Frankenstein offer problem, and I’ve been using that quite a bit recently. Sorry, Frankenstein. In fact, I think Frankenstein is the name of the doctor, isn’t it? Rather than the Monster. But the Frankenstein offer problem. So you are the Frankenstein as the creator of all these offers. Lots of scattered, custom, bespoke offers. We’re saying yes to everything.

We’re being reactive and that’s helpful and even necessary, maybe when we’re first starting. But it leads to complexity. When it comes to your marketing, it means your message is diluted. It’s harder to make sales when I am trying to one month speak to solopreneurs, the next one to founders with teams, the next one to HR leaders who are supporting their organisations. You know, I can either speak to a very high level message, which is fine, full leadership content and that will kind of resonate with everybody, or I can go really specific, but then I’m turning the other off or they’re ignoring me in the meantime. And so it’s not to say that it can’t be done, but it certainly creates complexity versus just having the one message, one client. Now, if you’re anything like me, we’re never going to have just one client, one message, one off. But there is a happy medium, I think, somewhere in between those two extremes of being really boring and just having that one thing you do versus being completely scattered and Frankensteiny.

Okay, so that’s number one. Number two, and I’m sorry if this applies to you and it probably applies to most of us, undercharging and over delivering, often that comes from pricing based on fear. And especially if we’re starting out, especially if it’s a tough market, we’re having a wobble, it can be easy to go, oh, it’s the price, I’m just going to charge something less and, or I’m going to charge that, but I’m going to work way harder and deliver this, this, this, this, this, rather than basing it on the value. And that inevitably, I guarantee you will lead to resentment, exhaustion and clients who don’t value your time. I had a chat with a fellow speaker a while ago and she asked for some advice about a client who, a potential client who just wasn’t locking in a workshop and she wanted to go away for her birthday and she actually decided she didn’t want to deliver that project anymore. And she said, oh, gosh, how do I even say that? And it’s like, look, the thing is, it’s your business. You get to say, I’m sorry, I’m no longer anymore. Ideally, we’ve obviously been clear up front about these are the deadlines, this is the scope, these are the conditions under which we’ll work.

Jessica Lorimer, the selling to corporate expert taught me a long time ago that we should have an expiry date in our proposals. And that really helps to say, look, this is valid until X. That means we don’t have to keep delivering to 2020 prices five years later. But undercharging over delivering is going to lead to you taking those types of clients who don’t value your time, who aren’t bought into what you’re doing. Oh, this particular client, by the way, that I was mentioning there, also pushed her down, like made her discount her offer. So it’s just. Yes. If we’re desperate and we have nothing else on, we can say yes to those things just to get a bit of money coming in.

But if we do, I would very much recommend that we put in clear boundaries rather than the opposite, which is then we over deliver for something that’s way less than we actually want to be charging. Does that make sense? So by all means we can take on lower paid things, but then let’s put those boundaries in place and compartmentalise it and box it off and like, right, that’s it, they’re paying that fine. So that includes this. And you don’t get all the extra stuff that I would have done if you paid me millions, then I would be really keen to over deliver, no problem. Okay, so undercharging over delivering the next one. I think this is so important with our type of business. Again with this kind of independent expert. I want to be a recognised authority.

I’m not scaling a massive business. I don’t need millions of leads coming in. In fact, I wouldn’t know what to do with them. Funnily enough, Daniel Priestley, who of course has a totally different type of business, I agree with some of the things he says and some not. For that reason, he said, you know, if he had gone on Steven Bartlett’s podcast a few years earlier, let’s say he would not have been ready to accept the deluge of people who came to him when they discovered him. Certainly I’m not ready to even entertain the idea of pitching myself to Steven Bartlett’s podcast. He wouldn’t have me on. But.

