The learning center

Our last article began a two-part series on how to get things done. In this article, we conclude our “best of” list for high performance and productivity. Combined, this two-part series of articles can be thought of as a blueprint for how high-performance people think and work.

I’ve always believed and personally experienced that success is learnable and predictable – meaning that if I consistently do the things that other successful people do, I’ll usually get the same successful results they do.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

‍‍Batching – A Key To Boosting Your Productivity

Do you find yourself trying to cram everything into your busy day? Every time you reply to an email three new ones arrive. One of the most sensible productivity techniques tips I’ve ever received is batching. Batching can save you hundreds or thousands of hours that would otherwise be wasted.

We’ve previously looked at taming technology – especially email. There we’ve introduced the idea of only checking email once or twice a day at most. The reason for this is that batching similar tasks greatly reduces the overall time needed to complete them. This is especially the case for smaller and more regular tasks such as responding to email, voicemail and running errands. For example, to respond to email as it arrives, the process might go something like this:

• Email “ting” notifies me of a new email (interruption)
• I go into my email inbox (set up time)
• I reply to the email and then delete or file the original one (doing the actual task)
• I go back to what I was doing prior to being interrupted (re-focus)

The above business process sequence might take me just three minutes. However, repeated fifty times throughout my workday would take up two and a half hours in total.

Had I scheduled a time in my day to respond to the fifty emails as a single batched task, it’s very likely I could have done this in half or even a third of the time.

Efficiency is gained because I have eliminated 50 repetitions of the interruption, set up and re-focus cycles.

On top of that, the productivity gains of not being interrupted every time an email arrived would be huge.

Email isn’t the only task that can be batched. Anything that happens multiple times a day or multiple times a week are perfect candidates for batching. Some common examples include: returning phone calls, replying to or sending email, meetings, running errands, handling snail mail, sales calls, etc.

Doing multiples of a similar task in one session keeps your frame of mind focused, reduces set up time, and boosts overall productivity.

The Art Of Thoughtful Neglect

Productivity is often focused on getting as much as possible crammed into your day. Using tools like Outlook, Gmail, various list systems or the excellent Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, one has a myriad of options for becoming highly efficient.

The only problem with being efficient in this sense is that it rarely ever results in making progress on our most important goals. Busyness and efficiency can deceive us into thinking that we are actually accomplishing something, when in fact all we are doing is spinning the wheels but going nowhere.

What would happen if you concentrated fully for a set block of time, say 3 days or a week on that one big goal – you know that big one which has been gnawing away at the back of your mind?

Blow everything off. Don’t reply to the emails, don’t return the phone calls (or at least do the bare minimum you can get away with). Would you get it accomplished? Would you at least make a big dent in it?

Ask forgiveness not permission. “Sorry I’ve been away on some important project work for a few days,” can precede any belated return emails or phone calls.

Let’s take this a step further, what if you only made two goals for the entire year – one personal and one professional? Choose the two biggies. Rather than ten goals that only get partially completed due to lack of focus, what if you absolutely smashed through and achieved your two biggest? Would that make your year?

Do What You Love

This one is huge. When work doesn’t feel like work, getting things done is not burdensome – or at least it’s much easier.

I frequently tell people I’ve never worked a day in my life. That’s because I’ve always followed my interests and created businesses around these interests. Even though I was building fast-growing businesses it felt like a hobby – like I was a kid playing when I should be doing my homework instead.

That’s not to say I enjoyed every facet of what I did. Of course there were tasks which in themselves were no fun, but overall the “mission” was something that I felt passionate about and enjoyed doing.

The side benefit is that it is very easy to get really good at what you do when hours fly by and they feel like minutes because you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing.

I really can’t say it much better than Alan Watts does in the narration of this short video:

When Is The Best Time To Plant A Tree?

Answer: Yesterday.

When is the next best time to plant a tree? Today!

Have you ever thought about the things you should have done in days gone by? What should you have done a year ago, two years ago, 5 years ago, or earlier? What benefits would you be reaping now if you had done them? This is not an exercise in wallowing about the past – but we do want to use the past as a teacher.

