Better Business Boundaries

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 159. 

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach, and then on to multiple six figures as a fulltime money and business coach. 

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. It is now mid-December, which is pretty crazy that we are about to complete this calendar year. Also from where I'm sitting, we're about to enter into the holiday of Hanukkah, which is so delightful. It is a time of miracles. And right now in the Middle East, at least when I am recording this podcast episode, we are witnessing tremendous, tremendous miracles. All of our enemies are just falling alongside of us. And it really is the story of Hanukkah when the small little army of the Maccabees destroyed the Greeks, the Hellenists, and that is really what we are witnessing all over again.

And it is a time of tremendous thanks and thanksgiving and miracles that are happening to the Jewish people. So I'm just going to start with that and how much overwhelming gratitude. And I know that when we get to the holiday of Hanukkah, just saying our prayers and singing Hallel is going to be so full of meaning for us this year in a completely different way.

And I also want to remind you that if you are not yet on my email list, you really do want to be there because I have some fun stuff coming up in my business during Hanukkah. Maybe some extra special like offers. I had a mystery offer that I was working on Black Friday, and I'm going to be doing some more offers that are going to tickle your fancy. So you really want to go onto my newsletter, debbiesassen.com/newsletter and sign up because you want to be the first to know so you don't miss out on amazing opportunities.

And for the next few weeks, as we go into the end of this calendar year, and I know that so many of us are going into holiday seasons, these podcast episodes are going to be kept short. I'm going to give you one small topic, something meaty, something that you can implement in your business right away and walk away with. And I'm going to be sharing with you topics that my clients are dealing with. And if my clients are dealing with these topics, these issues, I imagine that you are too.

Today, we're gonna be talking about boundaries and creating better boundaries, building better boundaries around your business.

First, we have to talk about what is a boundary. And when I think about my house, my neighbor's house, we have walls. We actually, the way our homes are built here in Israel is my neighbors on either side of us, we have adjoining walls. But, you know, my kitchen and my neighbor's kitchen, we share a wall. I mean, it's thick enough that I don't really hear her doing her dishes or doing her cooking, but I know that her house is just the mirror opposite of mine. And my neighbor on the other side, we share living room wall. So actually I do sometimes hear them playing piano. That's just the way they build houses here, but usually it's good, so it's not a problem.

But anyway, the boundary is there to give a clear demarcation of what's mine, what's my space, and what's not my space. On the other side of the wall is my neighbor's space. So I know what's in my world and what is outside my world or what's in my house and outside my house. And similarly, I have a front door and I have all of my personal belongings in my house and when I walk out, I'm in the public space. This is my private space. That's a public space. There are very clear walls. Sometimes windows, we do open our windows, look the air in, but we know what's in the house and what's outside of the house.

Now when it comes to our business, if you do not have a brick and mortar business where you have a physical space, but like me, you have an online space. It's very important that your clients know what is okay in your business when somebody comes into your personal space in your business and what is not okay.

I mean, if you think about it, if you had a clothing store and somebody came into your clothing store with a popsicle. Right, you would want to make sure that your clothing in the clothing store was not going to get drippy popsicle and sticky hands all over the clothing. You don't want a popsicle stick wrapper, drippy orange popsicle on the floor in your store. And you would tell people, hey, please finish your popsicle outside of the store before you come into my space.

When you have an online business, like a virtual business, it's important that your clients know what is okay and what's not okay in your business. So for example, if you have a contract, a contract is one way of telling your clients, we meet every Monday at 10 o'clock in the morning and our sessions are 45 minutes long. And then your client knows because there are boundaries set in place that this is when you show up, this is when we start, this is when we leave.

I have in my contract that we give five minutes grace because I do understand that life happens, but mostly we show up on time. And so if your client is consistently late, your contract would also say, for example, that if you show up 20 minutes late, unless it's a mad traffic jam, a truck turned over on the road, like I do, you know, make exceptions. I'm not like mean and bad. But your client also knows what the consequences are, what the ramifications are for not holding by the contract or not holding by the agreement.

But what I've been seeing recently is some of my clients are letting their boundaries be fuzzy, either because they do not have a contract or because my clients in particular, the business owner, has not been meeting their requirements according to the contract and or they've been letting their clients overstep the boundaries. And when your boundaries are not clear and if you don't enforce your boundaries, that creates a lot of confusion and mixed messages and nobody really knows what the expectations are.

You need to set the expectations in the beginning, let your client know what's in, what's out, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, and what is going to happen if they don't meet your standards. And I'd like to share this specific example. When I wrote my book, The 1K Investor: Simple Smart Steps to start investing with $1,000 or less. I was at the time working with a copywriter, an editor, who was helping me to prepare the document, the draft for the book. It was over the summer, and I have, thank God, a very large family.

