2013 Goals And Changes

Summary: Hey, Happy New Year! This is Mike Cowles from www.mikespodcast.com and in today's session we're gonna be talking about the different steps we're gonna be taking this year to make changes in my business as well as a key strategy you can follow in your own business to avoid information overload. So in today's session we're gonna be talking about this year and specifically gonna be focusing on in order to bring you my readers and customers the absolute best quality content, training, tips, tools and everything else I possibly can this year. So I plan on having this year be the best year of my life as far as business goes as well as a bunch of other things. One of the things I'm gonna be focusing on outside of business in order to help me with my business is working on the physical health as well. Whether it's working out on several times in a week or even healthier getting rest, getting up a little bit earlier, going to bed a little bit earlier which I know my wife will like. All those things, I believe will help me focus more on my business as well as being more productive and by being more intentional with the things I plan out. I believe that it's gonna help me focus and have the different things I'm creating for my customer be that much higher quality. So one of the things I've been thinking about and reading about and listening to other marketers talk about that I believe is really true as far as productivity goes is to understand is that we really a lot of times need to take away things from our schedule, from our focus, from our to do list in order to get the things that are most important done. The Pareto's principle comes in a play here and if you don't know what that is the 80/20 rule which basically says that 80% of your results are gonna come from 20% of your efforts. So the key is, is to occasionally take a step back and to look at what you're doing and kinda question whether its your schedule, the things that you say are important, the things that your spending time on and to really track this stuff. So for me, what it means is to simplify the number of sites that I have, the number of projects that I'm working on and to bring my focus down to my podcast, my academy, my blog and done for your services. The done for you services is something that normally pays very well but can definitely can suck up a lot of your time. So for me this year to setup done for you services that are already ready to go and kinda package where it say "Hey, you can pick from silver gold or platinum plan” or whatever it is that is really going to help let the customers know up front what to expect as well as help me to scale it and systematize it. So the keyword that I really wanna focus on this year is exactly that which is systematize. There's a book that I highly recommend called "E-myth" and the "E-myth Revisited", those are a couple of different versions of the same book. The guy talks about how I think the percentages like 90% of most single business owners that start a business fail within 5 years however if somebody starts a business and its part of a franchise like a McDonald or Subway or Burger King or whatever than 75% of them succeed and I believe the reason for that is because most people only have a few different gifts naturally. Now, if you're a mechanic, maybe you maybe working for the man and say to yourself, “I could make more money if I just did this out of my garage”. The challenge is as soon as you start doing it that you're gonna realize that you're also gonna be the janitor, the bookkeeper, the collections person and a million other different things. Those may not be your skill, your gifts or whatever. So when you systematize things and you have an operations manual or standard operating procedures then you can normally outsource it but you do have to train people over and over again and you can be super productive with it. So systematizing the business is a big deal.