Stop Being the Employee In Your Own Business

• Why “I don’t have enough time” is almost never actually about time
• The simple percentage split Kate uses with every client (and how to find yours)
• What it looks like when you’re quietly over capacity — before it becomes burnout
• Why being “successful on paper” and feeling successful are two very different things
• How to stop working like an employee in your own business

“It’s not always about finances. It’s about time — and most people are completely over capacity without even realizing it.”

“Even if it’s just you, you’re not a freelancer. You’re a business owner.”

“If you take one thing from this episode: sixty percent chargeable, forty percent everything else.”

“You shouldn’t be at the point where your business is stealing time from the weekend, the evening, or the hours you swore you’d spend with your kids.”

“There’s a horrible phrase — busy fool. You’re just busy for busy’s sake, and you’re not actually making any progress.”

Excerpt

In this episode of The Productivity Sweet Spot, capacity planning expert Kate Kurdziej joins Anne to unpack why “I don’t have enough time” is rarely actually about time. Together they break down the entrepreneurship and productivity math behind sustainable service businesses — the sixty percent rule that separates a full calendar from a full life — and the effective CEO habits that keep business owners from becoming employees inside their own company. It’s a practical, actionable-insights-packed conversation on staying organized, protecting your work boundaries, and building the kind of structure that helps you create productive systems instead of constantly playing catch-up.

Transcript

Anne Rajoo: Kate, I’m excited you’re here, and I’m excited about the topic we’re going to discuss today. I want to start with something I hear a lot — I don’t know if you hear it too — the statement “I don’t have enough time.” What do you think is actually underneath that? Because in my opinion, it’s not always about time. Do you hear that a lot, and what do you think is really going on?

Kate: I hear it a lot, and I hear it from myself on a regular basis too. No one’s immune to this kind of thought process when you run a business. But for me, with my clients, it normally comes down to not knowing what the priorities are in the business — not knowing what actually drives the business forward.

Kate: It’s such a horrible corporate phrase, “what moves the needle in the business,” but it comes down to that. What tasks, priorities, projects or processes do you actually need to focus on to make money? I always think there are really only two things you have to do in a service-based business: get new clients, and look after your current clients. That’s all you have to do. How you do that will differ between businesses, but when you boil it down to priorities, those are the two things.

Kate: A lot of my clients spend so much time on social media — Instagram specifically — building these lovely content plans. But when I ask them where their last ten clients actually came from, it’s in-person networking events or a referral. So why are you spending so much time on social media, when a little extra time in networking could get you even more clients for far less time than a month’s worth of Instagram posts?

Kate: I think we don’t stop and think enough about what the real priorities in the business are. People have a notebook full of to-dos, ClickUp or Asana full of so many different things that it gets totally overwhelming. So when you open your laptop in the morning, you don’t know what to focus on — because you don’t actually know what makes money in your business. There’s normally a couple of big priorities, and if you focused your time on them, business would be much easier. But we spread ourselves too thin.

Anne: I love that. This really resonates — we sometimes overcomplicate what it means to run a business. You’re saying it really comes down to two very simple things, even though the strategy for each can look completely different.

Kate: Exactly. And then at the end of the day, people still go with what’s easy — whatever’s jumping at them, whatever feels urgent. A client pings you, or a new lead does, and it’s right in your face, so you jump in without thinking. People work from their email inbox or their notifications. But that’s everyone else’s priorities — not yours.

Kate: You probably have somewhere written down what you want to achieve in the next 90 days, or your year plan — and those urgent, reactive things usually aren’t in that plan. So with my clients, and for myself too, the first 30 to 60 minutes of every day I don’t respond to clients at all. They’re not in my vision yet. If I can get one or two things done for my own business first, without any disturbance, I know I’ve moved something forward that day.

Kate: Otherwise you choose the easy thing, or you respond to the email — but that’s not making progress in your business. That’s why clients say, “I feel like I haven’t moved my business on in six or twelve months. I’m in exactly the same place, I’m not making more money, I’m not taking more time off, I never hired that team member.” It’s because they’re living reactively, over and over.

Anne: And they feel busy all the time. But when they look back at the day, they’re like — what did I actually do?

Kate: Right. There’s a horrible phrase — “busy fool” — horrible because it makes you sound like an idiot, but it’s really applicable, because you’re just busy for busy’s sake. You’re not actually making progress. When you pause and think, “what will actually make progress,” normally you don’t know — and that’s where you need to start. Once you know, you break it down: every day I’m going to do one thing toward that, every week one thing toward that, and after 90 days, six months or a year, you’ll have made real progress.

