project_log: 024

Yo.

Trying something a little different this week. Instead of my usual format, I'm sharing a live strategy deep-dive. Let me know what you think.

I've been thinking about a question lately: what's the most powerful lever I can pull as a solo operator to increase my income without working more hours?

The answer I keep coming back to is speed.

A few months back, a client paid me 5X my normal rate for next-day delivery on a project that would typically take a week push through.

This taught me two things:

1. Clients will pay significantly more for faster delivery

2. Speed is a massive competitive advantage in today's market.

So how do we get faster?

Breaking Down My Current Process

To optimise for speed, I first need to understand where the bottlenecks are. I’m going to stick to the client acquisition phase (before a client pays) in this article. This will be more actionable to all internet services providers.

My current process:

1. Create content on Twitter to attract lead getters (for those new to lead getters, read this)

2. Client reaches out after seeing my content, website, or through referral.

3. We exchange messages, then schedule a discovery call

4. On the call, I ask questions to understand the scope

5. They ask for pricing and availability

6. I review my notes, look at similar past projects, and create an estimate

7. If they agree, I prepare a scope document and collect 50% deposit.

This process can take anywhere from a day to 2 weeks. AKA there’s a massive opportunity for speed optimisation.

Now for the juice.

The Three Speed Levers

I’ll run my process through the three speed levers: Templatise, Automate, and Eliminate. The goal is to get creative and find solutions to optimise that aren’t immediately obvious. Let’s start with creating templates:

1. Templatise

What it is: Creating standardised solutions to avoid repetitive work.
Why it matters: Less repetition = more available time.

Potential opportunities:

• Develop social media templates based on my highest-performing posts to attract more lead getters, faster.

• Create project update templates for weekly client communications that take 2 minutes to fill out.

• Create a scope document template that has generic information relevant to all projects to save time.

• Create discovery call structure template to reduce the time spent on calls.

2. Automate

What it is: Building systems that work without direct involvement.
Why it matters: More available time = faster delivery.

Potential opportunities:

• Use Ballpark, my tool that automates the estimation process so leads can instantly see if they're in budget.

• Create automated follow-up sequences for leads who’ve submitted my estimator.

• Use AI to automatically draft tweets based on Newsletters I’ve written.

• Create an up to date availability tracker to avoid the question of “When are you available?”

3. Eliminate

What it is: Ruthlessly cutting activities that waste time.
Why it matters: Every minute on non-essentials is a minute not delivering value.

Potential opportunities:

• Eliminate time wasters: consuming short-form content, obsessing over vanity metrics, working on shit that doesn’t matter (like redesigning your portfolio).

• Schedule three 90-minute deep work sessions. Don’t use slack. Don’t check emails. Don’t go on socials. Focus. (Read Deep Work if you haven’t. Great book).

• Say '“no” earlier in the communication process to avoid wasted time on clients that aren’t suitable.

In just 30 minutes, I’ve identified multiple areas for optimisation. Some of them are shit. That’s ok. It’s important to let your mind think creatively.

Now we action.

The metric we are tracking is Speed. If something takes less time to achieve the same result, we’ve increased speed. We’ve won.

Run through the list above and find the opportunities that are both easy to implement (as in take less than a couple hours) and those with high impact.

For me that’s:

1. Social media templates.
2. Saying “no” (literally takes 2 minutes and saves weeks).
3. Use AI to run my newsletter through my social media templates.

The trick here is avoid implementing multiple optimisations at once. You want to understand the impact each has on the speed of your to delivery.

That’s all for this week.

Stay fast. Talk soon.

Will

P.S. If you found this valuable, share it with someone you think works slowly (or maybe don’t lol) ❤️