Author: brianjohnson

Posted on

I’ve Always Been Restless but My Interpretation of that has Completely Changed

I feel like I’ve always been quite restless. I’m always thinking about the future and my current state and get a bit antsy.

But in the past, I feel like it made me uneasy and anxious. Now it makes me feel motivated.

So what changed?

I wish I could say it was some huge, profound realization inside myself that allowed me to break old scripts and get out of self-destructive patterns.

But it wasn’t at all.

I owed a lot of money before, and now I don’t. That’s it.

More specifically: I owed a lot of bad money like credit card debt, and it wasn’t really going away at all. It wasn’t growing much but it was still always this huge burden that made it feel like I wasn’t succeeding at all.

Recently, after a string of good financial moves, I’ve been able to quickly pay off a ton of debt, including all credit card debt. Every month, I’m able to pay everything down to zero on personal cards and in my business. I also paid off my student loans completely.

And it’s made all the difference.

In the past, I’d be thinking about the future and just worry about all the debt I had, and how it’s been years and I still hadn’t managed to really get control of things financially. It always just felt like this specter I couldn’t get away from.

And when I started feeling that way, I feel like it just turned to general anxiety and actually crippled me from getting things done and really succeeding, which probably kept me in that state a lot longer than I should have been.

But now that’s gone! I’m running a massive surplus of cash every month which I can use to pay off anything or even start investing. Whereas before it felt like I had no opportunities at all, now I can do anything I want!

And so when I feel that familiar sense of unease, I’m interpreting it as excitement and a sense of unlimited possibility in the future, and that’s actually quite liberating and motivating. Suddenly I feel like if I really focus on something, I can really take this business off the ground and do whatever I’d like with it.

That’s a great feeling.

And it really just comes down to interpreting how I’m feeling differently, not even necessarily feeling differently. I think the Buddhists would have a lot to say about that, but it’s still a really interesting thing to experience myself.

Posted on

I Need to Make the Most of my Time Here in Mexico

So I was finally able to rent out my bedroom and get out of the country. That’s the good news.

The bad news, is the coronavirus.

It’s starting to look like I’ll soon be quarantined inside here, and I’ll be here for two full months just about. Most of that time may be spent in my own apartment!

But I don’t want to waste my time here. It’s easy to just get lost in the news or doing nothing productive, but I really want to make the most of it even if I end up stuck inside.

With work, that means re-focusing on my “one thing”. It means being productive when I’m supposed to be working and concentrating on long-term success.

For everything else, I just want to make sure I’m concentrating as well. I want to do a lot of reading, studying Spanish, and even speaking in Spanish with people. I think I’m going to have to start scheduling italki lessons because there’s nobody to meet here! Everything is closed. And what’s not: I shouldn’t be going to.

So, I’m in a bit of a dilemma. But it doesn’t have to be terrible.

Worst case, I watch every sunset from the balcony, have a pint of Corona, and wait for this all to blow over.

Posted on

What if Most Businesses Grow Because they Invest Money, Regardless of What In?

Today’s thoughts are a little difficult to explain, but I’ll do my best.

The background to this is that I’ve determined I could probably turn money into new clients fairly reliably by purchasing other businesses. It’s a bit costly, but it works.

Most other businesses also grow and also invest money in opportunities, though they don’t typically acquire other businesses.

But my thought is basically this: what if they are only growing because they invested money at all, regardless of where they put it?

Obviously there are free forms of marketing, though they usually take time and therefor have a real opportunity cost, so in my opinion it’s the same in the end.

So if monetary investment of any kind is what leads to growth, acknowledging that fact has some very profound ramifications.

It would essentially mean that if you want to grow, you need to have extra cash on hand in order to invest in worthwhile activities. Without that budget, you’ll struggle to grow.

I think you could also simplify all forms of marketing and just say that all marketing you can invest in has an expected rate of return and acquisition cost for new clients, and while your goal is of course to maximize return and minimize costs, ultimately you’re going to have to spend money regardless.

Furthermore, given your limited resources, why not do everything you can to find the investment options with the highest ROI, and then invest everything into that?

Why bother diversifying at all?

I think so many businesses have so much on their plate with trying to run a bunch of social media pages and accounts, email marketing, SEO, trade shows, branded merchandise, various advertising, and much more.