Kate: Half the clients who come on my retreat, it’s about that clarity piece. When you’re so busy in your own service-based business, pulled in different directions serving clients, you don’t have time to step back, get clear on what you actually want, and either adjust or make a new plan and implement it. There are a lot of moving pieces to get this right — but on a simple level, it’s: what do you need to do to make progress? And to answer that, you need the data first.

Kate: You need to know what moves the needle in your business. A lot of people don’t, because they don’t track where their leads come from, and they don’t track capacity — which is what we’re talking about today. A lot of people don’t know how many resources they actually have in their business. It’s not always about finances — it’s about time. And most people are completely over capacity. They don’t know what they need to do to make progress, so no wonder they feel overwhelmed on a daily basis.

The Wave of Client Work — and Why Capacity Matters

Anne: That really connects to conversations I’ve been having in my membership about how you actually juggle all of that capacity. We’re all at maximum — we have clients to serve and new clients to find, but how do you split that up? It feels like there’s a phase where you go out, network, connect, find opportunities, and that takes time — a few weeks, a month, depending on your conversion journey. Then suddenly everyone comes out of the woodwork at once and wants to work with you, and you don’t have the capacity to actually serve five new clients. It feels like a wave — effort, then a pullback, then another wave of opportunity.

Kate: That is the crux of service-based businesses, especially if you’re a solopreneur and the only service provider — though I work with agencies too, and it’s a similar dynamic. How do you plan, how do you forecast? It comes down to knowing your capacity, understanding what your pipeline looks like and how you serve clients, and the third piece — making sure you’ve got offers that don’t screw you over when a wave like that hits. Could there be a group offer? A shorter one-to-one offer, so the pipeline rotates more? There are different business models, and that’s such a big part of the work I love doing with clients — not just foundational work, but going in when it’s messy: offers, team, processes, capacity, financial forecasting, all of it.

Kate: That is what service businesses are. If you haven’t got a handle on it, it’s really hard to succeed — even if you’re making money. There was a point in my own business where my husband would drop our son at crèche at eight fifteen or eight thirty every morning, and I’d work from the minute they left the door after breakfast, straight through. I’d pick him up, put him down for a nap, go back to work, and work through till six, then make dinner. I was doing huge chunks of work — all service-based, retained work, project work, ad hoc work — and I was totally over capacity.

Kate: You’d look at my finances and think, fantastic — I looked like success. But I wasn’t a success, because I didn’t feel like one. I didn’t have the time I wanted. That’s when I really started digging into capacity planning, because it was becoming clear this wasn’t sustainable — this couldn’t be what my business was, because it was just going to burn me out. A lot of service providers get to that point.

Kate: I ran a workshop years ago where clients worked out their capacity live on the call, and someone came out at 120 percent capacity of client work alone. Once I explained the figures, she said, “no wonder I’m opening my laptop every single night constantly trying to catch up, working weekends” — she was way over where she should have been for her business model. Once you understand that, you can scale back, change your offers, put your prices up, so you don’t need to work so many hours. There are things you can do once you understand your capacity — which is why I’m glad we’re talking about this today.

Finding Your 100 Percent

Anne: So for someone who’s very new to the idea of capacity — maybe they’re good with time management, they track their hours — what does this actually look like?

Kate: My clients come to me because it’s not sustainable — they’ve reached the point where this isn’t why they signed up to have a business. They wanted time freedom, financial freedom, whatever their reasons were, and instead it feels like a prison and they’re exhausted. They’re very much over capacity. But nobody comes to me saying, “I’m at 125 percent capacity” — so how do we understand that?

Kate: When we talk about capacity in a service business, we talk in percentages, because everyone’s hours look different. If you’re working around school drop-off and pick-up, you’ll have far less time than someone working nine a.m. to eight p.m. So I talk in percentages, and you work out what that looks like for your own business. But before we get there — let me give an example using finances first.

Kate: Say you’re employed and paid a salary of two thousand euros a month. You allocate that two thousand: your mortgage or rent, maybe four hundred for food shopping, three hundred for other essentials, clothes, toiletries. You budget a hundred percent of that salary. What you don’t do is go and take out loans all the time, or borrow off people all the time, because that’s not sustainable — unless there’s a real reason, something big and necessary, like a holiday you really need, and you can pay it back within your budget. But you’re not just constantly dipping into extra money because someone offered it.

Kate: Apply that concept to your capacity. The hours you put into your business should be relatively finite. You shouldn’t be at a point where your business is stealing time from the weekend, the evening, or the hours you swore you’d spend with your kids. Working out your time budget is step one — that’s your hundred percent.

