If you’re a small business owner, you have probably learned that the way to succeed is to hustle. To always be working. And if you’re a solopreneur, that pressure often becomes even bigger: not only do you have to hustle and always be working, you have to do all of it yourself—the creating, the marketing, the doing of whatever it is you’re selling. Doing less in business doesn’t seem to be an option.

In the UK, four in ten self-employed people say they’ve experienced burnout while running their business, and more than half regularly work beyond their normal hours, according to research done by the insurance company Markel. Given all that contemporary entrepreneurship seems to expect from us, that’s no wonder.

But can you afford to do less in your business? And how do you go about it?

Perhaps surprisingly, working less can actually be good for your company: a UK pilot from 2022 showed that company revenue stayed roughly the same when businesses introduced a four-day workweek. Historical data analysed by Stanford economist John Pencavel moreover shows that output drops sharply after about 50 hours a week. And while you think that more offers leads to more sales, providing more choice tends to make the decision to buy from you harder for prospective clients and customers.

If you’re ready to start doing less in your business, carefully reviewing your offers is a good place to start, as it also directly impacts the marketing you have to do.

The other day I sat down with a small business owner to review their offers. We scrolled through page after page. I started to feel overwhelmed on their behalf. There was so much there!

This is a common scenario: we start a business with one or a few offers or products, and then keep building and building until we have an entire offer suite. Keeping all of these offers going adds considerable load to your business, because you need to be ready to provide all of them—whether that means marketing them, or producing many different types of products.

Perhaps surprisingly, offering more can actually lead to fewer sales. If someone lands on your website and sees five different options for working with you 1:1, or six different courses to choose from, they might well wonder which one they need. And while they’re wondering and thinking, you’re losing them. They close the tab with the intention of coming back to your website (and probably never do). For you, having many different offers and products means marketing all of them: writing sales copy, creating posts, writing emails, posting Pinterest pins. Not to mention answering any questions that your audience asks you about them.

If you suspect that your business might be suffering from offer bloat, take a close look at what you’re selling:

  • What does each service or product do? What are the deliverables?
  • How is each service or product distinguished from the other? Which add-ons are you offering that really don’t do much other than add complication?
  • What will be the right option for a prospective client or customer at which time? You might draw a flowchart for yourself here (and even share it on your website). Remember: if someone is not quickly able to see what the offer is and how it’s right for them, they’ll simply click away.
  • What does each offer cost you in time and energy, and what do you gain from it, especially financially?

Based on your answers to these questions, you have four options:

  • Retire your offer;
  • Pause your offer—this can be an experiment to see what happens, or a way to help yourself get used to the thought of retiring it;
  • Fold it into another offer;
  • Raise the price of the offer so it’s more worth your time.

For me, this meant changing my 1:1 offer twice in one year. In an attempt to make my working hours more flexible, I cut calls from my three-month package and replaced them with more asynchronous support. While this worked for some clients, I realised after a while that it felt increasingly difficult to explain the benefit of this approach—and I also missed connecting with my clients during calls. Nearly a year after changing my offer for the first time, I changed it back.

Review How You Spend Your Time

Doing less in your business also means taking a careful look at how you spend your time. Take a close look at your calendar for the past couple of weeks: which events and meetings were actually useful? Which moved your business forward? Measure the success of these activities: not just in terms of sales, impressions or contacts made, but in terms of your energy too. Is this networking event leaving you so exhausted you can barely work for the rest of the day? Cut it. Does this marketing channel perhaps not lead to clear results, but make you feel really creative and connected to your business? Keep it.

Marketing can be another time-suck—so much so that many of the small business owners I speak to barely have time to actually work in their business because they’re so busy on all the channels. We tend to be quick to think “oh, but this doesn’t take that much time”. Usually that’s not the case, but even if it were to take you only 10 minutes to create and post an Instagram post, once you’re on the platform you’ll likely stay there to scroll a bit, to keep up with others in your network and to check the likes and comments on your post. 10 minutes quickly becomes 30 minutes or more. Staying on top of lots of different channels takes a mental load as well, as you’re constantly checking off lists for each and every one of them.

  • Which of these channels do I actually enjoy?
  • Where do I feel connected to my (potential) clients and customers?
  • Where can I use my strengths and what feels easeful?
  • Where do I see most conversion?

When I streamlined my own marketing in 2022, I soon learned that focusing on fewer channels (in my case my newsletter over social media ), is actually more effective than rushing through many.

Once you’ve reviewed how you spend your time, being intentional with how you spend it—and set boundaries around it —is the next step.

What Are You Getting Back By Doing Less?

If you’re still wondering whether doing less in your business is something you can afford, you might think about what your current way of working is costing you. That cost isn’t only in hours. It’s the evening spent answering questions about an offer that barely sells, or the weekend lost to marketing a product you’d quietly stopped believing in.

Start small: one offer, one channel. Decide what to do with each, and then notice what fills the space you’ve made. And perhaps, instead of adding more work to fill that space, reconnect with your hobbies or loved ones instead.