But at the end of the day, all of those cost something and all of them have differing ROIs. Nothing should really matter other than the ROI, so why would you bother diversifying to that extent?

I think you should find what works best, and then put everything into it.

And now that you’ve found what works, and you’ve acknowledged that all you’re doing at this point is turning cash into growth for your business, the question becomes: how can I free up as much cash as possible so I can grow as fast as possible?

That is, assuming growth is your goal. But this is capitalism, so growth should basically always be the goal. Anyone who is putting any effort into marketing but doesn’t seem to think they want to grow (or more commonly: doesn’t actually have the capacity or ability to handle growth), is confused and should reconsider his priorities.

Historically, I’ve spent almost nothing on marketing; I’ve only put in my time. Which worked for a while, but obviously has a limit. I only have so much time, but money could grow forever.

I feel like I can see a future where I’ve figured out where to put my marketing dollars, where I’m putting everything I make back in and keep the ball rolling. It seems predictable and safe.

But as long as I accept this model as accurate and worthwhile, my mindset needs to shift completely. Whereas in the past my thoughts were always on marginally improving things and… I actually don’t really know what I was trying to do. I guess just grow “naturally”, whatever that means?

But whereas that, my goal now should literally just be to make as much money as possible now, take advantage of my credit, and invest as much as I can into growth. And as I take on more clients and have more recurring revenue, use that cash to grow even faster.

Unfortunately, I’m at a point at this exact moment where I don’t have much cash, and I’m not making a huge amount more than what I need to survive. I do have credit available, and I did just buy a business that will give me extra funds on a yearly basis.

But I’ll need to really think about where my dollars are going now, and how I can leverage them to trigger growth long-term.

As a follow-up side note: I don’t mean to imply that marketing initiatives that take up my time or can’t immediately be utilized or scaled up by spending more money aren’t worthwhile. There’s still room for a cohesive marketing strategy, and content marketing, SEO, and possibly social media advertising may still all end up being pieces of what I’m doing.

But they are all investments, and they need to be treated as such and possibly given money to be allowed to achieve their full potential.

I also don’t know exactly which options are going to have the best ROI for me. That’s part of what I’ll be working on over the coming months.

But if I can buy clients at the rate of $144 each, then that’s the metric to compare against. If I can find a way to acquire clients for less than that, it sounds like a good place to start dumping money.

And as a final side-note: for a typical client, I will likely make more profit than $144/year. So if my acquisition cost is less than that, it means that they’ll be profitable after a single year. And then after that, those profits could be used to acquire 1 new client.

Which means that technically, I should be able to double in size each year if I do things right.

Of course there are taxes and some other expenses that seem fixed will inevitably grow with the business, but even so, I should be able to grow very rapidly if I do this right.

Posted on

I Need to Develop a More Robust Marketing Strategy

I’ve been reading a lot of books recently as part of my “One Thing” each day to help prepare me for all of my upcoming marketing plans. And I’ve concluded that there are quite a few things I’m going to need to do.

In addition to rethinking my positioning, rewriting my website content, putting together landing pages, and testing out different advertising options, I think I’m also going to need to plan out email marketing strategies and automation campaigns.

While I haven’t thought all of this through just yet, it’s become clear to me that I probably won’t be able to just put an ad on Facebook and have people purchase my services without any additional interactions.

Most likely, it will require me to turn them into subscribers of some kind first, and then eventually they will buy from me after enough interactions.

Unfortunately, it’s all just quite a bit more complicated and will take much more work than initially anticipated.

One interesting thing I read about is the difference between high-risk and low-risk sales. Unfortunately, I’ve found very little information regarding how to sell the two differently, which is very odd.

Low-risk sales are considered those of less than $200. My services could certainly fall under that category if billed monthly. So if nothing else, a good insight here is that monthly payment options should definitely be considered for new clients because the barrier to purchase is so much lower.

But even as a low-risk service, I think people perceive that going with us for any of our services is a very important business decision, and that they need to be cautious in their choices with it.

I’ve had a couple other interested thoughts recently that are unrelated.

The first is the fact that the clients we want to work with already have WordPress sites, and that we don’t need to sell them at all on WordPress itself. They already understand its value.