Kate: For me, it’s ten till three, because of school drop-off and pick-up — five hours a day that I want to work. Multiply that across the month by 20 or 21 working days, or fewer if you work less, and you get an hourly total for the month. We always work in months with capacity planning, unless your business model is unusual and needs a shorter window. Let’s say, for ease of calculation, that gives me a hundred hours a month — that’s my hundred percent.

Kate: If you’re going through a big launch or a big event, you’ll need to take some “loans” of time — a bit extra in the evening — and that’s fine short-term, as long as there’s a real business case for it. Don’t beat yourself up over that; we all go through busy periods, it’s part of entrepreneurial life. But if it becomes consistent — working every evening, every weekend, through lunch — you’re essentially taking loans all the time, stealing time from places it isn’t sustainable to take it from.

The 60/40 Rule

Kate: Once you know your hundred percent, we split it between chargeable time — the actual paid client work, whether hourly, by project or by deliverable — and non-chargeable time: marketing, admin, invoicing, checking emails, networking, coming on a podcast, all the necessary tasks that aren’t direct client work.

Kate: So — rewinding to chargeable time. Once you’ve worked out your hundred percent, that’s how much time you’re willing, able and want to put into your business. Go over that and you’re over capacity. If there’s a reason — a launch, something big — that’s fine short-term, but it shouldn’t happen on a consistent basis.

Kate: Generally speaking, if you’re a one-woman or one-man band service provider, aim for 60 percent chargeable time. If that creeps up to 80 percent, you’ll probably start feeling it — opening your laptop in the evening, struggling to keep up with social media content, not getting to the bottom of your inbox for a month. You’ll start to feel like something’s breathing down the back of your neck. If you’ve got a heavily automated business, or a team member or virtual assistant supporting you with the non-chargeable tasks, you might be able to creep up toward 80 percent. But generally the comfort zone is 55 to 70 percent, which is why I use 60 as the benchmark.

Kate: On a simple level, if you have a five-hour work day, that’s three hours of client work and up to two hours for admin, marketing, networking, or coming on a podcast — whatever that looks like for your business. If you have ten hours a day, that’s six hours chargeable and four non-chargeable. Play with the percentage a little, but you’ll need to time-track, or count it up from your calendar if you work in rigid client blocks.

Kate: I do a quick diagnosis on my own calendar by colour-coding: green for chargeable time, purple for everything else. Over a busy week, purple might get squeezed a little — that’s fine, as long as it comes back the following week. You don’t need to hit the split every single week, but overall, over a month: 60 percent chargeable. If you take anything from this podcast, it’s that — sixty percent chargeable, forty percent everything else.

Kate: That client I mentioned earlier who came out at 120 percent chargeable time — it wasn’t that she had a little extra time to give. She was maxing out all day, doing client work in the evening too, and never had time for her own admin and marketing. Once she understood that, it completely changed her business — she now has a team supporting her and has grown into more of an agency role, which comes with its own, different capacity percentages.

Kate: If you bring in chargeable team members, the business owner’s own chargeable time usually drops, because you take on the added responsibility of bringing in clients to keep the team fed — more marketing, less direct delivery. There’s always a sliding scale. Once your agency and team are up to speed, your own chargeable time shouldn’t stay at 60 to 80 percent — you should be focused far more on business development, because your job is now sales and marketing to keep your associate team close to fully booked. They shouldn’t be doing admin work that isn’t chargeable. So there are different percentages for different scenarios — but for solopreneurs, it’s 60 percent, and once it creeps toward 80, it’s time to look at what to do next.

Anne: I love having that guideline — our brains want something tangible, a marker in the sand.

Kate: It is. And I’ll share my own story quickly — my optimum is actually more like 50 percent chargeable time, because of the level of work I do. It takes a lot of context switching; it’s deep work, not just “send an email” or “schedule this.” I can’t physically work at 60 percent chargeable — I’m more comfortable at 50, because I need that white space to switch between complex tasks. So depending on the service you provide, you might need that extra space too.

Kate: And then the next question is: what do you do next? You look at your offers. Are you able to reach your income goals with the offer suite you currently have? Do you need to put your prices up? Because if you’re saying, “I won’t work more than 60 percent chargeable,” what does that do to your finances? There’s usually a pricing equation involved — you can’t just keep putting more time into the business to earn more; there’s a tipping point. Normally it’s a slight tweak to the offer, or a price increase, to create breathing room. Maybe you stay at 60 percent but earn more, or move to 50 percent and earn the same because you’ve raised your prices.

