Nicole Munoz

$5,000 For Four Hours Of Consulting, And Worth Every Penny

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It was December 2011 and I had a big desire to grow my business. So, I did what most of us do as entrepreneurs and I started to look online for a business coach, someone that could help me figure out how to grow and scale my company. As I was searching online, I found a coach that had an executive leadership assessment on her website. So, I filled out the executive leadership assessment tool and got my results.

 

After these results were delivered, I was asked if I would like to schedule a call with the coach. Well, I filled it out and, in less than a week, I was on the phone with her, just two days before Christmas in 2011. As I got on the phone, I was very excited to be speaking with her. (Some of her coaching clients were Fortune 100 executives.) I thought, “Wow, if she works with all of these big companies, she’s definitely going to be able to help me, as well.” And as I got on the phone with her, I was able to explain to her some of the biggest challenges and the biggest blocks that I was having in my business at that time.

In less than 20 minutes, she had completely ripped apart my entire business model.

 

She pointed out five different ways that I was seeing things wrong, doing things wrong, and how these little things were actually harmful for my business. She told me the truth I needed to hear and, because of that, I made large pivots in my business after that phone call. And that phone call was less than thirty minutes long.

 

 

At the end of the call, she began to explain to me how she usually provides high level executive coaching. At the time, it was a four figure investment for her services. I said, “Well, I’m not sure I can commit to that.” She replied, “Well, because it’s Christmas time, I’d love to offer to have you come out here to do a half day coaching session for $5,000.”

 

Honestly, I didn’t know what to say. But, because she’d already helped me in just the first 30 minutes, seeing things within my entire business that I never knew were holding me back, I thought, well, maybe. Maybe I could make this work. I asked to talk to my husband. (I usually don’t spend $5,000 without talking to my husband first!)And, when I told him about the opportunity, he gave me the okay to make that investment.

 

Once I said yes, everything happened very quickly. I paid the $5,000, got my plane tickets, and was ready to leave in just a few weeks to meet this coach in person. I was so looking forward to just this half day with her. I knew I was going to be able to get more information, more help from her one-on-one so that I could really start growing and scaling my business.

 

During the couple of weeks I had before this in person meeting would take place, I spent close to 60 hours consuming every bit of content on her website.

 

I downloaded everything, and she had tons of free guides and templates at the time. (She doesn’t offer them anymore.) Almost everything that I downloaded required some sort of work on my end, like filling out templates or creating strategies that would help you grow and scale your business. I filled out every single one and answered every single question.

 

On top of that, I read every single one of her blog posts and books. I basically learned everything that I could about her teachings. Since I had decided to make that $5,000 investment with her, I wanted to make sure that I got the most out of the time that I would spend with her. I didn’t want her to have to teach me the basics. I wanted to be able to ask her intelligent questions based on all of the things that I consumed on her website.

 

I flew out for my session with her and got myself to her office in the morning. We started to go over all of the templates that I had filled out, all of the work that I had done in preparation for a meeting. I had my list of questions and, during the next four hours, all of that work I had done prior to our meeting turned out to be very helpful.

 

But, she kept trying to teach me the things that I had already learned myself from her websites. She began to talk about how you need to have different types of goals in your business and how there is a specific way to set goals for your business. I said, “Yeah, just like you said here.” Then she’d move on to the next thing and the next thing. And, every time she brought something up, I would say, “Right, that’s what’s on your website here,” or, “That’s what I read over here.”

 

And, unfortunately, that’s pretty much how the entire half-day meeting went. She tried to teach me the things that she had already taught on her website, just in a one-on-one setting. However, as the meeting came to a close, we managed to put together a very strategic plan to help me grow and scale my business over the next twelve months. Honestly, we didn’t really need the whole time I paid for because I had already prepared myself ahead of time.

 

But, what I did realize is that if I had not invested that $5,000 for the consultation, I would not have consumed every bit of content that she had on her website. I would have just downloaded that one assessment that I took and then I would have walked away. I would have looked at something else and someone else’s website, even though her website had all of this material that was extremely valuable right there in front of me, free for the taking.

 

The thing with free content is that, if people don’t make an investment to learn it, they won’t take the time to consume it.

 

 

If you’re a service provider and you have a desire to share your expertise and knowledge, then you find yourself giving valuable information away because you know it’s so helpful — and exactly what the person needs to be hearing. You know that if they just follow your path and the instructions that you’ve given, they’re going to be able to grow their business. You know that.

 

The problem is when you give something away for free, people don’t value it. If you sell it for a dollar, they don’t value it. If they give $37 for it, they’re going to value it at the $37 level. But, if you’re charging someone $10,000, maybe now they’re going to pay attention because that is a significant investment — one they don’t want to waste.

 

It’s like someone that’s going to go get a car. If you’re going to buy a car for $2,000, or if you’re going to buy a car for $20,000, which one are you going to take better care of? Which one are you going to spend more time making sure that it’s being maintained, that the oil is getting changed? Well, the one that you invested more money in. And I believe that each person has a “get stuff done threshold”— the threshold that they have to pay to be able to finally implement and get stuff done.