And with that in mind, I thought of a brief tagline of sorts that I thought sort of represented our value to those people.

“WordPress is hard. We make it easy.”

Perhaps a bit too simple, but maybe not! It’s not exactly praising WordPress itself, but to a business owner who is struggling with maintaining a WordPress site, they’ll get it. 

That’s all I have for now. I’ll be reading a few more books and then hopefully moving on to the rest of the tasks.

Posted on

Initial Competitive Analysis and Positioning Ideas

I’m getting started now on re-thinking my positioning, so these are my notes from that initial session.

For now, I’m focusing mostly on our website hosting, updates, and maintenance services. These are the ones I want to stress in my marketing and positioning as I feel they are the way forward.

We’re still happy to do website design, but it’s not an important part of my growth strategy going forward.

So to begin: let’s take a look at my competitors.

Realistically, the ones I’m actually competing with are Godaddy, BlueHost, HostGator, and the other huge, cheap website hosts.

Premium hosts like WP Engine, FlyWheel, etc., are more direct competitors, but here’s the question: should I try to compete with the premium hosts, or target the low-hanging-fruit of people who don’t even know about them?

It’s a question of going after uneducated clients who are completely ignorant to the varieties of hosting available (or even what hosting is) versus going after those who have some idea and already know the value.

That’s something I should probably consider now and make a decision on before going forward.

So here’s an analysis of both markets and clients.

The Cheap Hoster

  • Market is very large, since it’s the “default choice” for business owners and anyone with a website
  • Likely ignorant about how hosting works or that there’s better out there
  • Not actively looking for improved services unless they have specific problems
  • High percentage of them either have a tiny business, don’t take the website very seriously, or don’t really have a business at all
  • If I already have them or acquire them when purchasing another business, loyalty is likely to remain high because they won’t leave unless there are consistent problems
  • Probably difficult to capture these clients unless they are a captive audience already and I can educate them
  • Only exception is that if they have serious problems with their existing hosting (extremely slow, downtime, etc), they may be interesting in learning more or switching

So I’m not sure. While this market is much larger, it may be considerably more difficult to actually convert these people into paying clients.

I’ve seen that with my website and blog traffic. I hear from people with tiny websites that don’t generate much income, and while they aren’t happy with their hosting, they just don’t have a budget for better and don’t seem interested in doing anything about it.

And even if they do switch, they usually go back after a while because they can’t afford anything else.

The Knowledgeable Premium Hoster

There are a couple distinct groups within this, but I’ll try to describe generally who fits in here.

  • Smaller market
  • Usually a bit more educated and understands the value of quality hosting
  • Much more likely to be a more-established business that probably doesn’t hesitate at the cost
  • Less likely to be a solopreneur, decision-maker is often an employee of the company
  • Much less price-sensitive, but cares more about premium quality and add-on services
  • Still relatively loyal as long as there are no issues
  • However, will switch to another provider to bundle all of their services (website design and maintenance, for example)

Perhaps I need to be targeting the people who are transitioning from the first group to the second. Maybe their business is growing, or maybe they’ve just had a website long enough to realize they should be investing more money into it.

If they have the pain points and are receptive to looking into something better, that would be the time to capture them. So this might be a great group to target.

I think that is probably the way to go. I can still take on clients from both groups, but I should be targeting those in the center who are transitioning. So let’s make another category here and focus on that!

The Transitioning Business

  • Likely an established business
  • They understand the value of their website and are looking for ways to optimize it
  • They have pain points with their existing site and hosting, but they may or may not know that better hosting will solve their problems
  • Might still be the business owner, or could be an employee in charge of these areas
  • Generally more tech-savvy
  • Receptive to new information about how to solve their problems
  • Likely feels overwhelmed with managing the website and open to ways to make things easier

One thing to note is that I’m not totally sure this type of person will be as receptive to hosting issues alone. It’s possible that they would be much more interested in having their “website problems” solved more generally.

I don’t know that it’s something I can answer without experimentation, but I might have to try different messages and see what works best. Do I try to solve just their hosting issues, or do I offer peace-of-mind for the whole website experience?

A more holistic message certainly seems more appealing, and the stakes are much higher so it could be considerably more compelling. So I’ll probably start with messaging that addresses all of that and see what kind of success I have.