Kate: Or you bring in a team member. Once you’re tracking your time, you might see you’re spending ten hours a week on Instagram content, for example — and that might be totally fine if it’s bringing in hundreds of clients. But you need to know where your leads actually come from. A capacity audit isn’t an isolated exercise — it’s a diagnostic tool that points you toward the areas you need to go deeper on.

Anne: I think this is probably the second big takeaway I want listeners to walk away with — the 60/40 split, yes, but also: track your numbers, take the time to understand your business and your leads. Because when we’re in that fast-paced, over-capacity rut, those are exactly the things that get dropped first — “I need to do this for my client or they won’t pay me” — and it gets to a point where everything starts breaking down, because you have no idea what’s actually happening financially. That’s the danger of constant work without a pause.

Kate: Exactly — and it’s really important not to become an employee in your own business. I’ve been there — I felt like I was running around like a headless chicken serving clients, my own chargeable time probably around 120 percent too. Even if it’s just you, you’re still the business owner as well as the service provider. It’s not about putting down freelancing, but I always think of it as being a business owner, not a freelancer.

Kate: So even in the periods where it’s just me, I still protect CEO time for this kind of work, because I know nothing else will happen in the business otherwise, and I’ll end up right back where I started. That can be a real challenge for a lot of people — stopping client work to focus on your own business, which is why it’s the thing that gets pushed to the end of the day, or postponed. How many times have you blocked out “four weeks on Friday, I’m doing a CEO day” — going to a coffee shop to work on strategy — and then the moment client work gets heavy, that’s the day that gets moved? You’ll move the time you set aside to actually understand your business — and then where will you be in another six months? The same place.

Kate: There’s a point where business owners need to say: I’m the business owner here, not just the worker. That’s when things start to change, because you understand your business, understand the data, and the next steps become much clearer.

Anne: Absolutely — I always say CEO time. I actually have a quiz for that, because it’s one of the main things I see get dropped so easily, and over the long term, it’s what gets people into trouble.

Kate: Love it.

Anne: So before we wrap up — what didn’t we cover yet that listeners still need to know about capacity planning? Or is there a story from your own journey as an entrepreneur you want to share?

Kate: Yeah — maybe a couple of

practical things then, because there’s a chance that people are listening to this going, that sounds great, but how do I do it? Like, what do I do?

Like I say, there’s a there’s an element before you get to the numbers, you need to actually track your time. So, if you don’t track your time already because you’re not tracking it for a billing purpose, then use something like Toggl, which is free. It’s it’s just a way you could literally put your client sort of names in and just track time against that over a week, two weeks a month. I normally say to my clients when they’re doing this exercise, pick a normal fortnight period. So don’t have one where you’re like off for two days in an event or something like that, or during the holidays. Like pick a normal fortnight period that’s sort of regular work. We don’t need tracking to like the minute, like we don’t need to get that granular on it, but realistically, you know, to the newest 15 minutes, you know, something like that would be really useful to work out. Okay, for this client, I spend this amount of time, and then you track it. I’m actually just thinking I’ve got a free capacity planner that your listeners could download and make sure that they can plug their numbers in, so it’s split in those sections. It’s split with client work, so you can put in, or if you’ve got a group program or a membership, or you can list by client name. It doesn’t matter. However, you want to put that data in, you do it by month. And then the lower section is the business admin, the marketing, you know, that kind of thing there at the bottom.

So you need to come up with your figures first and plug that in and work out the percentages. And actually, your my spreadsheet does it for you. Puts it in a percentage. It’s free. You can download it, but you’ll then come out with a kind of you know your percentage, and then it’s traffic light coded. So it will tell you if you’re like way over, yeah, in in a little bit of a danger zone, or yeah, it’s doing okay, and then you’ll be able to see, you know, I can actually see these numbers now. See that I’m doing 10 hours of marketing. See that I’m doing five hours of admin, and that’s where you need to get to.

So first, work out what your time budget is. So what is your overall figure? Track your time. That’s part two, and then plug it into the spreadsheet to actually work out your percentages from that. And so, on a practical level, that’s where I would start. And I think the next part after that is completely different for everybody because the the spreadsheet will highlight different things for you, or you know, just do it on paper.

It will highlight different things for you. And some people might need to hire somebody to help. Some people might need to outsource a particular task, automate something, eliminate something, put their prices up. They’re like, “Oh, there’s really no movement. But what I could do is put my prices up and actually drop a client. You know, there’s various things that will come out of that.