 

Here’s another way to explain that concept…

 

One of my friends, a coach for men that have addictions, was charging a very low amount for men to take his course, just $97. He found that they would pay the $97, but then they wouldn’t finish the course. They wouldn’t actually do the training. So then he said, “Well, I’m going to raise the rate to $197.” When he did that, now 20% of people finished the program, not just 10%. So then he decided, “Well, I don’t like just 20% of people finishing the program, so I’m going to raise the rates again.” Now he was charging somewhere close to $497. The program itself never changed. But, as the rates got higher, people’s completion rates increased, too. At $497, he had 60% of people finishing his course.

 

He saw the trend and continued to raise the price so that he would see even more men complete his course. If the valuation was high enough, he knew he’d be able to get a 100% completion rate, which, as a coach, was what he really wanted to see.

 

And this same principle applies to you, too. If you’re creating courses, the people who buy them are going to value it based on what they have invested in. And that investment level is going to be different for every person. So, maybe their investment level needs to be

$197 and, if they pay that much, then they’re going to finish the course. Or, maybe their investment level is higher, closer to $987. And, until they invest that much money, they’re never actually going to finish the program because it just doesn’t seem worth it.

 

What I learned for myself from investing $5,000 for a half day coaching program was that I too have a “get stuff done threshold”. For me it was 5K. But unless I wanted to spend 5K every single time, in order to get stuff done, I needed to figure out what my get stuff done threshold was and pretend like I paid a lot of money and just dedicate myself to do it. But, unfortunately, that kind of mind trick usually doesn’t work. 🙂

 

Investing in yourself is so important because the education you receive from being coached and mentored is going to help you to grow and to scale your business. When you decide to make that investment of $5,000 or $10,000, it’s going to motivate you that much more to complete the training or program, which, at the end of the day, it is to your benefit because it’s going to help you to grow and to scale your business.

Planning Isn’t Everything

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Have you ever been in a place in your business where you’re trying to make a decision? Should I or should I not invest in this software or this tool, or this service provider, or this consultant to help me grow or scale my business? And you’re trying to figure it all out, you’re trying to decide, and you’re trying to weigh the pros and cons.

 

Does it make sense for me to invest in this for my business or not?

 

Out of all of the systems and softwares you can think about investing in for your business, the one I think about the most, and the one that people ask me about the most, is Infusionsoft. One of the best marketing automation tools for e-commerce businesses, and one that I personally rely on, Infusionsoft can, at first, seem costly. Many users spend about $300 a month for this particular software tool. And when I’m speaking to someone to help them to figure out whether or not they should make this investment, I always go back to asking them, “How much time is it going to save you?” In other words, is investing in this tool going to save you at least the amount of money that it is going to cost you to pay for this tool?

 

There are many successful businesses out there that have grown by cobbling together different tools, some of these are even seven-figure businesses. The beauty about Infusionsoft is that, in reality, it’s three tools in one. The thing is that many of my clients don’t have $300 a month to invest in a tool like Infusionsoft right now. So, they get a more cost effective tool, or tools, like combining Mailchimp for email automation and PayPal for accepting credit cards online. And, in the beginning, this works out just fine.

 

 

But, as sales begin to come in, using these two separate tools actually begins to take up a lot of your time. You have to sort through Mailchimp emails to find your customers from PayPal and then manually move them, or remove them, from certain email lists. Why? Because you don’t want to be sending the same emails to people that have just purchased a product and the people who still haven’t purchased; these are two separate segments of your email list. This process might only take five or ten minutes each week when you’re first starting out, but as your business grows it will take up significantly more time.

 

 

As your business becomes more profitable, your time becomes more valuable.

While you might have been making $25 or $50 an hour at the beginning, soon you can start making $200, or even $700, an hour. This means that if you’re still spending 20 or 30 minutes a day managing your disjointed systems, then you’re losing a significant amount of money every week — potentially thousands of dollars. Suddenly, that $300 a month for a software like Infusionsoft starts to make a whole lot of sense.

 

So, when you’re deciding what’s a good investment for your business, and what’s not, always ask yourself: “Does it make sense for me based on what my time is worth today for me to invest in this software tool for my business?”

 

Another example of this is when you’re trying to figure out how you can grow and scale your company. You’ve done all of the free training, you’ve read all of the blog posts, you’ve taken all of the free master classes, but you just need someone to maybe point out some areas to you, that you need someone to look at your business one-on-one. You need someone to give you that direct feedback. And so you need to hire a coach or a mentor, and you’re wondering, should I or should I not do this?

 

Do I want to spend the next three months, six months, or year trying to figure this out on my own? Or do I want to invest in a coaching program for $5,000 or $10,000 to figure this out faster and get results faster so that I could make more money? And so that is how you can also figure out if you should make this investment. Because you can always make more money. But, you can’t make more time.

