#114 - Spring Clean Your Business: 6 Simple Ways to Declutter, Simplify & Get More Clients

If you feel a bit overwhelmed, scattered, or stuck in your business right now, that's perfectly normal. Spring is here and we feel the natural urge to expand. That's hard to do when we're bogged down by all kinds of clutter. 

If your inbox is overflowing, your offers feel unclear, and your content is all over the place… this episode is your reset.

Today, I’m walking you through 6 simple ways to spring clean your business so you can declutter your digital space, simplify your systems, and create more clarity, ease, and momentum.

And the best part? Each step takes under an hour.

We’re not doing a full overhaul, this is a focused, intentional reset that will actually help you shift into expansion mode. 

Inside this episode, you’ll learn how to:

✨ Declutter your digital workspace and reduce decision fatigue
✨ Simplify your offers so you can actually sell with confidence
✨ Clean up your messaging to attract the right clients
✨ Audit your lead magnet and create a funnel that converts
✨ Streamline your tech and eliminate unnecessary tools
✨ Shift your energy so you stop forcing and start attracting

If you’ve been feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like your business is harder than it needs to be… this is your invitation to simplify.

🎧 Listen now and pick ONE area to reset this week.

👉🏻 Want a copy of the Checklist I made to help you do this right? 

Just drop me a DM or email me and I'll send it on over! 

Loved this episode? It would mean the world to me if you would scroll down wherever you're listening and leave me a rating, and a review! Thank you in advance for taking time to do that! 

Mindset to Market is a Luminous Creative Production. If you'd like to learn more about our business coaching program and group coaching container, please visit us online at DeborahcSmith.com.

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Transcript

 Hey, solopreneur, I'm gonna take an educated guess that your business feels a little bit cluttered right now. So we've just come off of winter. It's been a long winter, it's been a very difficult winter in so many ways. Um, you're doing a ton, you've got a lot of ideas. I'm guessing you have a ton of content just scattered about your online business.

World, but it's springtime. And so, you know, it's really important that we make space to become more expansive because it's a natural cycle of the seasons, and it's natural for us as humans and as creators to become expansive. But if things are messy, scattered, or really heavy, like if you're weighed down by just a ton of stuff on your laptop, on your desktop, then it's hard to take action, right?

It's hard to clear things up. So we gotta clean it up. Spring cleaning. Your business is a ritual. It's not about doing a ton more, it's about just creating space in your life so you'll have more clarity and you can actually, you know, find things with ease and just waste less time digging around on your computer.

There's a lot of great data and science behind how decluttering and organizing helps to create that expansion. So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through five simple ways to spring clean your business, not your desk, not your office, not your kitchen, your business. And here's the best part. All of these take under an hour.

Most of them take under 30 minutes, and you don't have to do them all at once. So these are just some very clear ways for you to declutter your business and make some space. And we're not gonna do an all day overhaul, we're just gonna do focused and intentional resets. So grab a notebook or open your notes app and let's clear some space.

Hey there. Welcome to the Mindset to Market Podcast, your go-to space for practical tools at. And solutions to the everyday challenges of being a creative and soulful entrepreneur living in a material world. I'm your host Debra Smith, a holistic business coach and marketing strategist. With 17 years of experience, I help my clients bust through mindset blocks and learn daily marketing practices that balance personal wellness with financial growth and impact.

I'm here to offer you support with creativity, mindset, practical how-tos, and getting into imperfect messy actions so you can experience daily breakthroughs as you grow. If you're a purpose-driven entrepreneur building an online business, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Hey there. Welcome back or welcome to the Mindset to Market Podcast. Um, before we dive into this episode, I just wanna state the, I think obvious, but sometimes it's not, which is that we are in a really difficult moment. Um, I live in the United States and we are in just a really. We're living in a hard timeline, and it's not just business as usual for me.

Um, it's not business as usual for anyone that I know. This is not a political podcast by any stretch of the imagination, but I am a concerned citizen, and I believe that as a woman and an entrepreneur, that's inherently political because everything that we do is to create our own livelihood and. Have a say in the way that our lives play out.

Just in general. I think it's very political to be a woman and to be an entrepreneur. And so that being said, I'm not the kind of person and the content creator who's gonna spiritually bypass this moment and pretend that we're not at war, that things are not chaotic in the airports, that it's not, you know, that we're not dealing with a serious amount of, you know, rising inflation in our economy.

There's a lot of stuff going on that make it really, really hard right now to operate business as usual. So I think it's really important for us to stay connected, to stay in conversations about how we can support each other. Um, get involved. Use your voice, use your platform. If you don't have a platform, you can build one, because we do still have freedom of speech in this country.

