Client calls from nine to six. Proposals at night. Your own pipeline, your next sales hire, your pricing.. somewhere next week.

It feels like giving your best. It's also how a service business stays stuck while its founder works flat out.

You want the business to grow faster and your evenings back. More hours won't get you either.

You've heard the advice to work on your business, not in it, a hundred times. Here's what it looks like on a normal Tuesday, in two hours a day.

I talked this through with Jane Applegath on Epic Vision Zone (February 2026). Listen to the full conversation: The 2 Hour Strategy Habit on Epic Vision Zone

The lie that sounds like hard work

In my years at a global strategy consultancy, my friends kept asking: when do you stop? I had started a weekly soccer group, and then I was never there.

My answer was always the same. Just this client. Then three months later, just this project.

Big logos. Airbus, our work in the newspaper. It felt important. And it was, for them.

The reality: I was solving their problems ten hours a day, and I had "zero minutes per day on solving our problems".

Bitter to swallow. And it's the trap in finance, consulting, agency work, any service business. You are always solving your clients' problems. Nobody is solving yours.

Book two hours with yourself

🐬 So take one or two hours a day and work on your business, not in it. Call it strategy. Put it in your calendar.

If your day is full, do it two hours before your day starts. If you're an evening person, take the two hours instead of Netflix. You will find them.

I'm a morning person. One hour before everybody wakes up, while the house is still quiet, is strategy time. Then the next eight or ten hours go to clients. But I start with our own strategy.

I also have an hour a day in my calendar called strategic thinking, so nobody can book it. Most days there are two or three decisions waiting: my team, a client, a partner. I put the hardest one into a single question and chew on it during a walk. For example: "what would I do to serve the highest good for everybody in this decision?"

I leave without an answer. I usually come back ready to decide.

That's my two hours. One in the morning for strategy, one walking with a decision.

It doesn't look like work. It is the work. When you own the company, your job is mainly thinking, because you're the one who decides.

Think of Warren Buffett. Basically no meetings. Days of reading. It might even look lazy from the outside. Look at the results.

Make the work small enough to score by Friday

Picture a game. You shoot a bird, the screen says 500 points. Next shot, 700. You already want the next one, because you can almost see the 800.

Now picture the same shot, and the screen says: "in 30 days, you will receive a bird point report to your email inbox."

Nobody plays that game. And yet that's how a lot of work is designed. Six months of effort, no feedback, and a surprise at the end.

So one core principle of the Strategy Sprints method is to make work small, and to get quick feedback from the person it's meant to serve.

Monday Strategy. What's the most important thing? What's the 80/20, the part that makes the rest follow? Pick a piece small enough to finish by Friday.

Friday Learnings. Everybody has one swim lane from Monday to Friday, and on Friday everybody looks at the same dashboard. Sales shows the sales numbers. Marketing shows new subscribers and registrations. Ops shows how many clients are happy right now.

You don't wait for the end of the quarter to do strategy. It happens every Monday when you pick your fight, and every Friday when you measure and learn.

If you get it wrong, you find out after six days. Not after six months, when the mistake has gone stale.

Decide who you won't sell to

Here's a strategy-hour exercise that changes your sales conversations.

Write down what makes your ideal client, five levels deep. Five criteria. Then turn the page and write five anti-ideal criteria.

If one of those anti-ideal criteria shows up, that's not your client. Say a polite no, or refer them to someone better placed.

Clients who don't fit take your time and your energy. And when you haven't decided who fits, every prospect feels like one you can't afford to lose. That's where the chasing starts.

With both lists on paper, you walk into the sales conversation choosing, not chasing. You ask the questions. You lead. That's control of the sales conversation, and it starts in your strategy hour, not on the call.

Get the process out of your head

🐯 In a service business, the billable hour makes it look like your time is the impact. It isn't.

Think of a Pilates class. You move cities, you change teachers, and Pilates still works in the new city. "It wasn't the teacher, it was the process."

You have a process too, whether you know it or not. Maybe it only lives in your head. Write it down, share it, and it becomes a standard operating procedure other people can run.

When Strategy Sprints started, it was just me and billable hours. Then I noticed a pricing spreadsheet had worked four times, in three industries. I saved it. A go-to-market framework worked 12 times in five industries. I saved that too, and gave it a name that says what it does.

We ended up with 274 modules. They became the Sprint University on our app. So when a client brought me a problem, I could say: go do module 17. The second hour, my knowledge was creating the impact, not my time.

That's the same move that lets a new salesperson sell without you in every call. The process is written down, so it no longer depends on you.

The only stable thing is the week

🌴 You don't reach a level where the business finally runs itself.

"Whenever you reach a new level of success, all your past processes break." You build processes to reach 35k a month, and at 35k they break. Again at 100k. Again at 500k. Again at one million.

What stays the same is the cadence. Like eight people in a rowing boat, you keep one rhythm at every level. "The week will always be Monday and Friday."

Monday: pick the fight. Friday: what worked, what didn't. Do more of what works.

That's how you grow without growing the stress. And it's where Sprintlife starts: control of your week first, then control of your sales, then the time freedom to live the adventure you started the company for.

Start this week

Block two hours in your calendar tomorrow and name it strategy.

Take one decision you've been carrying and turn it into one question.

On Monday, pick one piece of work small enough to show someone by Friday. On Friday, score it. Then shoot the next bird.

Two hours on your business. Every day. That's the whole habit.

Listen to the full conversation with Jane Applegath: Epic Vision Zone with Simon Severino

Grab the free tools and join the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