With that decision being made, I may have to rethink my product offering as well. Rather than having distinct “hosting” and “updates” services, I think it’s pretty likely that I’d be better off with packages aimed at solving all of their headaches at once: hosting and speed issues, WordPress updates, and maintenance to the rest of the site.

I saw another business that offered these and include 30- or 60-minute fixes to sites as part of their package. That sounds logistically challenging and like there might be conflicts with clients who don’t fully understand, but as a value proposition it is very compelling. I might have to experiment with that!

If I had to break down my current client-base, I’d say that about 60% of them would be the “Cheap Hoster”, but are essentially with me because they have no problems with my service and it isn’t that expensive anyway.

Unfortunately with many of them, if they knew there was a cheaper hosting option out there, they might take it. A huge percentage of my new clients from my business acquisition would be these.

Main Advantages I Bring to the Table

  • Superior quality – faster, more reliable, consistent
  • Manage every aspect and deal with all issues
  • Capable of taking care of any issues so that they never have to worry about anything
  • Small business – can speak to actual people who will solve their issues
  • Not even that expensive
  • Extras like uptime monitoring, helpdesk, automated, off-site backups, email hosting

I guess that in general, our main selling point is that we take care of everything and do a good job. Websites, and in particular WordPress, can be a bit of a pain to manage and maintain, and hosting problems can be especially frustrating.

We solve all of those problems for a reasonable fee. We handle everything they need to keep WordPress sailing smoothly.

So with that established, I want to dive in a little bit more about our ideal client.

Ideal Client

  • Already understands the value of their website and presumably is making money from it (we aren’t looking to solve that problem)
  • Has either been self-managing the site or has had services they are not at all satisfied with in the past
  • Small business between 4-50 employees
  • Has an existing WordPress website (could have e-commerce but easier if not)
  • Is in growth mode and doesn’t want to deal with website issues anymore
  • Minnesota-based (or at least Midwest) tends to work best, but there’s no reason I couldn’t work throughout the country (or world!)
  • Doesn’t need extensive, custom-coding on website
  • Not typically looking for a full redesign
  • Has a to-do list of things to get fixed on the website (often very pleased when they see how easy it is for us to fix them)
  • Frustrated with what it’s taken to maintain their website
  • Ready to just outsource everything for it

These are the people I need to target! I can work more on this in the future but this is a great start.

Other Misc. Thoughts

  • Might need to add a service where, when we take client on, we audit their website and see if there are any major things we can/should fix and warn them of potential issues in the future
  • Could potentially bundle a service where we do this yearly; put together an entire process for checking for expired plugins or ones that are premium and not-renewed, look for custom, deprecated functions, etc
  • I’ll need to put together a list of specific pain points people have (anything from spam comments/form submissions to not being able to swap out content/personnel, etc)

Plan for finishing this step

  1. Read my new book (power through it!)
  2. Come up with some buyer personas
  3. Develop a positioning statement
  4. Come up with a paragraph that describes who we are and what we do
  5. Come up with a one-sentence value proposition
  6. Come up with messaging guidelines so I can be consistent

From there, I think I can move on to the next step and actually start revising the website content.

Posted on

The Plan for the Next Month

Today, my “one thing” is to basically plan out what I’m going to be doing over the next few weeks. Generally, what I’m doing is testing out different methods of marketing and figuring out what works.

But here are the specifics!

There are more tasks needed than to just test different marketing methods. I need to do some research first to prioritize what I’m going to be trying, I need to rethink my messaging, I need to rewrite a lot of copy for my site, I need to read a bit about putting together landing pages, and then I need to actually build landing pages.

So there’s a lot to be done, but luckily I’ve allocated 10 hours each week to accomplishing just these things. That should be plenty!

The tasks are all sorted below in terms of priority. There should really only be one priority at any given time, so my goal is to focus entirely on the first one, and then when it’s completed, move on to the second one.

Hopefully, after about a month, I’ll be fully testing many methods and starting to have some success with it.

So here they are!

1. Rethink and redevelop my positioning and messaging

My business has seen a great deal of change over the last few years, and I think it’s time that I put together some better positioning and messaging.

Historically, I’ve based everything on some idealistic notions of what we wanted to do, and never really had a strong sense of brand identity or direction when writing my copy. Much of what still exists on my site is really just something I threw out there to try and see what would stick.