And on a very practical level, that’s the the kind of workflow to get to that point, and I think the clients that I do this work with there’s a there’s a kind of bit of a relief after doing it because it will either highlight the fact that you’re over capacity, which is pretty normal. It’s pretty normal to have like bright red cells on the sheet, like ah, you’re over capacity. That’s normal.

If you’re feeling like, oh yeah, I need to make realistic planning, you probably get some red squares, and that’s normal because that’s just going to reflect. You know, there’s a reason why you’re doing with realistic planning, but you’ll be then able to work out what you need to do next. And the ones that have then hired somebody or put their prices up, you know, there’s a relief because the data is backing up how they’re feeling, and I think that’s really important.

That in business you don’t just sort of put a finger in the air and think, “Well, I think I’m doing the right and things I’ve got based on client next month, because then this becomes your kind of not your pipeline. We need to be doing that somewhere else. But actually, you can see that in two months’ time, this client’s dropping off. The request is going to be less that month, so you’ve got room. So yeah, okay, let’s start advertising. We’ve got one retainer space coming up in June, or two projects.

Anne

The time I want to take off. Like I have a lot of conversations right now about school holidays coming up. Summer in Europe, and for me, always in December, I have two month school holidays. How do I plan for that, and how do I make sure I can actually take time off? But if it’s just like one month after another after another, then you come to the period where you want to take time off, but you can’t because you have client delivery or whatever it is, and I think it’s yeah exactly.

Kate

So just think about this particular spreadsheet. You know, you can put your holidays in at the top as well, so then it will show you what your reduced capacity is that month, and then yeah, you might not want to take on another client just before you go on holiday.

So if you use your capacity very closely with your pipeline and your financial forecasting, it’s kind of the third piece of the puzzle. That how can you possibly know if you can take on another client if you don’t know how much time that you’ve got in your business, and that’s the question that capacity planning can really help you with.

So it’s not just a kind of administration operational tool; it really is a sales tool because you need to know how many spaces you’ve got, and then you can jump on Instagram stories or send out an email to say I’ve got X amount of spaces coming up, and you feel much more in control with that pipeline.

Anne

love that. And I think maybe it’s a sanity tool as well because what came up for me in this, what what you just shared as well, is a lot of times we women we beat ourselves up. Oh, I’m not I’m not good at this. I’m not a good business owner. But when you actually look at the capacity in your time, the way you described it with an Excel sheet and all. It’s like oh, obviously it’s not physically possible to have to do all of this. And sometimes like when you see it, it removes this like skills and maybe shame that we put on ourselves of like you know why do I work so much? Well, obviously it’s like the way it’s functioning right now. It’s what you what you’ve got to do, but you can change it once you see it, once you look at it.

Kate

Yeah, it’s nothing to feel like guilt or shame about or anything like that. It’s just like I say, a diagnostic tool in your business to give you a snapshot at that point of where you are.

But then it will help you going forward to plan for your sales and marketing. And like I say, if you’re feeling over overwhelmed, over capacity, then that will probably reflect in your capacity planning, and to your point, Anne, like that that hopefully will remove some of the why aren’t I doing more? Why aren’t I doing better? You know that questioning of ourselves. It’s because you physically can’t, you cannot put more time into your business. You don’t have more hours to put in, and then you can make decisions.

So it’s kind of the first piece, certainly the first piece of work that I do with my clients. But it’s the first piece, and then you have decisions to make after that, which we could talk about for a long time.

But essentially, that will help you understand what the next move is in your business, and it will pinpoint bottlenecks. It pinpoint areas where you’ve got a lot of time. You actually are you on 30% chargeable time. Okay, well then we need to do more marketing because we need to fill you up, and then we need to plan a consistent level of marketing after that because we don’t want to go through feasts and famine where well we’ve not got a lot of clients. We’re doing a lot of marketing, and then you get a load of clients, like you said, and then you stop marketing. We need to find a budget in our time for there to be consistent marketing, and that’s really important as well. That you kind of have this almost like residual time in the business that you will always be doing admin and marketing and networking and all of those things. That should never stop, which is why there has to be a cap on your client chargeable time, because the business can’t sustain these peaks and troughs. We need to level that out a little bit.

Anne

Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. Well, everybody has to go and download your capacity planner. The link will be in the description. And where else would they go to find you?

Kate

I live on Instagram mainly, so it’s just my name, Kate Kurdziej. You can find me on Instagram, and yeah, come over and let me know if you did your capacity planning and what your percentages were. I love you again.

Anne

Yeah, absolutely. It was such a pleasure, Kate. Really, yeah, I enjoyed this conversation a lot. I could have asked you 5 million more questions, but thank you so much for being here.