But you know, Steven, if you do, then let me know. But I wouldn’t be ready to have that many clients. I don’t have the team and systems and anything in place to do that. Right. Two years ago, and I’ve apologise if you’ve heard me tell this story many a time and I had a post go viral and I had hundreds of people book calls and, you know, it was just too much. It just didn’t work and didn’t translate into sales. So if we’re constantly chasing those new clients and we’re doing so by posting on LinkedIn and what I’ve told my clients in the accelerator is that, you know, we’re kind of, if you imagine and I’m drawing this on the table and you can’t see me, sadly, concentric circles. I’m here in the middle, in the centre, and we’re trying to post stuff to cold audiences of people who don’t know us and convince them that they need our thing, want our thing, can afford our thing, should get our thing now, should work with us to get that thing.

You know, it’s a lot of work. It’s not to say that that long term brand building and positioning is not important and nurturing those cold people to become warmer is of course a really important part of the business. But we’re missing out on actually the relationship based marketing and sales and the fact that it’s past clients and current clients and friends of friends and past colleagues and so on local networks that will bring in the clients in the immediate future. And we don’t need hundreds of thousands of clients. Unless your pricing is way too low. And then let’s talk. But really we’re talking about most of my clients. Like I just need a handful of clients to do this.

You know, I’ve got one more day now for coaching and I’d like that to be, you know, five clients. Fine, great, no problem. You know, so we’re not talking about hundreds and thousands of people here. And a lot of the strategies we’re taught and told and a lot of the things we’ve internalised are very much hanging on that kind of volume over value. And so I’d really urge you to reframe how you’re thinking about it. First of all, in that kind of the shorter relationship radius, I suppose the people who are in your inner circle, rather than just kind of throwing more stuff at the long term, building stuff, unless you’re in a very comfortable position where you’ve got lots and lots of money and you don’t need the immediate cash flow, which is fine. But if you do want sales, then probably, you know, don’t just do that and do the numbers. Again, it’s all about maths.

If I want to earn 100k working this many hours, I need this many clients paying this amount of money. Right? It really is that simple. And then finally, and that’s linked to What I just said there about kind of posting to cold audiences, marketing, busy work. I had a client, bless her, who said, you know, I’m spending hours on crafting each LinkedIn post. And if you’ve only got 20 hours a week that you’re working and you’re doing five posts and each one takes two hours, that’s already 10 hours gone just on LinkedIn. And that’s absurd. Unless LinkedIn is, and there are people like this bringing in lots and lots of clients to you, and that becomes your one primary mechanism, that’s probably not the best place to spend your time. Also, because A post on LinkedIn is just temporary.

Yes, more and more posts seem to be kind of lasting for longer, which I think is good news. But it’s not a long form, evergreen piece of content like, like a podcast, like a long workshop or YouTube video or book or something like that. Right? So. And let’s not put that much time into the individual things that last for about three seconds. And crafting and reposting, reposting, re editing and perfecting the picture and so on. First of all, visibility is not sales. And again, I did a series on this, I think it was in July, on sort of quiet authority over that virality and also marketing. And again, another episode from July is not the same as sales.

So the again and again I hear from people who’ve grown their following thanks to the latest hacks and tricks on. On LinkedIn, let’s say. And the same on Instagram. I have a colleague who said the same. It does not translate into sales. Okay, so stop sort of comparing yourself to people with bigger followings. And let’s look at who we have in front of us now. Also, from like a integrity and generosity standpoint, there are people right now, you know, five people show up to my workshop.

That’s amazing. Five people have trusted me to spend an hour together with me. That’s huge, you know, and it’s quite disrespectful to go, oh, only five people showed up. If I’ve got, you know, 2,000 people on my email list, that might not seem like a lot, but imagine 2,000 people in a room, you know, listening to what you’re saying once a week, twice a week, whatever it is, that’s again, huge. So you know the value and the real conversations that you’re having, relationship building over just that busy work. Okay, so Frankenstein offers too many scattered custom offers. Undercharging over delivering, pricing out of fear, focus on volume instead of value. And that marketing, busy work.