 

So, let’s just say, for example, you are trying to figure out how to do something, and it will take three months to do it on your own. But, if you hire someone to do it for you, it will take significantly less time. A great example of this is building your own website. There are many business owners that try to build their own websites from scratch, but, unless your business is web development, then you honestly have no business building your own website; you have other, more important, things to do. Not only can a professional get this work done faster, which means you can be up and running sooner, but you can do other things simultaneously that will allow your business to be in a position to scale and grow.

 

So the decision you always have to go back to is:“Does it make sense for my business? Do I have the money to invest?” The concept you need to realize and keep in mind always is that you can always make more money, but you can’t get back your time. So, anything that you can do to save time in your business is going to be so helpful to help you to grow and scale so much faster.

 

You can look at my family for another example of this. Our family makes a trip to the United States about every year to see friends and family. Sometimes we include a trip to Disneyland for an extra fun highlight for everyone. In the past, especially when our business was just getting started and it was not as profitable as it is today, we would all drive together in our car, to the States and then over to California. And, from Puebla, Mexico, that is a pretty long trip — just thirteen hours to get to the border. The entire drive itself, then, is pretty much a 4-day commitment. Sometimes we would wake up really early and we could make it in three days, but that was very rare.

 

And when you’re traveling in Mexico, there are many places where you do not have access to the Internet. Unlike the States, there are so many dead spots on the road, which means you can’t make calls or anything while driving. That means, work of any sort is virtually off the table during these days. Not only is the internet non-existent, but the bumpy roads make it impossible to even type or write. Add to that a van full of seven noisy, talkative kids, and you definitely don’t have an environment that’s conducive for working.

 

Of course, I loved spending time with my family. These days on the road really were fun and exciting. But as my business became more demanding (and profitable), this 4-day road trip commitment started to make less and less sense. Not only did my high end clients need me on a more full time basis, but the days spent in the car (eight days in total) took away from our time with family and friends (and Disneyland) in the States. In order to get everything in, we needed at least sixteen solid vacation days each year.

 

We hit a point where we realized it made more sense for us to spend more money and fly from Mexico to California. (My amazing husband still drove the four days there and back with our 15-passenger van because, well, we needed it for our big family to get around the States.) Doing this, I was able to shave six days of travel off of our family trip, which was huge.

 

Time is so much more valuable than money.

 

I can make back the cost of those plane tickets in an hour or two of consulting. Whereas, if I had taken four days to travel to the States and back, I could not get back that time to be able to work on my business.

 

These are just some of the types of ways that your business may change as it grows and evolves. Your life, and your business, will inform these decisions, as will your evolution as an entrepreneur. The goal is that you start to realize that you can always make more money, but you cannot make more time.

Sell First, Then Build It

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I’m sure you’ve heard the same. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. I believe that very much because I believe it is very important to plan.

 

There is a personality test out there called the KOLBE, and it will tell you how much of a planner you are on a scale of one to 10. Personally, I’m an eight. I like to plan things out, so I like to know in advance everything that’s going to happen. I ask a million questions. When I’m preparing to give a speech or presentation, for example, I want to know: Who’s going to be in the audience? How many women are there going to be? Are there any topics I need to cover specifically? What time should I arrive? Do I need to bring food? … I literally want to know everything.

 

I like to plan ahead, and that planning is usually good. But, you can also get to the point, especially in business, where your super-planning personality becomes a detriment to your business. That’s why, planning isn’t everything in your business. I can’t tell you how many times in my business that I have set up 12-month content calendars or 90-day marketing plans, only to literally dump all of that planning in the trash because, for one reason or another, I realize that this plan, this direction, isn’t going to work.

 

 

Honestly, I can’t tell you how many hours and hours and hours I have spent year after year after year in December trying to figure out what am I going to do for the next year to grow and scale my business only to have everything that I put together be totally changed in less than three months later. Less than three months later, I have a new idea, a new mentor, or a new coach, and then decide that this needs to pivot because this direction I was going is not the direction that I want to keep going. That’s why planning is not everything.

 

Execution, however, is.

 

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what you get accomplished, what you actually get done. This is the only way that you can move forward, because as you execute in your business, as you start to put into action your ideas, you’re going to learn each step of the way. I’ve learned that if you actually try to plan too much too far ahead, then pivoting when you need to becomes more difficult. You don’t want to throw away the planning and the work you’ve done, which means you’ll just keep going and going, even if you know it’s not the right direction for you or your business right now.

 

Recently, I realized that I almost always fail to plan a Black Friday special for my business ahead of time, even though I know this would be a good idea. Each year Black Friday comes and goes, and I’m left thinking, “Well, I’ll do it next year. Next year, I’ll have my entire funnel built and ready.”

