Give yourself a raise.

When I built my very first consulting business in 2019, I was smart enough to remember to build in two weeks of vacation. I just forgot to give myself time to run the business.

My goal back then was to earn $500,000 a year working 32 hours a week. Fifty weeks, four days a week, and eight hours a day gave me 1,600 hours of my time to sell each year. Divide $500,000 by 1,600, round a little, and there was my rate.

$300 an hour.

And I still get to take every Friday off, and enjoy two weeks of vacation. Pretty nice, right?

As the practice grew, my calendar started to fill up with clients. Which was great, until I needed to market the business, create content, prepare for meetings, or do pretty much anything else involved in keeping it running.

Apparently, all of that stuff was now supposed to happen on Friday, which was the one weekday I’d promised myself I wouldn’t work. Whoops.

I knew I needed to charge more. But going back to people who had already agreed to a price and saying, “Hey, I’ve decided to raise my rates,” wasn’t something I felt particularly comfortable doing. They hadn’t made a mistake pricing my time. I had.

So I grandfathered my existing clients in at their original rates. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I still don’t know. Someone a lot smarter about pricing negotiation probably could've taught me how to handle those conversations. But I did what I felt comfortable doing because that’s how I would want to be treated.

That also meant I couldn’t start fixing my calendar overnight. Most of the consulting engagements I sold lasted three to six months, so I needed to let those projects wrap up while I brought in new clients at the higher rate, which I raised to $600 an hour.

By then, I’d started to really figure out who my ideal customer was. Early-stage healthcare technology companies doing less than $5M in annual recurring revenue, selling to small, private doctors’ offices, with sales cycles under 30 days. They wanted to grow toward $50M in recurring revenue, and they needed help figuring out how to get there.

That’s a pretty specific group. But at the time, I knew that niche cold. Put simply, I’d found the intersection of clients I loved working with and could help, and clients who loved working with me.

I had happy customers and testimonials to back that up. So I started turning down work outside that group, promoting my very niche testimonials, and charging new clients twice as much.

As the higher-rate work replaced the old engagements, I could earn the same amount from half as many consulting hours. Problem solved.

Except now each empty hour on my calendar was an hour I could charge $600 for. I liked making money, and that felt like such an amazing opportunity. I could easily see a $1M consulting practice in my near future!

I’d raised my rates to get some time back, and now I was considering selling that time all over again.

Filling those hours with more clients would put me right back where I’d started. Sure, I'd make more money, but I'd still have to be sitting on a call to make it. And that certainly wouldn't help me find time to do all of the extra work that was piling up.

So, I decided to work fewer consulting hours. With my newfound free time, I ended up building my very first digital course, The LinkedIn Playbook. Now I could keep earning money from consulting while I tried building a second income stream from something people could buy pre-recorded. No time-for-money trade needed.

Over time, the courses I built brought over $7M in sales and became the core of my business. I created five courses, sold them to nearly 100,000 people, and never had to give those customers an hour of my time on a call. Within a year or so after raising my rates, I went all in on pre-recorded digital courses and completely shut down my consulting and advising business.

I don't think I would have discovered that business model if I’d kept filling my calendar with consulting work. And when I made the decision, I had no idea how the course would turn out, or that I’d build more, or that it would become this incredible business over time. The fact is that I was giving up hours I had proven I could sell to try something completely unproven. Naturally, I had to resist filling every opening with another client that would pay double my old rates.

To this day, it's still one of the best moves I made.

You can give yourself a raise in free time, but you have to let yourself keep it.

Maybe you’d use those hours to build something else. Maybe you’d invest them back into running the business you already have. Or maybe you’d take that weekday off that you promised yourself when you started.

I happened to build digital courses. They worked out better than I could have imagined, but I had to find the time to build them before I knew that.

I could have kept taking on consulting clients and made an amazing living. But having time to build those courses changed the kind of business I got to run.

And it all started by simply trying to keep my Fridays clear.