I feel like the title for this piece is a contradiction.

I bet you can go chat with people in management today at pretty much any company, and they would share the same sentiment.

And what’s that? Everyone wants to get ahead, live a comfortable life, enjoy a 4 day work weekbut no one wants to do the legwork.

The new “normal” style of working is now positioned in popular media as a 4 day work week, working from home, on flexible hours.

What is the legwork you ask? Let’s list a few:

• Being at work at 9am, essentially, putting in the hours

• Visiting a client site to pick out products for a shoot or to be there for a photoshoot

• A Fashion Stylist would be on-site during the wee hours of the morning to observe the photoshoot setup

• A Baker would be spending days, weeks, months in their kitchen perfecting their recipes

• A budding writer would want to invest more time during their day to practice and hone their writing style.

• Gathering customer feedback and integrating it into your business processes

• Picking up the phone, yes, physically picking up the phone and calling instead of texting, emailing, or slacking people.

• Prepping mailing labels - somebody has to mail out the packages - who else would that be when you’re starting out?

• Sending outreach emails / cold calling. The business has to come from somewhere, unless you’re already an established player and people are knocking at your door. In that case, good for you.

I’m not saying a 4-day, 4-hour even, work week isn’t attainable, but I think the surprising thing is many newcomers to the job market expect that they start there — they’re not working their way towards a 4-day work week. before you get to a point where you can contract out work to other people so they do the work for you, you need to put in your own time to do the legwork such as:

1. Building up a contractor and vendor network. Even if you go on Fiverr, you’ll probably want to test. A few projects with different service providers until you can select a few to work with longer-term. That takes time and money - where’s that coming from? What confuses me the most about people starting up a new business is that they really think it’s “free”. That coffee or lunch you’re buying for yourself and the prospective customer/advisor/potential hire? Not free. The website you want to build that actually looks nice and professional and isn’t a free wix site still with the wix banner on top? Not free. Registering a business, setting up a business tax account to limit personal liability and separating your personal and business finances? Not free.

2. If you are a contractor or Solopreneur - build up your skillset. So you’re a fresh grad, looking to do your own thing instead of working for the man. It’s going to be a hustle, and your hourly rate or even fixed fees for a project may not be sufficient to sustain you with a 4-day work week yet. The more experience you have, the higher the quality of your portfolio, and to be honest, the better your sales skills evolve as you meet more clients…all of these factors could lead to you charging a higher rate per project. Before then, map out how much money you really need to live on a 4-day work week as your end point, and then start working towards it.

3. Figuring out your business model - and this isn’t just doodling on paper, you’ll likely need to try it out for 6 months to a year to work out the kinks. One of my friends who is a fashion designer spent 2 years before she found a reliable manufacturer and refined her own clothing patterns. A business model isn’t your PowerPoint, it’s what actually works when you put it into action. If you randomly decided a 30% markup sounds good for your product, and a 10% trade discount is pretty fair, it’s all fantasy until a customer agrees the retail price is what they’re willing to pay, and a trade/distribution channel agrees to stock your merchandise for that amount. Sure, you can run your business online, but even then, there are still paid plug-ins, annual site hosting costs, graphic design or product photography costs… to name a few.

4. Investing the time to build the business to a point where every month you’re making money. Sure, if you’re a designer and programmer and a marketer all in one, you can build your own website and get to a minimum viable product for free, but usually, if you have to spend the money to hire others to help you build components of the business, there’s a cost to that. Until you can get your business to hum along each month and be net cash flow positive with minimum oversight from you, you’re likely not enjoying a 4-hour workweek on a beach somewhere.

This is my personal experience building a modest marketing services business over the past 6 years. I still like doing the legwork. I still like client spaces to take photos, videos and be involved on the creative and strategic side of things. The funny thing is, my staff are waiting for me to feed them creatives and visuals, instead of taking the initiative to tag along and do the legwork. It’s not a loss for me, because it gives me a chance to stay on top of the latest content creation and consumer behaviour trends; it’s a loss for them because they missed an opportunity to learn on the job.

It’s a trade-off, if you want to work less, you’re probably spending less than adding to your portfolio of skills, but you may have more time to enjoy your hobbies, travel, spend time with family. There’s nothing wrong with these things and I would love to have more time to do all of these things as well. But life’s a trade-off, and as much as I say let’s have our cake and eat it too, I understand that at least when it comes to building my portfolio, business, or skill set, it’s not realistic.

The world may not reward you in equal amounts for the effort you put in, but I can only say that the more time you spend working on your craft can only give you more experience and make it better.