 

 

This year, however, I decided to take part in a Black Friday challenge, one that asked us to put together a funnel in just a matter of days. So, there I was the Tuesday before Black Friday, putting together my offer and everything, what I was going to include, etc. I was literally inventing everything on the fly. I honestly didn’t even know what my product or pitch was going to be. But, by the end of the challenge, I had it all put together. And it literally came down to the wire. I finished everything within a short 90-minute time frame — time that I only had because my flight happened to be late.

 

And, when Black Friday quickly rolled around, my funnel was live — and we actually sold a couple thousand dollars of this new program that I put together in literally just a couple of hours.

 

None of this would have happened, however, if I had stuck to my planning personality and put it off for yet another year.

 

Planning is NOT everything!

 

Sometimes you just need to get out of your comfort zone. It’s not going to be perfect. There might be a broken link. The design may not be perfect, emails may not be 100% proofread, there might be a spelling mistake. That’s okay. I’m going to just execute. I’m going to move forward because that’s a couple extra thousand dollars of revenue that got added to my business that would not have existed if I had stuck to that stage of I need to plan this out 100% perfectly, or else it can’t be launched at all. Bottom line, planning is not everything — so get out of your own way.

How To Get Unstuck

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I know you’ve been there: Sitting in front of your computer, for two, maybe three hours “working” on a project but really getting nowhere. Your mind literally feels like it has turned off but you can’t stop thinking to yourself, “I have to get this done. I have a deadline.” And, because of this pressure, you refuse to get up and move from your desk. You won’t do anything else, or let yourself get distracted by anything else, until this is done.

 

Here’s the thing: That is actually the worst thing that you can do when you find that you are stuck.

 

The best thing that you can do is to stand up from your desk and walk away. Take a break, even though every piece of you wants to stay put until you finish.

 

Of course, not all breaks are equal. There are certain things you can start doing that will actually make you feel worse — and won’t really get you anywhere. There are, however, some very specific types of breaks you can take that help you get unstuck. In my experience, there are two breaks that really work wonders for getting unstuck.

 

 

The first is spending time with your family and kids. And, the second one is going shopping.

 

Of course my husband prefers the first one! 🙂

 

Just going for a walk with my husband once or twice around the block can do wonders to clear my head. We’ll talk about different things and different ideas, about the kids or the ministry, and, as soon as we do, I get removed from the situation I was previously working on. And when that happens, I can come back to it with a fresh perspective.

 

Shopping can be a motivator as well. You don’t necessarily have to buy anything. But getting out there, and seeing the things that you’d like to buy, can sometimes motivate you to get your business going!

 

So, if you’re feeling stuck in your business, don’t just sit there. Get up and take a break!

Do It, Delegate It, Or Delete It

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I’d like to share with you my number one favorite productivity tip, a tip I learned from Chet Holmes’ book, “The Ultimate Sales Machine,” which I highly recommend. This productivity tip is something that I learned back in 2011. It is something that I live every single day. So, what is it? Anytime something comes across your desk, you need to either do one of three things.

 

1. Do it

2. Delegate it

3. Delete it

 

 

That’s profound, right? Let’s look at each of those three things a little closer.

Number One: Whenever something comes across my desk, I need to decide what to do with it. If I decide to do it, I am making a decision, right? Before making that decision, I always ask myself one question, “Does this task take five minutes or less?” If it takes five minutes or less, I’m going to do it right then. I am not going to say, “Oh, I’ll do this later,” because, if I do that, I’ll forget, and it doesn’t get done at all. If something takes less than 5 minutes to do, it will take longer to pull up my Google calendar and schedule a time for me to do that task so it is more efficient just to do it right away.

 

If a task takes longer than 5 minutes, or if it needs to be done on a regular basis, then I schedule it in, making it repeat on my calendar so that I don’t ever forget. While I might not do that task right away, I schedule it immediately and plan when I will work on it.

 

Another little tip is to never check your emails unless you have time to reply to those emails at that exact moment. I only check my emails when I have scheduled time to do it. And, for me, that happens twice each day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I block off up to 45 minutes each time to make sure I can read and reply as needed.

Number Two: Delegation is your best friend, literally. If you don’t have a virtual assistant, today’s the day to get one. You have to have somebody that you can delegate tasks to. It is impossible to run an online business and do everything that’s involved all by yourself.

 

You can easily find someone to pay just $2.50 to $5 an hour. (I highly recommend the Philippines for this.) If you want to find someone in the United States, expect to pay $15 an hour to $30 an hour. It is your job to learn how to delegate. Many people are not able to grow their companies because they’ve never learned to delegate.

You can’t delegate a strategy, but you can delegate a task.

 

When something comes across my desk, the question I always ask myself is, “Is there anybody on my team that I can delegate this to? Am I the one that has to do this, or is there anybody at all that I can give this to?” If there is someone on my team that I can give it to, it goes in their box. I actually have a board where I assign tasks in Trello for this specific purpose. You can shoot a quick video using Loom to start the process of delegation because you can give specific instructions about what needs to be done and how to approach it.