Some things have stuck, others haven’t. I have enough experience, knowledge of what works, and insight into where I want to go that I think I can finally put something more concrete and effective together.

The first step in this process will be to write down exactly how I want to proceed with this. I need some action steps to get it accomplished, and then I can go through and actually do it. That will likely start today!

Note that I just bought a new book, “Obviously Awesome”, that tackles a lot of positioning stuff. It won’t come until Saturday, but I should definitely read that first and use it to guide me a bit.

2. Revise Website Content

Based on the results of #1, I will then have a clear sense of what needs to be done on the website.

I’ll need to generally go through the website and make some broad decisions about the changes I want to make. To start, I don’t expect that I’ll be changing a lot of designs or anything; I mostly just need to rewrite the text content.

I know that a lot of work went into the site SEO from both myself and a hired company, but realistically, I don’t think my home page pulls in much search traffic so I don’t think I have to worry about large changes all that much.

The key will be to focus is on my new messaging and make everything clear to our target market. While I don’t want to just throw all the past work into the trash, I think it’s more important to worry about getting our messaging right than it is to worry about SEO at this point.

So for this process, just like for #1, I’ll want to start with a plan of attack and systematically go through it all and figure out next steps.

#3. Develop a Landing Page

I’m going to need at least one, good landing page to try and drum up sales. I’ll likely need more later, but I think I should put together one really solid one before engaging too much in the other tests.

I just purchased a couple books on Amazon regarding landing pages and conversion more generally. I’m hoping to power through those quickly to prepare for this step.

With more knowledge, I should be able to make them fairly effective.

#4. Determine the Most Cost-Effective Places to Advertise and Try

I think it might pay to do a little research before I dive head-first into trying new marketing methods.

I had just assumed that I would test out Adwords, Facebook ads, and LinkedIn.

But what if there are way more worthwhile places? Some ones that might be worth looking into are:

  • Bing and Yahoo
  • Yelp, Manta, Google Maps, Apple Maps
  • Website hosting review sites
  • Other niche websites of that nature
  • Sponsoring a YouTube channel or something along those lines
  • Small local organizations

And of course, I should also just simply do some searches for the best places/ways to advertise for my type of business.

Specifically, I should be researching all of these places and finding out which ones are likely to work the best for a business like mine.

Some of this research can then be used in later steps when I do the actual testing.

Side-note: it seems like all of the really-effective Facebook ads I’ve seen, and all of the ones that seem to spend a lot of money there are the ones that solve a very large pain point for their clients, such as “how to get new clients”, or “how to scale a business”, or other things like that.

I’m not totally convinced that it’s an effective place to solve a pain point of “my website is slow”, because the pain isn’t that large, the reward for solving it not great (or so they think), and the perceived effort and/or cost of fixing it is high. This thought could maybe be an entire blog post!

#5. Run the Tests

At this point, it’s time for me to actually go through and start testing everything.

Once again, I’ll want to make a specific plan of attack here, but I think I’ll probably want to do something like this:

  1. Prioritize the places I’ll be testing
  2. Research each one specifically to put together the ads that are most likely to be effective
  3. Put together the ad and run it
  4. Move on to the next place while the ad is running
  5. Return to evaluate the results, and potentially tweak the ad and retry

After a while, I should have gone through every one and tried them out. Hopefully I’ll have had some success and can double-down on the areas that are working.

#6. Regroup and Re-analyze Blogging

This one might sort of fall into #5 as well, but I think I should continue blogging, but need to really re-think and re-analyze how I’m doing it.

I’ll want to think through what the purpose of the blog is, who I want to bring there, and how I want to do it.

From there, I can put a plan in place to continue and improve it, and hopefully get some more paying customers from it.

 

Lastly, I want to put some general timelines on everything so I have some idea of when these things will get done and can track how I’m doing.

These are pretty preliminary, but should still be able to guide me.

Rethink and redevelop my positioning and messaging
1 Week

Revise Website Content
1 Week

Develop a Landing Page
0.5 Weeks

Determine the Most Cost-Effective Places to Advertise and Try
1 Week

Run the Tests
3-5 Weeks

Regroup and Re-analyze Blogging
0.5 Weeks

That’s it! I should be done with all of this within a couple months. And from there, hopefully I can just double-down and continue optimizing my most successful test.