What should you be doing today to reap the benefits in one year, two years or five years from now and beyond? Don’t let it slip this time. Plant that tree today and water diligently.

In my experience, the most successful, intelligent, and driven people have and maintain a long view of things. Today’s activities are destined to be tomorrow’s benefits.

Look at each of the important areas of your life. What are you doing today in each of these areas that will have a positive impact in a year, two years, five years, ten years?

It amazes me how some people just have a knack for getting things done – they have an amazing bias for action. While others are still compiling a pros and cons list, they’ve already finished or are well on their way to finishing the task at hand.

A wise man once said – you’ll always accomplish more through movement than through meditation.

So what’s the difference between these radically different groups of people? What’s the difference between those who just talk the talk and those who walk the walk?

In this multi-part series of articles, I’ve compiled some of the key secrets of high-performance people. Both through observation and personal experience I’ve put together what can be thought of as a “best of” list for getting things done. You’ll be surprised how differently high-performance people think.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

The Best Time Management Tool In The World

The best time management tool in the world has, in fact, nothing to do with “time management” at all. You may have been expecting me to present some kind to-do list system, time management software or another tip that can save you a few minutes or a few hours here or there. However, this time management tool will literally save you years of hard work – get better at what you do.

You’ll not only get faster and better at the things you do, but you’ll also enormously increase your value to your business and to your customers. Your increased value is most often reflected in your bank account.

What books are the top ten percent in your field reading? What courses are they taking?

By far the best time management tool in the world is to improve your skills and keep improving them with continual self-education. The good news is EVERYONE who is in the top ten percent in your field was once in the bottom ten percent. Everyone who is now a master was once a disaster.

While getting better at what you do seems like obvious advice – very few people continue self-education throughout their lives.

Often when people get “good enough” they tend to get into a routine and their expertise plateaus. As the saying goes they don’t have 15 years experience – they have one year’s experience repeated 15 times.

Discipline – The Bridge Between Goals And Accomplishment

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. The 97% crowd hate hearing or thinking about discipline.

They want the push button, magic pill, buy now pay later solution.

You’re different. You understand that we must all suffer from either the current and temporary pain of discipline or the permanent and heavy pain of regret.

I’ll be the first to put my hand up and say I have difficulty with discipline, but here’s what I’ve discovered – discipline is infectious.

One discipline always leads to another. When I start keeping to my exercise routine, soon I find I’m also sticking to my daily to-do list. When I start keeping to my daily reading and self-education habit I soon also find that I’m able to stick to the good habit of healthy eating.

A discipline is the most important type of commitment – a commitment to yourself.

Conversely, the least lack of discipline starts infecting other areas of our life and begins to erode self-esteem. If you can’t trust what you commit to yourself, how can you expect others to trust you to do what you say you’ll do?

You don’t have to change that much for it to make a great deal of difference. A few simple disciplines can have a major impact on how your life works out in the next 90 days, let alone in the next 12 months or the next 3 years.

Work All The Time You Work

We all work below our potential capacity. The question is how much below your potential capacity are you working?

To be successful, you must discipline yourself to work all the time you work.

Don’t be feeling guilty and thinking about your family when you’re at the office and vice versa, don’t be thinking about work and continually check your email when you’re relaxing with your family. Give both activities your undivided attention.

How do you explain the fact that everyone, no matter what their role from plumber to CEO, works roughly the same number of hours to get done what they need to get done? The answer is found in Parkinson’s law;

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

The majority of people working today are expanding their work day with “artificial fillers” so as to fill in the available time. Activities such as meaningless busywork, chit chat, meetings, drinking coffee, and reading the news ensure they are working at well below capacity.

If they have a dentist appointment at 2pm, they’ll get everything they need to get done by the time they need to leave, yet on a normal day it would have taken them until 5pm or later. How did they magically gain 3+ hours? The answer is obvious – they eliminated some of the “artificial fillers.”

As an employee you effectively get rewarded for inefficiency – the longer hours you work, the more time you waste on pointless meetings, the more you’re perceived as a hard worker and team player. That’s because employees work in the time and effort economy.