 

If I am not able to delegate it, then it stays on my plate. It goes back to the “do it” box, and then I have to either decide to do it right now or schedule a time in the future. If I get enough tasks that are very similar, then I realize that I might be missing someone on my team and that it’s time to hire somebody new. When this happens, I consider how much it would cost me to pay someone else to solve this problem and do this task for my business. If I can pay someone $50 or less to do a task, then I’m going to hire someone to do that for me. Any time I’m working on a task that I could pay someone else to do, then I’m only earning $50 an hour (or less) in my business.

You have to decide for yourself exactly how much your time is worth to you. Then, once you do, you can more easily make the decision to hire someone and delegate.

 

Number Three: In order to be able to delete tasks, you have to learn how to be curious about the operations and systems of your business. At a director level, you must figure out if this task should even be done in the first place. The best way to do this is to get extremely organized.

 

We use Trello boards to manage our projects. With these boards, we use the Kanban Methodology, which means we have different columns to put our tasks depending on where a task is in the workflow.

The columns we use are:

● Backlog

● Weekly Sprint

● Working On

● Pending Review

● Closed

 

 

Backlog is where all tasks start. As soon as we have an idea for a new task, it goes in the backlog. The backlog is not assigned work, but rather the work that needs to be scheduled.

 

The next column is the weekly sprint. The weekly sprint column has all of the tasks that we plan to accomplish that week.

 

Next is the working on column. The working on column has all of the tasks we are working on that day or are currently working on.

 

The pending review column is used to place tasks that need a review or have some type of blocker.

We also have a completed column where tasks are moved once they are completed.

 

With all of this in place, when I find a task that I don’t have anyone to delegate it to, I have to decide if I’m going to take responsibility for it, if we need to hire someone else, or if the task needs to be deleted altogether. When I’m weighing the options, I put this task in the backlog section. And, sometimes, this task will stay in the backlog for more than a couple of weeks; it’s not that urgent.

 

Deciding not to work on something is as important as deciding to work on something.

 

One of my mentors once said to me, “If you give a problem to a smart person, he will immediately set about trying to fix that problem, never stopping to consider should this problem be solved in the first place.”

 

As smart as you are, don’t be that person. All of these random and unnecessary tasks you’ll find in your business aren’t always a puzzle to solve. Sometimes, the pieces just need to be tossed. Always ask yourself, “Does this problem need to be solved in the first place?”

Success Is Not Everything: Focus On What Really Matters

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Why did you decide to start your online business? If you’re like most of the people I talk with, you started it for freedom. The freedom to live the lifestyle you want, to make more money, to create your own schedule, to have more time with your family. Whichever way you look at it, freedom really is at the heart of most entrepreneurs’ “reason why.”

 

When was the last time, however, you actually felt free? How’s that vision of freedom with your online business actually working out for you?

 

A lot of times when we start working in our business, we get sucked into this trap where there’s always something else to do.

 

 

There’s always another client that needs help. There’s always another product that needs to be created. There’s always another email that needs to be written. There’s always something else that we could be doing because we know the more time and energy that we put into our business, the more results we’re going to get out of it.

 

We’re determined to push through and to be successful no matter what. But, what?

 

Unfortunately, what happens a lot of times is on that path to become successful, that path is supposed to give your more freedom; you actually lose your way. You become even more trapped, even more sucked in than before. And, when this happens, you forget altogether why you started this online business in the first place. Sure, there are plenty of successful entrepreneurs out there. But how many of them have lost important things, their reasons why, along the way? How successful will you really feel if you’ve lost your family, your marriage, or your relationship with your kids all because you wanted to build a profitable online business?

 

 

So, as you’re building your business, please remember this one very important thing: Success is not everything. What’s going to matter at the end of the day is going to be the relationships that you have with your family, with your children.

 

Always remember that. Yes, your business is important. Yes, you need to do what needs to get done. But, you also need to remember why you started your business in the first place. And you need to remind yourself of that every single day. If your business ever reaches a point where it’s interfering with your relationships, especially those with your family, then you need to take a step back.

 

You need to restructure your business so that it’s no longer taking you away from what really matters.

 

Your business isn’t just about being successful financially. It’s about finding success in all aspects of your life, each and every one that you sincerely care about.

Embrace Your Strengths

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How many of you have ever taken a personality test?

 

Personality tests are really fun. I remember one time we were sitting in our house with all of our kids and we decided to all take this personality test. And it was so fun to have each of my seven kids take the tests and see their results and what they revealed about each one of them. Some of the results were pretty surprising, not at all what I was expecting, and that’s always so fun.

 

In my business, I’ve always had our staff members take a personality test when they’re first hired. Now, my favorite personality test isn’t actually a “personality test” per se, but I love what it shows. It’s called the KOLBE and it reveals a lot about your behavior, your actions, and about what you do. The KOLBE gives you a ranking from 1 to 10 in a few different behavioral areas.

 

You can come back as a Fact Finder, the person that likes to do investigations and find out all the information ahead of time; the Follow Through, the type of personality that will see something all the way through; the Quick Start, someone who will jump out of the airplane and build your parachute on the way down; the Implementer, someone who likes to work with your hands; and the Visionary, someone that can envision a solution in their head.