I have my eight kids, and at that time, which was already now five and a half years ago, I have to go back in time and figure out how many kids were at home, how many were married, how many grandchildren, doesn't really matter. But at that time, it was over summer vacation and summer vacations can get busy with everybody on holidays. I have less time to be in my business if my kids are home.

And so I didn't get my review back to my copywriter on time according to the expectations that she spelled out in a working agreement. Whether I was a week over or two weeks overdue, I'm not sure, but she told me, okay, thank you for your edits. Now you're going to the end of the line, the end of the queue, and I will get back to your document in November. And she was very firm about it.

She was very nice and I didn't protest. It was very clear to me that I didn't stand up to her expectations and she wasn't cutting me off. She wasn't saying, I'm not going to work with you anymore. You're irresponsible. You don't know how to follow the rules or follow my directions. She was just very firm that, okay, we will continue our work together and it will only be happening in another three months. And I had to accept that. And I did accept it. I wanted to work with her. She was clear. I was clear.

So if you, for example, are working on a website for one of your clients, and you give your first draft of the website to your client, and you're expecting that your client is gonna get back to you with edits, things that she wants fixed up within a week, it has to be made very clear to your client that if she doesn't meet your time expectations, and I know that she's busy, everybody's busy, we're not sitting around waiting for a bunch of things to happen to fill our empty time. We all have our time maxed out, but that's why you give her a week, not an hour to complete those edits. But if she doesn't return to you on time, then the question is what is going to happen? And you have to be very, very clear. And you have to, you know, if you need to remind her, right, you're going to give her the document on a Monday, and maybe on Wednesday, you might send an automated email that says, hey, just reminding you that we're expecting your edits by Monday. Maybe on Friday, you'll send out another email, hey, just reminding you that we're expecting your edits by Monday.

And if that doesn't happen, and of course, if her mother is sick in the hospital, God forbid, or something like that, there is a family emergency, you might be able to be a little bit flexible, but it can't be, I've had a lot of work this week and I didn't get to it. Like that just doesn't go because then you will continually be letting your clients overstep your boundaries.

And then you are going to turn into a dishrag with people stepping all over you and your boundaries aren't gonna be solid and you're gonna be exhausted and you're not going to love your business. You're not going to love your clients, but your clients are just representative of your business.

It has to be very clear and you have to be firm and you have to set up with your clients what your expectations are and what the ramifications are if they don't meet your expectations. And when your clients understand that you're doing it for their benefit and for your benefit, we respect people who respect themselves and respect their boundaries.

And it's just like, matter of fact, this is what we're doing and it works for me and it works for you. What's lovable to me is lovable to you. What is in our interest is, it's just mutually acceptable and agreeable. Your client is going to figure it out.

I think it's important that we have to remember that our clients are adults. Our clients can manage their time if we allow them to, and maybe they do need a reminder here or there, but make it very, very clear and don't let your clients step all over you. This is something that I have been seeing. And if you are not managing your time correctly, then that is a wake up call for you.

If you are continually stuffing, stuffing, stuffing clients into a time space that just isn't enough because of your family situation, because you keep taking a lot of clients and you're hopeful that somehow you're gonna stick them in at, I don't know, 10 o'clock at night and 4:00 in the morning. If you're not managing, that is a wake-up call for you. Your clients also should not have to wait for you. If you're taking them on, then it is in your best interest and your client's best interest that you also fulfill your expectations. 

So really sit down. This is end of the year. It's time when we are reviewing our practices throughout the year, figure out where have you been serving your clients well in terms of delivery, you have that contract, are you replying to them on time? Just know when am I meeting my expectations? When am I like dragging it out a little bit? And where do I need to improve?

It could be that if you're constantly feeling like you're on the hamster wheel and you have too much work and you're not meeting expectations and your family life is like demanding your time, it very well could be that you need to take less clients. And what that means is it might be the opportunity for you right now to raise your prices, especially as we're going into 2025, you can take less clients at higher prices. You can still meet your income goals and you can just feel so much more relaxed because you won't be all the time running on the treadmill.

So the boundaries are there. So you know what is in, what is out, and what the consequences are going to be if your clients don't meet your expectations. And then you also have to have consequences for you, like what happens if you don't meet your expectation? If you told your client, I'm gonna give you that website in a week, and it's not ready, the consequences for you are that you're going to have to work later into the night. You might be working, burning the midnight oil because you promised something and you want to maintain your reputation. 

So either your kids are going to suffer, your husband is going to suffer, your spouse, your partner is going to suffer, your personal time, your exercise time, whatever it is. But if you have an agreement in place, make sure that you are upholding your own standards.

Because we only have 24 hours in a day. We only have seven days a week. For me, one of those is Shabbat, the Sabbath, and I do not work on the Sabbath. And I want to make sure that I can show up in my business with a fresh mind to serve my clients to the best of my abilities.

All right, my friends, I hope you were taking something very valuable away from this mini episode on boundaries, and I will see you next week on The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth. 

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.