Entrepreneurs are different. We work in the results economy. In the results economy, you get paid for results whether they took you an hour or year to achieve. Time and effort have no bearing on your bank account – only results matter.

That’s one of the reasons why getting good at what you do is so important. The better you get, the less time you need to achieve the same results.

You must therefore resolve to work all the time you work. You must decide that from the time you start until the time you finish, you’ll work on your top priorities as close to 100% of the time as possible. That will dramatically improve your productivity and output.

Rest, recreation, and having a good time are important, but understand that they are a separate activity from work (not that you can’t enjoy your work). Mixing the two does not give justice to either. If you do, either your work will suffer or you won’t be able to fully relax, knowing that you’re only doing your work half-heartedly.

When spending money on marketing one of the following three things will occur:

1. Your marketing fails (i.e., you make less in profit than you spent on your marketing expenses).
2. You have no idea if your marketing was a success or failure because you don’t measure the results.
3. Your marketing succeeds (i.e., you make more in profit than you spent on your marketing).

For each of these scenarios there’s a simple course of action:

1. If your marketing consistently fails and loses you money, then STOP and change what you’re doing.
2. If you don’t measure your marketing results, that’s just plain stupid. With the technology we have readily and cheaply available, it’s easier than ever to track your marketing results and return on investment (ROI).
3. If your marketing is working and consistently giving you a positive ROI, then you should crank it up and throw as much money as you can at it.

Why Your Marketing Budget Should be unlimited

One of the craziest things I see small business owners doing is setting a “marketing budget.”

By setting a marketing budget you are implying that either your marketing isn’t working and hence it’s a pure expense (i.e., a waste of money). Or you have no idea if it’s working because you don’t measure the results and so you throw money at it in the hope that it’s giving you some sort of positive result.

If it’s the former then of course you need to set a budget because you can’t have expenses running wild in your business. But a good question might be – why are you wasting money on marketing that isn’t working?

If it’s the latter then you need to change things pronto. You wouldn’t hire an employee and not measure their productivity, so why on earth would you consistently pay for marketing and not know what result it’s generating?

If you’re marketing is working (i.e., giving you a positive return on investment), why on earth would you limit it with a budget? It’s like having a legal money printing press.

This scenario is called money at a discount. If I was selling $100 bills for $80, wouldn’t you buy as many as you could possibly get your hot little hands on? Or would you say, “Sorry my budget for discounted $100 bills this month is only $800. I’ll just take ten, please?”

That’s why I always say, I have an unlimited budget for marketing that works. And you should too. One argument I hear against this is concern about being able to handle the demand. Firstly, that’s a great problem to have.

Secondly, if you’re truly receiving more demand than you can fill, this is the perfect opportunity to raise your prices. This will instantly boost your margins and bring you a better quality of client.

The Right Time to Set A Marketing Budget

The only time to set a marketing budget is when you’re in the testing phase. In the testing phase, I advocate that you fail often and fail cheap until you have a winner. Test your headline, your offer, your ad positioning and other variables. Then cut the losers and optimize the winners until you finally have a combination that gives you the best possible return on investment.

Remember the post office charges you the same amount to post a crappy direct mail piece that bombs as they do a high converting direct mail piece that pulls in millions. Once you have a winner that pulls in more than it costs you, crank up the marketing spend and hence the speed of your legal money printing press!

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on What is Direct Response Marketing? As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to market your business.

Want to know what the absolute biggest mistake made by small business owners when it comes to marketing?

I can’t overemphasize how widespread this problem is and it’s at the heart of why most small business marketing fails.

‍If you’re a small business owner, you’ve no doubt given some thought to marketing and advertising. You might be thinking about putting together a plan. What approach are you going to take? What are you going to say in your advertising?

The most common way most small business owners decide on this is by looking at large, successful competitors in their industry and mimicking what they’re doing. This seems logical – do what other successful businesses are doing and you will also become successful. Right?