 

 

Knowing your strengths, and the strengths of people on your team, keeps you from getting frustrated.

 

Rather than spending all of your time trying to figure out how to accomplish something you’re not good at, you can find someone else who thrives in that area, which means you can spend your time doing what your business needs you to do — your own personal strengths. It’s so important to stop being negative to yourself about the things that don’t come naturally and, instead, just embrace your strengths, the things that you’re really good at.

 

One of my strengths is that I am visionary. The opposite of this is that I am not hands on at all. Please, whatever you do, don’t ask me to actually physically print something with a printer. I promise you, I will break the printer. Every. Single. Time. It is a running joke in the office. If you want the printer to break, ask Nicole to print something!!! But you know what? My clients don’t need me to print things with a printer. My clients don’t need me to build an office chair. So, why should I worry about those things? What I need to worry about is embracing the things that I’m good at, focusing on those things, developing those things even more, and being able to leverage those things in my business. When I do this, I can provide more value for my clients.

 

At the same time, you should also realize that sometimes your strengths are also what blocks you from success. Because I love to plan, I’m not a Quick Start, and that can really get in my way. When this happens, I have to remind myself, “Yes, this is not planned out 100%. That’s okay. It’s planned out 50%.” Sometimes you just have to jump into it with both feet, move forward, and push yourself out of your comfort zone and away from your natural behavior.

 

Embrace your strengths.

Every Time You Say Yes To Something, You Are Saying No To Something Else – Like Your Spouse And Kids

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Warren Buffett once said that the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

 

This goes against the advice that many of us have heard over and over again. I remember when I first got started, and I joined a new, high-ticket coaching program.

 

One of the things that they taught us there was that you shouldn’t leave money on the table. What they meant was that, if you were a service provider or a coach or a consultant, and someone asked you, “Do you provide this service?”, your answer needed to be yes. If it wasn’t, then you were leaving money on the table. We were taught to say, “Yes, of course, I do,” to anything and everything. And then, after you close the deal, you find someone to partner with in order to deliver on that product or service. That’s, they said, how you could expand and grow your company.

 

 

I followed that advice for many years. I was always able to provide a good service for what I had promised by partnering with other people or by learning to do it myself. Unfortunately, I usually underestimated how much it was going to cost to fulfill it or the amount of time it would take to learn that new service. Also, I was never able to get it to become very profitable. The reason I wasn’t able to become very profitable is that I was trying to learn how to do everything.

 

There’s another saying about that: “Jack of all trades is a master of none.”

 

That’s exactly what was going on in my businesses. I learned how to do Facebook ads and landing pages and websites and social media. We built applications. We did pretty much everything under the sun with digital marketing, but we were not able to become experts in any of them because we weren’t confident enough at that time to say, “No, that’s not what we do.”

 

To paraphrase Warren Buffett, the difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people have learned how to say no to anything that is not their main project.

 

In fact, I was reading just the other day another story about Warren Buffett. During a sort of coaching session with someone he was working with, Buffet asked the man to make a list of all of the projects that he was working on. So, this person made a list and, when he was finished, he had about 25 different projects listed. Warren Buffet noticed that he had circled five of them.

 

Buffet asked, “Why did you circle five out of these 25 things on your list?” And the person responded, “Those are my top five activities, the top five projects that I’m working on.” Then Warren Buffett asked, “What about the other twenty?” He answered, “Those are for whenever I have some free time. Then I start to work on those other twenty projects.”

Warren Buffett responded with another question, “Isn’t it actually that those other twenty things are your distractions that keep you from being hyper-focused on your top five priorities? Do those other twenty things actually prevent you from becoming very successful?”

 

That’s the key here.

 

 

The key is that every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. This is a lesson that all of us need to learn in our own business and our own life.

 

Figure out your top priorities. What are the top things that you want to focus on in your business for this next year? What will help you to actually grow your company? Just because an opportunity comes to your door doesn’t mean that you should be saying yes, especially if you’re just getting started.

 

When we’re just starting out and we’re trying to scale our business from zero to $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month or $250,000 a month, we’re not able to focus on more than just one business at a time. Every time we do that, we are splintering ourselves and dividing our focus and our efforts. And, when we do this, we’re not able to grow our company and to scale it to the level that we could if we were hyper-focused on the project that is right in front of us, the real project we want to be working on.

 

One of the big things that people like to do every year is to make their big list of New Year’s resolutions. For entrepreneurs and business owners, this list of resolutions typically includes business goals. And, from there, those goals turn into marketing plans and new strategies that will help them achieve what they’re after.

 

Oftentimes the result of these well intended efforts are very detailed and complicated marketing plans, ones that span the next 365 days and include every single idea they have. If they are very detailed, they may even be planning out what they need to get accomplished every single day—or maybe the three things they need to do every single day. When they do this, they believe they’ll be able to meet their goals.