And. I think the flip side of this is that we need to be active and be involved, but we also need to keep building our businesses. We need to keep showing up, keep sharing our work, keep connecting with the people who we can help and keep growing and not stop pursuing our great dreams of living a life that is truly free and building something beautiful for yourself.

So. Don't stop believing in your dream. Keep showing up, share your work. That's what we need to be doing, in my opinion. Um, if you can, if you have the means and if you don't or if you need support, reach out and ask for help. Okay? So with that said, cleaning up your clutter and your mess is going to help you streamline activities and take more clear action and just create better business.

So let's do this right now. I've got five specific tasks for you to help you spring clean your business, and with each one of these, I'm gonna tell you what it is. I'm gonna give you approximately how much time it should take you exactly what to do and how it's gonna impact you. So if. Let's start with an easy win.

Number one is cleaning up your digital clutter. So I want you to set a timer for 30 minutes. That's it. This is not the time to reorganize your entire life. We're not getting deep into your entire, you know, filing system. This is just about creating some breathing room and clearing away stuff that you no longer need.

So here's what I want you to focus on, just three simple tasks. The first is unsubscribing from emails that you never read. These can compile up quickly. We get onto all kinds of mailing lists. We get spams. People send tons and tons of emails that we just really are not interested after a while, and we just leave them in our inbox.

And so I want you to go through and unsubscribe from anything that you're really not benefiting from. Right. So if it's not bringing you joy, it's not bringing you value, and it's not something that you actually care about, it's okay to unsubscribe. Even if it was your friend's newsletter, it is okay to relieve your inbox from all of this extra dead weight go through, clear away a ton of emails.

It's gonna feel really good. The second task is a quick cleanup of your desktop itself. You know how you're always screenshotting things and moving things onto your desktop to hold until later. Um, I want you to go through, delete everything that you no longer need, and if you think you might need it, just create one folder and label it hold.

And then we're gonna set a timeline to go back in and check that in a month from now. And if you haven't used it yet, then you can delete that as well. And then the last thing you can do. Just create a few simple folders in your Google Drive to organize the stuff that you have in your downloads folders, or that's gotten scattered about, so you have a place to put the things that you actually want to use and work with.

And that's it, right? Because clutter, digital clutter especially really creates decision fatigue. And so when you're constantly overwhelmed by the little things, it slows down your ability to take these bigger actions. So don't overthink this, just throw 30 minutes on a timer. Hit, you know, scroll through your inbox and unsubscribe on a bunch of things and clean up your desktop and move things that you do.

Wanna keep into some organized folders in your Google Drive. Get 'em off your desktop. Get 'em out of your downloads. Okay? Number two is auditing your. Offers. And for this, I think you probably want about 45 minutes, maybe 60, but I would really cap it at 60. And this one might feel a little bit deeper because it really is taking a look at the work that you're sharing and serving with.

So, but we're gonna keep this simple. So you're just gonna set a timer for 45 minutes and we wanna break this into three. Parts. The first part is 15 minutes. I want you to write down a list of every single offer that you currently have, okay? That's step one. Just write down everything that you currently have, any ideas that you might be selling, anything that you actively have on your website or on the marketplace.

But write down everything. The second 15 minutes, I want you to go through that list and mark each one with two possible marks. One is, this feels aligned. And the second one is, this feels heavy or unclear. And just be honest with yourself. Either it feels aligned with the work that you're doing and the client that you wanna serve, or it's something that you thought would be a good idea, but you never quite developed it.

And it, there's obstacles to completing it. Um, it's undeveloped, it just feels heavy or it's unclear. And then the last 15 minutes is that you're gonna choose just one offer to focus on right now. For the spring focus. Okay. Just one. Your main choice. Because most of the time the problem that we face as entrepreneurs isn't that we don't have enough ideas or enough ways that we can serve or share.

It's that we have too many. So none of them are getting your full attention. None of them are getting your full energy. You can't just focus on one thing because you're in the back of your head. You've got, you know, this loop open for completing tasks on a bunch of different things that you had ideas about, and you started working on it and you did some research and.

Pulled up some graphics and you, you know, listed out the bullets of what you might deliver and what the benefits are. So you've got these open loops in your brain, but you do not need more offers. You need one really good, solid, clear offer, and that clarity is gonna help you be of better service to the people who work with you.

So I'm not saying you cannot have a, a, a full offer suite if it's aligned, but you and I both know. This has gotta be ringing true for you, that you've got a bunch of unfinished ideas clogging up space in your brain. So I want you to label that as that it feels heavy or unclear. And then put it in a folder labeled, revisit this in six months.

So you're not giving up on your ideas, but you're, you're getting it out, you're clearing it out of the way and making space for the one offer that you think is really aligned right now. That feels easy and light, and for you to sell, trust me, it's gonna help you think more clearly and make better sales.