In reality, this is the fastest way to fail and I’m certain it’s responsible for the bulk of small business failures. There are two major reasons why. Let's unpack them.‍

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

‍

Reason 1: Big Companies have a Different Agenda

Large companies have a very different agenda when it comes to marketing than small businesses do. Their strategies and priorities differ from yours significantly.

The marketing priorities of a large company looks something like this:

• Pleasing The Board Of Directors
• Appeasing Shareholders
• Satisfying Superiors’ Biases
• Satisfying Existing Clients’ Preconceptions
• Winning Advertising And Creative Awards
• Getting “Buy-In” From Various Committees And Stakeholders
• Making A Profit

The marketing priorities of a small business owner look something like this:

• Making A Profit

As you can see, there is a world of difference in the marketing priorities of small and large companies. So naturally, there is a world of difference in strategy and execution.

Reason 2: Big Companies Have A Very Different Budget

Strategy changes with scale. This is very important to understand.

Do you think a big property investor who buys or builds skyscrapers has a different property investment strategy to the average small property investor? Of course.

A big property investment strategy simply won’t work on a small scale. You can’t just build one floor of skyscraper and have a success. You need all 100 stories.

If you have an advertising budget of $10 million and 3 years to get a profitable result, then that is going to be a very different strategy to needing to make a profit immediately with a $10,000 budget.

Using a large company marketing strategy, your $10,000 is going to be a drop in the ocean. It will be totally wasted and ineffective because you’re using the wrong strategy for the scale that you’re operating at.

Branding and ego-based marketing is the domain of large companies. To achieve any kind of cut through requires an enormous budget and the use of expensive mass media.

Direct response marketing gives small businesses cut through on a small budget. It’s designed to be accountable and ensure you get a return on investment that is measurable.

Mimicking Large Business Marketing Is A Mistake

Following the path of other successful businesses is smart, but it’s vital that you understand the full strategy you’re following and that you’re able to execute it.

Strategy from an outside observer’s perspective can be very different from the reality. If you’re following a strategy that has different priorities to you or has a vastly different budget then it’s highly unlikely it will generate the kind of result you’re hoping for.  

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on How to Create a Lead Magnet that Converts in 6 Steps. As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to acquire leads for your business and build your authority.

I recently watched a movie (can’t remember the name) where the snooty head chef after reading one of the order tickets starts shouting at the waiting staff “NO MODIFICATIONS, NO SUBSTITUTIONS!”

Chef felt indignant that the unwashed masses were ruining his dishes which he considered perfect works of art.

A famous chef may indeed have the luxury of deciding how his work should be consumed by the masses and force them to like it or lump it.

I see the exact same attitude from some business owners in regard to their marketing.

While this kind of head strong attitude is charming when it’s our hot-tempered French chef, as a business owner it’s one of the fastest ways to throw a huge pile of money down the drain on marketing that doesn’t work.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

I Would Never Respond To That!

When presented with an out-of-the-box marketing idea or strategy, it’s common to hear business owners say something like, “That won’t work; I wouldn’t respond to an ad like that!"

The obvious answer is that it’s not designed to elicit a response from YOU. It’s designed to elicit a response from your customer, and you are not your customer.

The typical objection given is, “That would never work for me; my business is different, or my clients are different.” This is especially so when presenting some of the concepts in direct response marketing mistake. One I see commonly repeated.

Assuming anything about your marketing and basing your marketing on your own opinions or the opinion of friends, family or colleagues is a major mistake. One I see commonly repeated.

Prove Yourself Right Or Wrong

You have a much deeper and more technical understanding of the products and services that you sell than your customer does, so of course you wouldn’t respond to the same types of advertisements as they do. You also have a built-in bias which skews how you view your products and services in the marketplace.

I’ve personally experienced this many times. Things I thought would never work, have worked brilliantly and things I thought would be sure winners were flops. Why? Because my point of view and biases were different to those of my customers. What I thought they wanted and what they really did want were misaligned.

Would you feel comfortable flying in a plane whose design was based on opinion? Wouldn’t you want to be sure that the design had been rigorously tested, passed aviation safety standards and had successfully flown in real-world conditions?