 

Posted on

Time-Blocking Everyday

In the last post, I developed my plan for what I need to do. The most important thing I can do now, everyday, is to work on that and move all of those things forward.

So to that end, I think it’s time that I dedicate predetermined chunks of time to only doing those things.

Again, this is something he says to do in The One Thing, but I think it’s a great idea. If I’m only spending 10 minutes per day on the most important things, how can I ever move forward?

In the book he recommends 4 uninterrupted hours of this. Now, I’m not saying that 4 hours is too much. However, I don’t know that I can transition into doing that all at once. So instead, I’m going to try to commit to 2 hours every day.

During this time, I think it’s important that I:

  1. Put my phone on silent and face-down
  2. Exit any email tabs
  3. Exit any text messaging tabs and WhatsApp windows
  4. Commit to only working on my “Own Thing” for the day

It won’t be easy, but hopefully it will be quite effective.

So how do I schedule this?

I’m thinking that I should have a set schedule throughout the week. Obviously my week varies a bit but I can definitely schedule 2 hours that are always the same on a given day of the week.

So right now, I’m physically adding them to my calendar. I’ll try out the time slots that I’ve created for a while and see if they work for me!

I think I can still be flexible with this arrangement, but if I have to move the time slot, the point is that it needs to be rescheduled! I can slide it later but I can’t avoid it entirely.

Realistically, this is an entirely new way of thinking and of spending my time, so I don’t think it’s going to be easy to implement.

But it’s so important. I think it could be absolutely crucial to advancing in my business.

Whereas in the past I feel like I’ve just reacted to things and improved marginally over time, this has the potential to help me take control and achieve rapid growth in very little time.

Here we go!

Posted on

Here’s the Plan

I always feel the need to plan things out, yet I almost never do it. I love thinking through all the top-level things that need to happen or that I want to try, but I don’t necessarily follow-through and make an actual plan.

That needs to change!

So right here and now, I’m making a plan.

I’m re-reading “The One Thing” and it has a format that I like. Obviously, the “focusing question” from that book is something along the lines of:

“What’s the one thing I can do right now that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?”

But further than that, he breaks it down by time frame, so what’s the one thing I can do in 5 years, 1 year, etc. By starting at the end and then breaking things down, you can get to actionable items right now that, over time, will lead to that goal.

So what do I want?

I want to make enough from my business that I can essentially do whatever I want and retire early, but also be able to work entirely remotely and spend very little time on the business.

How can I get there?

Well, let’s try and figure out what that means. I could pluck a number out of the air, but I want to say that it means somewhere around $500,000 in personal income for the year, while working 10 or fewer hours per week.

I like the idea of continuing to use hosting, updates, and WordPress maintenance as the main source of income, because they are all scalable.

If I continue focusing on WordPress, I think that for each client I could expect something like $150/year in profit on hosting, $75 for updates, and perhaps $150 for maintenance.

So that’s $375 in profit per site, per year. To get to $500,000 then, I would need 1,333 and 1/3 clients.

That’s a lot of clients! But honestly, that’s totally doable.

I’ve got maybe 275 hosting clients now. They aren’t all WordPress and they won’t all bring in $375, but I’m working up to that. To be safe, let’s say I need 1500 clients in 5 years.

With the 275 I have now, I still need 1,225 more, or 245 new ones per year. With attrition, that number is going to need to be closer to 300, most likely.

Now, my goal for this year was 100 new hosting clients, and I still intend to exceed that goal. Obviously that won’t cut it if it’s all I can do each year.

However, this first year is going to be the most important one, because it’s where I’m going to figure out how to rapidly get new clients. I’m going to experiment and try things and hopefully accomplish something that’s repeatable.

So without further ado, here is my priority for each time range.

The one thing I can do in 5 years:

Service 1,500 website hosting clients

The one thing I can do in 1 year:

Figure out a scalable, repeatable method of acquiring new clients and investing heavily into it, resulting in 100 new hosting clients.

The one thing I can do in 1 month:

Test a variety of different methods for acquiring new clients and see what works.

The one thing I can do in a week:

Put a plan together for what I’m going to test and put concrete timelines on everything.

The one thing I can do right now:

This!