 

But, what actually happens is that we start to focus on fulfilling that plan, and we fall behind because we’re really good at thinking, “Oh, I can get that done in an hour,” and it doesn’t take an hour. It never takes an hour. It’s going to take six hours or it’s going to take a whole day or you’re going to have interruptions or you’re going to have blockers. We think that we’re going to be able to get these three things done every single day. But, when we start to work on them, we fall behind. And, suddenly, we didn’t meet our goals.

 

On the next day, instead of having three things on our list, we now have six things. We have the three things for that day and then the three things from the day before. Pretty soon, we have fifteen things on our list, and maybe we’ve got one done.

And then, of course, we get discouraged. We begin to be tempted to think, “Why should I even try? I’ll never be able to be successful. I’m not able to keep up with this plan that I have set for myself.”

 

Instead, we should tell ourselves, “Okay, I need to focus for the next ninety days on these three things. These three things will get my primary attention, and anything else that comes in, if it’s not in alignment with the three things that I’m focused on for the next ninety days, then it’s going to be no.”

 

Another way to look at this, which is so important, especially if you’re a mom or dad, is that every time you say yes, you are saying no to something else. Usually that no is to your family. A lot of us by nature are very helpful. As entrepreneurs, we want to solve problems when someone has a problem. We want to figure out how to fix it, how to solve it.

 

And every time we say yes to help someone else with their problem, what we’re saying no to is more time with our spouse or our kids. As entrepreneurs, one of the things we need to consider is why we are doing this in the first place. We say we’re doing this so we can spend more time with our families. But, at the end of the day, we actually spent less time with our families because we’re so focused on trying to make our business successful.

 

Again, this is why it’s so important to limit the number of projects that you’re working on. Focus on the top three to five projects at any given time. Make sure that every time you say yes to something, you’ve considered exactly what you are saying no to. As yourself, “What can I take off of my plate?” Despite what we like to tell ourselves, we can’t do everything. Thankfully, by not doing everything and focusing on the right things, we can actually hit our goals that much faster.

How To Create A Morning Routine To Double Your Productivity

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I would like to talk to you about the one tweak that you can make to your morning routine to drastically increase your productivity.

 

Now, for many years, I considered myself to be a night owl, someone who will stay up really late and gets most of their work done late at night. Whereas the morning lark is someone that wakes up early and likes to get their work done early in the morning. For me, I would get up and I would drink my two or three (or four) cups of coffee. And then, of course, the espresso after that. And maybe a bottle of Coke. I basically lived on caffeine all day long to be able to maintain my energy levels so that I could stay up until 10 p.m., 11 p.m., midnight, or even 1a.m. to get all of the work done. And that worked for me for a very long time.

 

It worked all the way up until a few years ago when I started to have some health challenges. I actually injured myself and the result was a herniated disc in my neck. I saw my chiropractor. I went to physical therapy because I definitely didn’t want to have surgery on my neck. The chiropractor said that I needed to do some exercises every single day and, If I didn’t do these, I would be in pain pretty much all day, every day. These exercises would take at least an extra half hour each morning — and I absolutely had to do them. Otherwise, I really was in pain the entire day.

 

I quickly realized that I was going to have to start getting up earlier in the morning so that I would be able to have time to get those exercises done. And, as my morning routine changed and I needed to get more and more done, I noticed that, actually, my morning routine started in the evening. I needed to go to bed earlier because I couldn’t get up early in the morning if I didn’t.

 

So, right there’s your first lesson: Your morning routine actually starts the night before.

 

Before my injury and my need to exercise and stretch in the morning, I would hit a wall at 4 p.m. And, when it hit, I would need another cup of coffee or another shot of espresso. When this would happen, my mind started to shut down and, all of a sudden, I wasn’t able to produce as much. After 4 p.m., I had to reserve the afternoon hours for activities in my business that did not require peak mental capacity because, by that time, I was pretty sluggish and definitely not as effective as I normally was.

 

 

But, when I started to add my exercise routine to my mornings, I noticed that 4 p.m. would roll around and I actually didn’t need that extra cup of coffee, or that espresso. I was able to actually maintain a higher energy level throughout the day, all the way until 5 p.m., 6 p.m., or 7 p.m., when I would turn off my computer anyways so I could spend time with my family. Now, remember, this exercise wasn’t the type you would necessarily do at a gym. I wasn’t working up a sweat. But, just this low impact exercise in the morning almost immediately helped me to be more productive throughout the day. It’s work to do the exercises in the morning, but that one small tweak has made me so much more productive.

 

Another benefit of changing my morning routine is that my family started to notice a difference — and they actually wanted in, too. My daughter saw me getting up at 5 a.m. to exercise and asked me if she could exercise with me. Pretty soon it was me and seven kids all exercising at 5am in the morning – every single day!

 

And you know what? After the initial pain of having to wake up early and adjusting to a new rhythm, I realized that this really is working out — and for everyone. I am much more productive. And I know that you can be too if you give it a try.