Similarly, to avoid wasting time, money, and resources on marketing that doesn’t work, I urge business owners to apply the scientific method to their marketing rather than basing it on their opinions or the opinions of others.

Here’s how you might apply the scientific method to your marketing:

• Ask a Question e.g., Will people who need plumbing services respond to this advertisement?
• Construct a Hypothesis e.g., I think this ad will deliver a positive return on investment
• Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment e.g., You run the ad in a publication that is read by your audience
• Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion e.g., The ad had a 7% response rate and delivered a 300% return on investment. Conclusion – this type of ad works.

Using this method, we don’t need to guess or base anything in our marketing on our own biased opinions or the opinions of anyone else.

We test small and analyze the results. We continue testing and discarding the losing ads. When we have a winner, we increase the marketing spend and widen the exposure to magnify the winning result.

This test and measure approach is accountable and relies on results, not opinions.

A wise man once said, “Don’t let your bias and opinions keep you away from a pile of money.”

You are not your customers, never assume what will work and what won’t – test and measure and decide based on results.

Around the year 1900, there were 100,000 horses in New York.

London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, for a total of more than 50,000 horses.

In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of these cities.

All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses.

If you had a horse related business, then business was booming. Everything from clearing away the huge amounts of horse manure to grooming, feeding and housing the ever-growing population of horses.

Fast forward a few short years to the advent of electrification and the development of the internal-combustion engine there came new ways to move people and goods around.

By 1912, autos in New York outnumbered horses, and in 1917 the city’s last horse-drawn streetcar made its final run.

So in 12 years your business went from being on top of the world to losing more than half its revenue. Five years after that you were bust and all your knowledge, industry connections and skills were totally obsolete.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

Don't Be A Turkey

Failing to anticipate changes, especially changes in technology, is what kills most businesses. Just ask these guys:

Kodak invented digital photography, yet despite this could not or did not use this early lead to its advantage. It let other competitors eat it’s lunch.

Borders finally got into e-books but it was too little, too late and consequently it also paid the ultimate price.

When the guy running his booming horse business in the early 1900’s started to see these new-fangled electric streetcars appearing, he might have chuckled to himself and thought that this form of transport was just a passing fad. After all horses had been used as means of transport for thousands of years.

Then a few years on, when more and more of his revenue was being eroded by the new technology, he might have started pining for the “good old days” when things were going well. He might have even become angry about what was happening and expected the government to intervene.

See anything similar happening today?

Various industries including manufacturing and brick and mortar retail are either in crisis or on the verge of crisis.

Globalization, the Internet and new technology is hurting them – big time.

They are whining and crying about the state of things, lobbying for government intervention and hoping the good old days will soon return.

But the good old days aren’t coming back – at least not for them.

Why don’t they just embrace the new technology and get onboard with it? Some of them will but most won’t.

The reason most won’t is because they have the same mindset as a turkey does.

Nassim Taleb, best-selling author of The Black Swan, tells the story of a turkey who is fed by a farmer every morning for 1,000 days. Eventually the turkey comes to expect that every visit from the farmer means more good food.

That’s all that has ever happened, so the turkey figures that’s all that can and will ever happen. In fact on day 1000 it's at the peak of its confidence. After all it now has 1000 days worth of track record on which to base it’s confidence.

With a track record like that what can possibly go wrong?

But then day 1,001 arrives. It’s two days before Thanksgiving and when the farmer shows up this time he hasn’t got food in his hand, instead he has a recently sharpened axe.

The turkey learns very quickly that its expectations were catastrophically off the mark – that the good old days weren’t going to last forever. So now Mr. Turkey is dead.

The moral of the story is don’t be a turkey and don’t run your business like the turkey would have.

How To Ensure Your Business Survives And Thrives For The Long Haul

Your ultimate competitive advantage is anticipation and taking action based on this anticipation.

It’s going to take guts, you’ll have to take risks and you’ll have to invest in research and new technology.