Okay, And I’ve got. Oh, I’ve got quite a bit to share with you, so we’ll see how we get on this time wise. But I wanted to give you some really tangible shifts you can make to earn more without working more, without burning out. And one of the frameworks I’ve shared before is, is the effort versus reward kind of quadrants. So if you imagine high effort, low effort, high reward, low reward, and I should really write this down so I can tell you the right thing in the right quadrant, but I’ll try to visualise it in my head to give you the right label. But if you think, obviously high reward and low effort is dreamland, if there’s something you can do, relatively simple, low effort, low input, but the reward will be huge in terms of whether it’s, I don’t know, reputation, visibility, income, meaning whatever, then that’s a great place to be. Right? That’s an obvious quick win. The other one that’s really important is the high effort and high reward.

That kind of thing is worth doing, but we’re going to recognise it will take more work and take more time. Then you’ve got the don’t do this, which is high effort, low reward. Those need to go. You’re spending hours and hours crafting bespoke stuff. No one cares, no one’s buying, paying very much. No. And then there’s the low effort, low reward, which, you know what, if you’ve got nothing else to do, by all means, you know, tick the box. But really, that’s not going to get you very far.

Right? So just take your offers as a start and your ideas maybe, and just map them on the effort versus reward quadrant and see where you end up. And like I said, the high reward, low effort obviously is dreamland. And then the high effort, high reward could be the things that you kind of planned for next year or for the future. The second piece, and these are the two sort of heaviest things and then the rest is a bit sort of simpler. But the second piece is knowing your integrity rate and your resentment rate and I can’t remember, so apologies if I’ve talked about this in the podcast before. Plus you may just be listening to this for the first time, so I’ll go through it again. But your integrity rate is what feels fair and energising to you. It’s based on the numbers.

And again, if you go back to the kind of the term time work episode from August from last month, then we did a bit of maths to get the math to be Mathing, it’s my favourite expression ever. Again, I always take the 100k a year you want to earn and you’re going to be working 100 days, that’s this many hours, and that means you need to be earning this rate, so that is where you want to be. If I’m getting that as sort of an average or they’re paying more than that, then happy days, I feel good. And even if it’s not kind of the massive, I want to get 20k for my keynote talk, as long as it’s above my integrity rate, that’s good. On the other hand, you also want to set yourself a resentment rate, which is what makes you cringe, what is not going to allow you to feed the poor children. You’re not going to survive on that rate. Okay, there are. And you can factor in some more subjective things.

Again, if you’re getting testimonials, credibility, getting to use a big logo of a company or something, that’s fine, you can factor that in. But obviously just ask yourself the question, if every client paid this, would it be viable? And the answer is no, then that’s not great. If again, that example that I shared before of, okay, they’re asking the world, they’re asking for like a really tight deadline, lots of stuff, and asking you to reduce your pricing, you’re not going to feel good about that, right? If something’s easy and yeah, sure, it’s a bit of a fun day out, I’ll do that. A bit less than what I usually charge, but no problem, I’ll do it, you know, so it’s, it’s a bit subjective, there’s no magical answer, but knowing your numbers is going to help you there. So your integrity rate, that’s what you need to be earning. I’m not saying charge by the hour, charge by the day, but you need to know, on average, you need to be earning 5,000 a day, 2,000 a day, 10,000 a day, whatever it is, and then your resentment rate below that, you’re going to say, no, I have a coach who says, like, oh, make sure that you quote sort of a range that is above your lowest rate. And I suppose in my terms, and the resentment rate, you don’t want to say if my resentment rate is, I don’t know, 1,000 a day, let’s say, whatever it is, I wouldn’t say to them, oh, yeah, it’s £1,000. And I wouldn’t say, oh, my prices are 1,000 to 3,000.

I would make sure that the bottom of What I say is higher than that bottom rate. Right. Hope that makes sense. I can do a whole training on this and if you want to work out your numbers, then, you know, get in touch, we’ll talk about it. Onestepoutside.com call to have a chat about your numbers. So, okay, number one, map your offers on the effort versus reward quadrant. And number two, know your integrity rate and resentment rate and that will help you work out. Okay.

Actually, this offer isn’t offering. No, that doesn’t make sense. This offer isn’t mathing. This doesn’t ladder up to the income that I want in the time that I want to work. Okay. And then as promised, the next three tips are a little bit lighter in the sense that there’s no framework here. But number three is sell more to the clients who already trust you. That’s that relationship radius that I talked about.