 

I’ve enjoyed the switch so much that I’m now, in fact, getting myself up at 4 a.m. There are moments, of course, the night before where I’m thinking to myself, “Okay. I’m not going to like tomorrow.” But, your body gets used to the new routine and, soon, the alarm going off at 5 a.m. or 4 a.m. no longer seems like a big deal. In fact, sometimes I just wake up on my own, right at 4 a.m. without an alarm clock because now my body is in the habit of getting up at that time.

 

Even night owls, it turns out, can change. You can retrain yourself and, when you do, that extra time you have in the morning helps you feel refreshed and relaxed. It helps you to get and stay focused because you have time to plan your day before everything gets busy.

 

But, before you start setting your alarm for 4 a.m. every day, I do want to say one thing. ..

 

Yes, I have seven kids. Right now, the youngest is ten years old and the oldest one is about to be twenty. I don’t have babies at home or even super young kids. If you do, however, this changes everything. Trying to establish a super consistent morning routine when your kids are below the ages of five, at least, will put too much pressure on yourself and your children. When you have little kids in the house, just go with the flow. You know they’ll be keeping you up at night, or waking you up in the morning, or both. You know you’re going to be exhausted. At these times in your life, you really do just have to fill your work into the times you have available. Enjoy those babies! Relax! And get up when you feel like it.

 

Your kids will get older and, when they do, you can come back to this chapter and rethink your morning routine. And, if you’re ready to be more productive and your morning routine has the flexibility to be changed, then I seriously suggest adding a little exercise and movement to your mornings. It’s a game changer!

Prioritization – Should You Be Working On This Task In The First Place?

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A few years ago, I was working with one of my client’s technology teams. I was in charge of managing the technology team for my client and had a team of five or six people that were web developers and graphic designers and automation experts and email builders.

 

 

 

I was responsible for making sure that their team got projects done on time and on budget. And one day we went in for our daily meeting, which is our daily stand up meeting of about 15 minutes, which I held every day with the team. In our daily stand up meeting I would always ask them the three basic questions:

 

1. What did you get done yesterday?

2. What do you plan on doing today?

3. Do you have anything that’s blocking you from moving forward?

 

Well, as I asked this question to the very first person on the call I said, “So, what did you get done yesterday?” And they said, “Well, I didn’t get the projects that you assigned us completed because last night the CEO contacted me and I jumped on a Skype phone call with him. He went on to explain to me that there is this customer that has come into our email system and they had this experience, and he wanted me to build a fix for that.”

 

“So, I stopped working on all of the other projects that you’ve assigned me and I have actually started to build out a solution for this. And not only did I do that, I pulled in the other team members to help as well, so nobody in the last 24 hours has gotten anything done because we’ve all been working on this new project the CEO has told us to do.”

 

I said to myself, “Okay, great. This is going to be a great learning opportunity for everybody on this call. And later on, I’m going to have to go talk to the CEO about interrupting the process and the systems that we have set up.”

 

The big lesson I really wanted to teach this team is that, if you give a problem to a smart person, they will immediately set about trying to figure out how to solve that problem, never stopping to consider if this problem should be solved in the first place. CEOs and business owners in particular see a problem, something that’s broken, and their immediate response is to try to fix it — and as quickly as possible. They want to have this amazing experience for their customers, but they don’t always realize that this one “simple fix” will have ripple effects throughout their entire business. If a CEO knew that all of his revenue generating projects were going to be delayed by a week, and that this was going to cost thousands of dollars, then he might have rethought the urgency of needing to fix a small problem.

 

This is why it’s so critical for the right people to be working on the right tasks — and for these lanes to not get crossed in business.

 

Before jumping in and starting a new project, ask yourself these questions:

 

● What problem am I trying to solve? In other words, is there really a problem to start with? Or is this just a “want” or an “idea”.

 

● How much impact does this have on revenue? If we do nothing, how much revenue are we losing? If we implement a solution, how much more revenue will we gain?

 

● How much impact does it have on the

customer? Is this having a big impact on the customer? Or is it a minor irritation? How many customers does it impact? All of them? Only a few? How often does it impact customers? Every day? Every week? Every month?

 

● How much impact does it have on my staff? How many customer service hours are being used to solve this problem? How many hours per month?

 

● What is the cost to implement a solution? What is the cost to the business if I do nothing? How many man hours is it going

to take to create a solution? Will I get an ROI from this effort? Does it make sense to invest the money to create the solution or are we better off just letting things be as they are?

 

 

As I asked these questions to the team, we discovered that in this case, the problem was something that customer service could easily handle in less than an hour a month, but the solution would require the entire team to stop working on other important projects and spend the next 3 months working on a solution full time. And to top it off, it had no positive impact on revenue.

 

So before jumping in, always ask yourself, “Should this problem be solved in the first place?” And, if the answer is no, then definitely don’t waste your time, or your team’s time, trying to solve it.