Okay? Number three is to declutter your content and your messaging. A yay. This one, I think give yourself about 30 minutes. So your content, oh my goodness. It's just we're living in this like nonstop hamster wheel of content creation, so everybody is gonna benefit from this. So set your timer for 30 minutes and go look at your last 10 posts that you posted on your most active platform.

So if this is email, go read your last 10 emails. If it's Instagram, go look at your last 10 pieces of content. If it's LinkedIn, go check out your last three LinkedIn posts and ask yourself. Who am I actually talking to here? And is it clear that I'm talking to them or am I kind of talking to everyone and so therefore no one, right?

So I want you to choose two to three core themes for your content that you're gonna focus on moving forward. And that's it. Not, we're not rewriting the entire brand today or developing, you know, a robust set of content pillars. We're just decluttering the messaging that no longer aligns with the offer that you just decided is gonna be the thing you wanna focus on this spring.

So make sure that the two or three themes in your content that you're gonna write messaging. Aligns with that offer so that when you're going out to the marketplace and, and creating content and speaking to somebody, it's aligned. And this is important because, as you know, a confused messaging, it leads to confused buyers or no buyers, but, uh, the clarity of who you serve and what you do to help them is what's gonna help you make much easier.

Sales. I've been doing these messaging audits for clients where I just walk through their entire funnel with them and. Look for the gaps in messaging and it's such an eye-opening experience. If that's something that interests you, reach out to me. I've got room for a couple of those each month, and it's really just an incredible process where it just cleans up and zips up the whole funnel so that it makes sense from cold traffic all the way to somebody you know, being onboarded into your offer.

So messaging that converts is. Crystal clear who it's for. So I want you to just take 30 minutes to go clean up your content and make sure that you are speaking to the right person. Okay? Number four, organizing your funnel and your lead magnet. So again, this is a decluttering of your business, and so we are looking at the internal.

Pieces, the assets that actually lead to potential sales. And so we're gonna get into the good stuff here. This is definitely a 45 to 60 minute task. Um, and trust me, it'll be worth it. So here's your focus. What is my current freebie or lead magnet? Does it actually solve a real, right now, what I call level 10 urgent problem?

And where does it lead people next? Okay, so what is my current free beer lead magnet? Does it actually solve a real problem for people that they're like seeking in the marketplace? They're out there looking for this checklist or this guide or this, you know, video tutorial or this, you know, whatever you offer, audio meditation.

Then where does it lead people? Next, is it actually aligned with the right next step in your funnel? And then here's another thing to check, just the basics. Are all the links working? Is the email delivery set up properly? Does it feel clear and intentional? So. When people download your free thing, do they get a warm invitation to that right next step?

Go through and monitor these things and make sure that people are not just getting dumped off into no man's land on the internet. And if it doesn't line up and it's no longer the right lead magnet for your offer, don't freak out. You do not need five new freebies. You just need one really strong entry point for your audience member.

Okay. What to watch out for here. It's so, so easy for us to start thinking that we need to create a huge variety of lead magnets so that we can be calling a, a variety of different potential clients into our offers. I advise against this. I did this for so many years, you guys, I've made this mistake for you.

Don't waste your time with a ton of lead magnets. It's opening a lot of doors into your house, and that means keeping a lot of hallways clean, keeping a lot of doorknobs, shiny, keeping, you know, a lot of pathways groomed. It's too much work. Choose one aligned lead magnet that actually is the right baby step or the right little first nibble.

Think of yourself at going to the Costco. Or some grocery store and you're walking down the aisle and somebody offers you a toothpick with a little sample of cheese on the end, you take a bite of that cheese and if you like it, you're gonna buy the cheese. Your lead magnet should be a nibble of your offer, so make sure you're starting with your main offer and then reverse engineer back to that lead magnet from there.

And you don't need five, you only need one. And just make sure it's the right one. Every piece of content that you create should lead somewhere, right? So this is how we start building a business that actually works for you, is by intentionally auditing your funnel and looking at the entry point. So for this one, you're just gonna go through that lead magnet, you know, top of funnel experience where people first enter into your ecosystem and make sure everything is aligned.

And if it isn't, you're gonna fix it up. Okay. Number five on the spring. Clean your business list. You're doing great. We're almost there. Number five is to reset your tech and systems. I would give this about 30 minutes, and this one's gonna feel really, really good. This is kind of like number one, it's easy to do.

It's gonna feel really great. 30 minutes. Go through your tools, your subscriptions, your systems, and ask yourself, what am I paying for that I'm not using? And then cancel it. What feels overly complicated? Simplify it. And what is one thing that I could automate to save time in my business? And just pick one thing.