Right? It’s upselling, cross selling to existing clients, extending engagements, creating, you know, group programmes, more advanced programmes for people who already knowing what you do and they’ve already done the basic stuff with you, having that ecosystem of things that build on each other rather than, again, just going for that cold audience with your LinkedIn posts or whatever, which is valuable but not immediately impactful. So sell more to the clients who already trust you. Streamline your marketing to what works. And I know it’s not easy to know what works, but do do a bit of analysis, look at your top posts on LinkedIn and above all, look beyond social media and think, okay, well, I went to that. You know, where did your last five clients come from? Where did your best five clients come from? And it might be again, I’ve mentioned many times, I’ve got quite a few clients from a personal branding article I wrote years ago. I’ve had clients drip in from different podcast guesting I’ve done. Some have come from workshops I’ve run, whether free or paid. It might be referrals, but thinking of where they’re coming.

So if I’m posting every day on LinkedIn and not a single client has said that they found me on LinkedIn, maybe I could scale that back and focus my time in a better way. And then finally, and this is the one I’m probably worse at, but I’m getting better, it’s collaborating and leveraging your network. Yes, we’re solopreneurs. That doesn’t mean we have to do everything ourselves. If we can partner with someone, get referrals, you know, have conversations, that’s really powerful. And I’m not Saying you need to now have a co founder. Certainly I’m not even saying that you should co develop a group programme or something because that brings a whole host of different problems. Rather it’s, you know, making sure that people around you know what you do so they can recommend you.

And likewise you might have a kind of, you know, I try now with my accelerator programme to tell clients, look, if you refer someone, because I’d love for it to grow organically, then you’ll get this extra training or coaching session and so will the person you recommend or you. You know, I’m happy to make a charitable donation or whatever that incentive might be talking to people around you. Who knows, the parents at school might be in the exact dream organisation you want to work with your past colleagues and clients and so on. Right. So again, just a reminder of those little tips or strategic shifts to earn more without working more. Map your offers on the effort versus reward quadrant. Know that integrity rate, the higher rate that you want to be earning and then the baseline resentment rate that you don’t want to go below. Sell more to the clients who already trust you.

Streamline marketing to what works and collaborate and leverage your network. So you know, that’s a lot that I’ve thrown at you, but I think the two key ones really are to map your current offers. Just see where they sit in the high effort, low reward quadrant. Certainly if they’re high effort, low reward, then you should nix those, but see where they are. And maybe the idea is how could you shift that higher reward square? What would happen if you did stop offering those things that aren’t bringing the reward right? And then what’s that real resentment rate? And what are you still saying yes to to work below? Who are the clients you kind of need to let go of or at least go, you know, why not go, hey, you know, I’ve increased my prices, is my annual price increase and then either they’ll say yes, happy days or they’ll say no and no problemo. So you do not need to add more offers, hours, hustle more to earn more. What you do need to do is design your business around the work that delivers the most value. And that means marketing, sales and the actual delivery of your work.

And that means value for your clients and value for you if you’re ready to redesign your offers and pricing for this sustainable kind of success, sustainable income before the end of the year. The doors are open now for the accelerator intake that we start in October. And best first step is to, well, in fact, if you’re interested in accelerator, the best thing to do is apply and it’s no obligation. But it gives me an insight because a little form for you to tell me a little bit about your business. If you go to onestepoutside.com accelerate onestepoutside.com accelerate you can apply there and then you’ll be redirected to book a call to have a chat and then we can talk about whether it’s accelerator or if it’s a one to one or something else that would be the best fit for you. But that is the best next step. Thanks so much and I’ll see you back here next week. Bye for now.

If you’re ready to grow a business that actually works, one that pays you well, protects your time and reflects what matters most, the Business Accelerator is for you. It’s a 12-month journey for independent experts who want strategic growth without burnout and without compromise. Apply or join the waitlist at onestepoutside.com/accelerate.

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