You need to constantly be pondering questions such as:

• What business do I need to be in?
• What technologies are coming that are going to disrupt my industry?
• How can I take advantage of the coming changes in technology rather than fight them?

You need constant strategic innovation – innovation that your customer cares about.

Skunkworks projects are one of the best ways to stay abreast of emerging technology while still continuing to run your current operation.

A famous example of a skunkworks project is the first Apple Macintosh computer.

Google have even made it part of their company’s culture by allocating 20% of employee time on side projects that interest them. Hugely successful Google products such as Gmail, Adsense and Google News have come from these skunkworks projects.

What resources are you investing in emerging technologies and trends in your industry?

Day 1,001 is coming for your business and your industry and if you aren’t ready with a new plan, your business could well suffer the fate of the turkey.

Having a culture of innovation, anticipating what is coming in your industry and running some skunkworks projects in your business will give your business a massive competitive advantage.

Talking about a competitive advantage. Are you in the process of building or starting a coaching business? Forget the guesswork and follow my proven methodology for scaling your coaching business. Just click the link.

My wife was recently subtly pointing out little things around the house that needed doing, as wives often do on Saturday afternoons when they sense you’re about to reach for a cool drink and a bit of downtime.

“Maybe you should get someone to come out and fix the silicon that’s coming off around the shower”, came the helpful suggestion.

Indignant that she implied I wasn’t capable of performing such a simple repair, I set out to prove her wrong and reclaim my manhood.

“I’ll fix this”, I said in my most macho voice as she rolled her eyes and left me to it.

Several visits to the local hardware store and a few hours later, I was proudly exhibiting the fruits of my labor.

Fast forward a few weeks and mold started showing up behind the silicon repair I’d made.

I finally gave in and called a professional.

“Did ya use bathroom grade anti-bacterial silicon mate?”, the gentleman condescendingly asked while inspecting my botched repair. The blank stare I gave in response ensured his bill was going to include a stupidity tax in addition to his normal charges for time and materials.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

The Value Of Experts

The above is an example when I clearly didn’t follow my own advice. I’m a firm believer in using outsourcing as a strategic leverage tool.

Outsourcing to experts can help you leverage your time so that you can concentrate on the highest value tasks possible. Everything other than your highest value tasks should be delegated or outsourced.

In my sad tale above, I paid for the materials to do the job myself, then I spent hours of my time doing the job (incorrectly), then I had to hire someone to undo the mistakes I’d made and finally pay them to do the actual job properly.

Clearly not the best use of my time or resources.

As entrepreneurs we have a “can do” mindset. This often means when something needs to be done, we are tempted to just roll up our sleeves and just do it.

However, spending a lot of time doing things that aren’t your area of expertise can quickly become a very expensive exercise. Remember money is a renewable resource – you can always get more money but you can never get more time.

Outsourcing Operational Tasks

Then there are other tasks which are necessary for the proper functioning of a business but don’t necessarily require any specialized expertise. These are often time consuming and repetitive.

Examples of this might include data entry, administration, follow up, shipping, etc.

The common concern with outsourcing these tasks is quality. Will they get done as well as if I was doing them myself? The answer is probably not, but a rule of thumb I use is 80% as good by someone else is better than 100% done by me.

Letting go can be difficult, especially if you’re a control freak and perfectionist like most entrepreneurial types are. But it’s necessary if you’re going to get scalability and leverage in your business.

Otherwise you end up effectively paying yourself minimum wage for menial tasks while sacrificing high-value tasks such as marketing and business systems which take your business to the next level.

I’ll leave you with some timeless wisdom from the late great, Jim Rohn:

Learn how to separate the majors and the minors. A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.

Don’t mistake movement for achievement. It’s easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?

Days are expensive. When you spend a day you have one less day to spend. So make sure you spend each one wisely.

We can no more afford to spend major time on minor things than we can to spend minor time on major things.                    

Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.

Time is the best-kept secret of the rich.

Neil Armstrong once said, “You only have to solve two problems when going to the moon: first, how to get there; and second, how to get back. The key is don’t leave until you have solved both problems."