Because the truth is that complex systems do not scale. And this is something that we work on inside my program week after week after week. Everybody wants to build out these robust, complex systems, but they don't actually work well for people. And then there's just more work keeping them attached and functioning.

And so your business should support your life, not overwhelm you. So picking just. Simple pathways for people to travel. It's actually better for your client as well. It's better for everybody. So I just want you to take 30 minutes, go through all the stuff that you have downloaded that you don't actually use, and get rid of it.

One thing I would note here is that the Google Suite of tools has a lot of free ways to support your business that are similar to paid subscriptions. So for example, you could have a, you know, if you have an acuity or a Calendly. You can set up a calendar link inside Google Calendar that allows you to automate bookings.

There's all kinds of stuff like that. I should actually do a, an episode on all the different free support tools inside Google, but the point here is to simplify and declutter your tech and get rid of things that you don't need. Simple systems, clean lines of communications, it all leads to easier sales.

And that is the goal. Oh, guess what guys? I have a bonus for you. I forgot about this. Okay, number six, bonus is clear your energetic leaks. And for this task, I would allot 20 minutes and this might be the most important one. So, um, here's here. This is fun. So set a timer for 20 minutes, grab a journal and ask yourself.

Where am I forcing things right now? Where am I overthinking? Where am I operating from a place of fear or lack or pressure to perform? Ooh, I felt that one. Just notice, right? We're not trying to fix you. You're not broken. You're a normal entrepreneur. Juggling the reality and the weight of all the different tasks that you have on your plate.

It's not easy. And so, like I said, no judgment, but I just want you to write down a few. Grounded beliefs about how you are allowed to operate. So something like I don't have to chase clients. Uh, I get to lead with authority in my expertise. My work is valuable, right? So these are sort of positive affirmations that help you clean up any of these energetic leaks.

'cause your energy is a part of your marketing. It's really easy for us to feel. Your, your energy inside, your sales messaging, inside the way you conduct yourself, you know, in opportunities to speak. And so if your energy is leaky and you're all over the place and you're doubting yourself and you're forcing things and you're trying to keep up with trends and you know what's happening on the internet.

That's something that we can feel as your audience and as your customer. So we wanna clean that up. So just ask yourself, just, this is a journal assignment, 20 minutes. Really do this work. It really changes how you feel. Where am I forcing things? Where am I overthinking it? Where am I not trusting my internal GPS?

As an entrepreneur, the strongest tool in your toolkit is that internal gut check. You already know. What you want, you know how you feel. You just gotta create space in your life to allow that to be a dominant force that drives you forward. And that is why we are spring cleaning, because that energy, that's part of everything that's gonna help you really move the needle in terms of making an impact, in terms of making sales, which make you money, that get you to that more comfortable lifestyle.

So really important. Number six, bonus. All right, we did it. Take a deep breath. That was a lot. I know, but also not really a lot. Because here's the thing, you do not need to do all of these six things in one day. Um, this is a process, like I said, spring cleaning your business is a ritual, so you can do these one at a time.

Maybe you do one of these a week. Throughout the, you know, rest of March and April, or maybe you're doing these over the summer because you're listening to this in the time, you know, capsule, that's fine too. Whenever you decide to do this, um, I, you know, give yourself permission to just create some space, put on your favorite song, you know, feel good about doing this, and take the 20, 30, or 45 minutes to do one of these tasks at a time.

Just pick one. Set the timer and give yourself and your business a little space to breathe again. Okay, I hope this episode resonated with you and you find these tips helpful. Um, if so, I would love to hear which one you're gonna be starting with, and send me a message, send me an email, shoot me a DM on Instagram, um, or share this episode with somebody who you know is going to benefit and tag me.

I would really appreciate that. Oh, and by the way, while we're at it. If you like this podcast, I would really appreciate a, your feedback. Um, if you can leave me a rating or a review, it makes a big impact on getting it heard and seen by other people. Greatly appreciated. Um, thank you in advance for the time.

You just scroll down to wherever you're listening and look for the stars. And usually there's a little link you can click that says, you know, rate this podcast. Um, all right, my friend. Oh, and if you want a simple checklist to walk through these step-by-step, guess what? I made one. Yes, of course I did.

Because as I'm creating these episodes, I'm organizing the information and then it's really easy to just highlight the whole thing and put c check boxes next to it. So I got a checklist for you. I live my life by the check checklist. Everybody knows this and can't get through the day without a checklist.

So, um, hit me up. If you want the checklist, I've got it. Okay, my friend. Let's keep building. Let's keep it simple. Let's keep it intentional. Let's stay on course. Stay in alignment, stay connected, and until we meet again, may you be vibrant. 

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