2017 was a very special year for me.

Steve and I had just done 5 Brand Ups in a row.

We had an intense five weeks - just hustling hard, and making $100,000.

And then we went to Europe for 2 months!

We completely switched off, landed in Barcelona with no plans except a rental car. We road tripped down the coast of Spain and let curiosity guide us. We discovered magical towns like Frigiliana tucked into the coastal hills.

We visited friends in Italy who took us to dinner at a restaurant in Tuscany where there was no menu, the waiter just brought us the most incredible meal with free flowing wine and the bill came as a number jotted down on a scrap of paper. We made detours to places like the Tarot Garden, a sculpture garden by artist Niki de Saint Phalle, went to Amalfi to meet up with friends who happened to be visiting for a wedding.

Then decided to take a little side trip to Mallorca on a whim for a home cooked meal with family friends who live there. We could do as we pleased, without needing to be anywhere with internet at any given time because we didn’t have clients to look after!

And when we got back, we had more Brand Ups booked in for the rest of the fall, and didn’t miss a beat.

You’re probably wondering how this happened, or how my students do this too.

It’s called The Chunk and Stack Intensives Method™.

We love it because it’s not only highly profitable, and delivers more value for clients, but it’s also the key to running a business full of flexibility and freedom, while staying small.

Picture this.

If you’re anything like most small branding agencies (or most small businesses for that matter), you're probably ‘always on’. You never leave your laptop behind on vacation, ‘just in case’.

So, to get some REAL time off, you hire employees.

Makes sense, right?

But between training them, answering their questions and fixing what they did, you end up doing more work.

And if you’re already struggling with steady sales, you’ve just dug an even deeper hole with even higher overheads and several paychecks to meet.

And like most creatives, you feel like you have a start your client projects straight away. So you’re overlapping and juggling concurrent projects, and then things REALLY start to spiral.

“I’ll get to that next week” turns into “WTF? How am I going to meet all these deadlines?”

And where, amongst all those weeds, are you ever finding the time to work on your business?

One thing I’ve learnt from all the entrepreneurs I work with is that they don’t want a multi-million dollar, Lamborghini lifestyle.

They just want to be paid well for their work, so they get to spend time with their loved ones, do what they love.

Here’s where The Chunk and Stack Intensives Method™ comes in.

Whenever I sign a new client, I block out the 5 days on my calendar that I’m working on ONLY that and nothing else until it gets done.

I’m not constantly switching from one task to the next which wastes so much time and brain power (look that up for the science!)

There’s no going back and forth with client revisions - we cut out that BS.

I see a project through from beginning to end, allowing my creative brain to immerse in the project, which makes for a better outcome.

And because I always do it this way, I know how much time it’s going to take.

We can schedule out our projects on a calendar, and in-between projects, we don't have to work with any clients. And that can be as long as we like!

There’s your freedom and flexibility.

And if you still don’t get it, think about this.

When you start a website project with somebody, it's usually like, “Oh, you know, this is gonna take 3-4months.”

Which is code for “It’s probably going to take much longer, well, actually I don’t really know when the website is going to launch.”

In an Intensive, it's like, “It's gonna be launched at 6pm.”

With that level of iron-clad reliability, even a project scheduled 2 months out is going to be finished way sooner than anyone else. As long as the client knows it’s going to happen, it works.

Now, let me get back to looking up RV rentals, for my 3 month road trip with the family…

Are You Still Taking Your Laptop on Vacation, Just in Case? That’s so 2017…