In the excitement of starting a business, it’s common to spend a lot of time thinking about “how to get there” – that is become successful. Often what’s given less thought is “how to get back” – i.e., the business exit strategy.

In this article, I'm going to explain how to set your business up for success. It'll take planning, and this takes time. You might want to check out these time-saving strategies.

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

Planning Your Exit Strategy

When starting a business it’s important to think clearly about why your business exists and plan for how you will exit. This sounds obvious but is something many business owners don’t think about until it’s too late.

• How’s it going to end?
• Who will your buyer be?
• Why will they buy your business?
• Will they buy you out for your customer base, for the revenue, for the intellectual property?
• How will they get a return for their investment?

Answering some of these questions will help you visualize exactly who your buyer is and why they would buy you.

It’s crucial to think about these things at the beginning because they will help you shape exactly how you engineer your business and what you focus on.

If your goal is to exit a business for $50 million, then everything you do in your business can be framed with the question: Will this help me get $50 million?

Who is Your Ultimate Customer?

You’ll rarely make as much money running a business as you will selling one.

The person or company who puts you out of business is your ultimate customer and satisfying them will result in the biggest pay day you’ll ever receive.

Countless fortunes have been made this way. However sadly a very large number of businesses are worthless and eventually just get wound down because the owner wants to, or has to, move on and has not been able to secure a buyer.

This is why it’s so crucial to structure things in a way that ensures you’re on the receiving end of a big pay day rather than faced with the realization that your years of hard work have come to naught as far as the value of the business is concerned.

What your business Investor Looks For

Over the years I’ve sold multiple businesses and now as an angel investor I’m on the other side of the table – evaluating businesses I feel would be worth buying into.

I can tell you the number one thing a purchaser looks for and that you need to satisfy is whether you HAVE a business or whether you ARE the business.

There’s an enormous difference. If your business can’t be operated without you, then it’s not a saleable asset and you’re stuck – regardless of how good or profitable it is. That’s why business systems are so crucial.

Having good business systems is what enables the business to run without you. See the following articles for more detailed coverage on the topic of business systems:

• Why A Lack Of Systems Is Stunting Your Business Growth And Costing You A Fortune
• Eliminating The Bottleneck In Your Business – YOU
• Products Make You Money, Systems Make You A Fortune

Next, you need to consider who will buy your business and why. Will it be a competitor? Someone new to the industry? Someone in your industry but in a different niche?

Structuring the business with a logical acquirer in mind is smart and it’s something that is attractive to investors. It shows them a clear path to exit and return of their invested capital. Even if you don’t plan to take on investors, as the owner of the business, you should think of yourself as an investor.

You wear the entrepreneur hat by day but at night the investor hat should come on and you should be questioning when that return on invested capital is going to occur and how.

But I don't want to Sell my Business

This is one of the most common objections I hear from owner-operators. Very often they say, “I love what I’m doing and I don’t intend to sell.” That’s great if what you love doing is making you a good income – relatively few people enjoy such a lifestyle.

But whether you like it or not, one day your circumstances will change. You may get bored, get sick, want to retire, see a better opportunity, etc. When, not if, that time comes and you do decide it’s time to sell, you want to be able to walk away with a cheque that has a lot of zeros on it rather than have to wind it all down and possibly end up in debt or sell for a pittance.

If you start thinking about structuring for exit at the time you need to exit you’re toast. It’s way too late and you’re very unlikely to achieve a favorable result. You need to start with the end in mind. Start thinking about your ultimate customer and what would motivate them to write you that cheque which becomes your biggest pay day.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy our article on What is Direct Response Marketing & Why It Works? As a small business owner, it’s the smarter way to market your business.

I’ve always thought of Google as the all-knowing, omnipresent computer onboard the starship USS Enterprise from Star Trek.

Ask it any question and it instantly returns you the correct answer. Ask it to elaborate and it gives you all the relevant information.

Except instead of asking it the coordinates of a Romulan vessel, we ask it more mundane things like the phone number of the nearest pizza joint.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to game search engine results so that you appear higher up in the results for a given keyword or phrase.

