I was talking to a colleague this morning about consulting and money, and our conversation reminded me of the mindset shifts I’ve had throughout my career.

I run a small consulting company that focuses on business optimization. I also run a blog that focuses on human optimization. I’m only mentioning that because the word optimization is going to come up a lot here, and I want to get the count up a bit. That’s three so far.

I occasionally mentor people who are just branching out in to some kind of solo consulting or mini-agency venture. Whenever I talk to someone who is taking the entrepreneurial plunge is, I always ask the same question.

“What are you optimizing for?”

It’s a question I didn’t ask myself until I was about 7 years into running my company. (I am not smart or a fast learner.)

When I started out, I was optimizing for freedom and money. I liked doing cool shit for fun, and I needed money to do that, so I went into business. I also liked having the freedom to work intensely but flexibly. And it worked out pretty well. My work-life balance was terrible; but I had consistent monthly revenue growth for about 7 years straight. I was building a network and a reputation that would take care of me for the foreseeable future.

I was proud. I was also getting tired of pushing so hard. By optimizing for money, I was by definition paying little attention to other aspects of the business and my life. My health (mental and physical) took a toll. Push push push. Go go go. Hustle 24/7.

I hit a breaking point. I had to make some kind of change. That led to me starting the Monthly Experiments Project.

Essentially, I had recognized that the path I had been on, while rewarding in many ways, was not the correct path for me to move forward. I also didn’t know what the correct path would be, so I committed to changing one small thing every month and documenting the results. I was flying blind.

My first experiment was to shift from working 12-16 hour days, to committing to stop work at 5pm every day for the month of January 2012. No wiggle room. No excuses. This was science, and I was committed to isolating variables and running a strict experiment.

Some weird things happened that month. My revenue fell by about 40%. Probably because I was working 40% less. My happiness increased by about 4 million percent. Approximately. I was perfectly happy with that tradeoff.

I decided to continue with my new self-imposed limit of stopping work at 5:00. I learned the value of constraints as I adapted to my new limit. I changed the way I ran my businesses. I was forced to do it differently. I didn’t even really notice that I was making other changes to adapt. They just sort of happened.

At the end of the quarter, I was doing my accounting. I knew my revenue had fallen significantly in the first month and I figured the trend had continued. Again, I was fine with that. But when I finished running my numbers, I was surprised to see that revenue had come back up after the first month. In fact, it had increased by 93%. Somehow, I was working much less and making about twice as much money. I honestly thought I’d made an accounting mistake at first. I dug into the numbers and the daily log I keep about the business.

How did I double my revenue in just a few months?

I started making different decisions. Hiring more help. Turning down some projects I might have accepted if I was still hustling. I also slightly changed the nature of the work, at least the focus and how I sold what we did.

I had changed what I was optimizing for. Instead of being focused on money and freedom (let’s be real, that’s a pretty selfish focus), I was focusing on how I could be the most valuable. 

Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d had this thought. I had always focused on being valuable, but it had never been the primary focus before. Being helpful and valuable was now the most important thing we focused on.

Doing the math, it’s not hard to figure out why that resulted in such a large growth in revenue.

More value provided = more value received.

I told this story to my colleague this morning. We talked about how he could provide more value and be more helpful to his clients. He was excited to drop a service he’d been offering for a while and focus on leveraging the most high-value work he does for his clients.

I have no doubt that he will grow significantly because of it.