We start our agencies to create time and financial freedom, but sometimes our businesses have other plans and it feels like it has a mind of their own.

What starts as an exciting journey into building the business of our dreams can turn into a business that traps us instead.

… working all hours of the day and night

… giving up on our social lives

… putting work ahead of family

… putting client’s needs ahead of our own health

I’ve developed plenty of bad patterns and habits in my agency only to realize after the fact that it wasn’t that the agency was “bad” but that I allowed the agency to devolve into a soul-sucking job.

So how do you get out of it? How do you get your nights and weekends back?  How do you reclaim your agency and get back on the path to having all that you want?

One word: Boundaries.

The reason you’re working too much, the reason you’ve let your business overtake your social and family life is the lack of boundaries.

It’s kind of like your agency has turned into a 3-year-old toddler that doesn’t understand that it’s not polite to stick their hands into other people’s food.  You don’t get mad, you just let the boundary get crossed and know that someday your tot will grow into a person with manners.

But when will your agency grow into a person with manners?

Well, when you demand it.

Here are four easy tips that you can use in your agency TODAY to start setting proper boundaries and put yourself on the path toward a better work/life balance.

1. Keep Office Hours

Every business in the world sets its hours of business.  Even Walmart which operates 24/7 publishes its hours, but do you keep and publish yours?  

Set clear office hours. When you do this it is much easier to communicate that to clients and to be clear about when you are available and when you are not.  If you leave this up to chance, you’re only inviting the opportunity for clients to take advantage of your flexibility.

Will clients try to push the boundaries and try to reach you off-hours?  Sure it does happen.  But when you’re clear about your working hours it’s far easier to set your client’s expectations and get them in line with the kind of business you want to run.

2. Turn Notification OFF

Beep. Buzz. Ding.  Alerts for emails, SMS, and direct messages are useful for one thing only: to distract you from whatever it was you WERE working on.  Being in the habit of keeping these notifications off and instead of being intentional about when you check messages will help you so much.

It’s not just about notifications that distract you during your work day, this is about reclaiming your nights and weekends so that you’re not constantly being pulled back into work when you should be enjoying the rest of your life.

Don’t be that guy that’s glued to your phone because the notifications keep pulling you in.  Break the habit.  Work will be waiting for you in the morning.

3. Get an Office Business Line

Giving your clients your cell phone number can seem like the right thing to do.  After all, you want to provide great service and be available to them.  But this is a slippery slope.

Get a dedicated business phone number for your clients to call and redirect it to voicemail or answering service after hours.  Answering services are inexpensive, especially for businesses with a low volume of calls and you can train the person who answers direct messages to you under certain circumstances.

4. Set The Right Expectations with Clients (aka be kind to yourself)

What expectations do you set with your clients about when you’ll respond to them or when you’ll get something done?

If a client called you today and asked for a website update, do you make a commitment that’s sooner than it needs to be?  Yes, there are some times when clients need work done fast but I found more often than not the turnaround time I was committing to was much faster than it needed to be – only because I wanted to provide the best service possible.

It’s easy to set ourselves up for failure or put ourselves under a lot of pressure when we make commitments to clients.  Decide what your minimum turnaround time is for any work that you do or any proposal you make and don’t unnecessarily create expectations that are hard to live up to.  

In other words, be kind to yourself!

Bonus Tip: Understand that your clients are hiring your company, NOT YOU.

Lots of people who own agencies mistakenly believe that the client is hiring them for their personal skills and knowledge and not hiring the company.  This can be easy to believe if you are an agency of one.

The sooner you adopt the attitude that the client is hiring your company vs. you, the easier it becomes to design your agency in a way that can leverage a team to provide the best service to your clients.

Ultimately, your clients are hiring your company for the results you can provide.  Whether that comes as a result of YOUR talent or the talent of the team that you assemble, doesn’t matter.  When you have a business that is hired for the team’s capability vs yours that’s when you’ll have ultimate freedom from working inside your business.

When you don’t set proper boundaries in your business you end up creating a business where every client has the possibility to morph into the worst boss you’ve ever had.  Except you don’t have just ONE boss, you have many!  

It can be easy to bring in habits and expectations from places you used to work.  When you own your own business you get to decide how things work.  Will you own an agency that respects your time and has manners or will it be that mannerless toddler?  The choice is yours.  You have to set the boundaries or your clients will do it for you.

Apply for a coaching call with our Director of Coaching, we’d love to help you take your agency to the next level.