It’s so that when someone types in “best hotel in New York,” your hotel comes up preferably as the highest result or at the very least on the first page.

It’s the equivalent of rigging the Yellow Pages so that your hotel shows up at the top of every page in the “Hotels” section.

If that seems to you like corrupting the objectivity of the all-knowing, omnipresent computer then you’re absolutely right.

It’s been happening for years and many people have made a lot of money in the process – both those benefiting from search results skewed in their favor as well as those offering services to help customers game search engine results.‍

Do You Want to Grow Your Business Rapidly?

Then you need to market it. But not just any marketing will do. In my new 1-Page Marketing Plan Course, I show you the exact techniques I've used to start, grow, and exit several multi-million dollar businesses, so you can too.

Tell Me More

A Costly SEO Misconception

Part of the popularity of SEO is that it is widely believed to be a free marketing strategy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s only free if your time is worth nothing. Enormous amounts of time producing content and generating back-links are required to have the desired effect on search engine results.

This has to be done either yourself or be outsourced to an agency specializing in SEO.

Google’s Crackdown

In recent times, Google and other search engines have been fighting back. Google was founded on the back of being able to offer much better search results than any of the search engines before it.

The gaming of search engines through various SEO methods has reduced the overall quality of search results. If users search Google for something and continually get spammy, gamed results they’ll start to look elsewhere for answers to their queries.

That will be the death knell for Google.

So Google has started fighting back. It is now actively looking for sites that are “over-optimized” or that are using shady tactics to game search engine results. It’s punishing these sites by either lowering their rank or in some cases completely removing them from its index.

When someone searches for “best hotels in New York” it wants to actually show you the real, most relevant and objective results just like the computer aboard the USS Enterprise would have.

Google’s quest is for objectivity. Its goal is to become almost a collective consciousness. If you were to ask everyone in New York what the best hotels were and then tabulate the results in order of the best to worst, that’s exactly the result that Google wants to put in front of you when you search for “best hotels in New York.”

Historically, Google has done that through the use of back-links. It treated a link from another website as a vote and hence sites with the most “votes” for a particular keyword or phrase got pushed up higher in the search engine rankings.

However, back-links are easy to manufacture and those whose business it is to game search engine rankings have been busy generating back-links like crazy over the past few years.

So Google is now looking for new ways to give relevant and objective results and is lowering its reliance on back-links.

It’s the end of SEO as we know it.

One of the new methods it’s using to judge a site’s relevance is by looking at “social” signals.

When you “like” something on Facebook or tweet about it, Google wants to know. Other than hooking everyone up to a brain wave sensor, this is one of the best ways for Google to tap into the global consciousness.

Social media posts such as “XYZ hotel had terrible service” or “had a great time at ABC hotel” are valuable to Google. They are much harder to artificially manufacture on a large scale than back-links. These social signals are starting to play a much bigger role in search results served up by Google and most other search engines.

This is also the reason Google has plowed huge resources into Google+ which is their answer to Facebook and Twitter.

The Best Form Of SEO

One thing you can be sure of is that Google is going to get better and better at producing relevant and objective results – it’s business depends on it and it has thousands of Ph.D.’s and propeller heads working day and night to achieve this objective.

Many businesses have been plowing huge resources into gaming search engine results. The results are dubious and often short-lived. In some cases it can cause negative results if Google catches on to what you’re doing – and sooner or later they will.

So what’s a business to do? After all search engines are a vital source of leads.

My advice is that you build an extraordinary business.

That’s not as airy-fairy as it sounds.

Build the type of business that gets “liked,” talked about, and mentioned. Take the resources you would have put into gaming search engines and put them into building a business with raving fans.

Doing that is the best SEO strategy I know of, and it’s sustainable long term. As Google gets better and better, you’ll only continue to benefit.

If you run the best hotel in New York, as Google’s algorithm continues to improve, so will your rankings. Finally, the person searching for “best hotel in New York” will be shown your website as the top result.

But unlike a gamed result, you need not fear being wiped off the search index. And in the process, you’ve built an extraordinary business.