 

There, I did it! I’ll need to review and plan over time to see how things are going, but I think this is a great start.

In “The One Thing”, he recommends spending literally 4 hours per day on advancing your “one thing”, and that definitely makes sense. I think to start I might start blocking off 2 hour chunks and really hitting it hard.

I think it’s really, really important that I actually do this. If I think back to how my time has been spent historically, only a tiny fraction of it has been spent on improving the business and implementing actual plans that I’ve had.

That really needs to change! And it will only happen by actually blocking off time. I’m making a note to figure out all of that tomorrow!

Posted on

Win: I’m Not Bogged Down by Excessive Client Work Anymore

It’s weird, but I feel like I so infrequently mention (or notice?) many of the small successes I’ve had. But the small successes lead to the big ones, and I think that highlighting them might be just as important as highlighting areas that need improvement.

So what’s the success? Basically it’s that I’m not spending large amounts of time on actual client work.

For many years when I started my business, I did everything. From sales and marketing to designing and writing every line of code.

I learned a ton. And my business grew.

But eventually it grew to the point where I couldn’t grow any more without some help. I started working with contractors and even had an employee for a while.

I found myself constantly drowning in client work, where I was personally going in and making designs, writing new code, and fixing other issues. And it was preventing me from scaling.

I’m sure there’s a blog post in here about it somewhere, but I resolved to stop doing the client work and focus on improving the business.

I wish I could say that it happened overnight, but it didn’t! It took years to shift everything over. Part of it requires developing the right processes, part of it is having the right people with the right clients, and the rest is just dealing with your own habits.

But I’m at a point now where I probably only spend 30 minutes per day on client work that I could be giving to someone else. That’s not bad!

And it frees up tons of time for me to manage the business and work on growing it, which is what I’m doing.

It was hard to get to where I am, but it’s nice to be able to trust my team with things and just send them work without having to worry. It feels… Functional.

And it’s less stressful now, because historically when I’d get bogged down doing things myself, I would just get more frustrated because I knew that it was preventing me from growing.

But now it’s all good!

So I think that’s actually a great success. So, time to celebrate.

Posted on

Knowledge, Experience, and Insight – Turning Mazes into Staircases

In reviewing my old blog posts, I came across this “classic”. And I had some new insights.

In it, I argue that most real-life goals can’t be attained in the same way as climbing a simple set of stairs to get to the top. Instead, there are countless maze-like paths to choose from. Some will get you there eventually, some won’t. Some might even have tons of extra obstacles you’ll need to overcome.

I still agree with that, but I missed out on discussing something that I think is really important to note: with increased knowledge, experience, and insight, you can effectively gain an overview of those “maze” paths and make things much easier.

I know I’m going to risk taking this analogy too far, but I think that with enough knowledge, experience, and insight (I’m just going to say KEI from now on), you can really simplify everything.

Imagine that the maze leading to your goal has multiple entrances and countless paths running through it. Only one leads to your goal.

Without any KEI, you’re just guessing where to go. You power through, you try everything, and there’s no way to know which one will get you to the end. The only way to the top is to just try everything and figure it out.

But with enough KEI, you might get an overhead-view of the maze. You can see which paths go where, and eventually trace through which one leads to the top. Imagine how much easier it would be to get there!

Sure, you’ll still have to put in the work of actually taking that path, but you’ll be armed with the confidence of knowing you’re on the right one, which will allow you to power through it and waste minimal time on other paths.

I think that we intuitively know this is all true. When thrown into a totally new situation, things are often overwhelming. If you are lucky enough to even know what your goal is, there’s a good chance you have no idea how to get there. You have some things you can try, but you don’t know which will work.

But after many attempts, you start learning. Through experience, you learn things that don’t work and eliminate those as possibilities. You start to develop a sense of how things will work out before even trying them.

You might even read books and research methods and concepts, which will increase the knowledge you have on the topic. This also will guide your decision making.

And through both of those things, you gain insight into difficult problems. That all helps you figure out the best way forward.

After time has passed, you end up gaining confidence and an understanding of how things work, and suddenly achieving those goals doesn’t seem as daunting.

Within my own career, it is very much true. When I first started and clients would report problems with their websites, I would often have no idea what was wrong. All I could do was try things and hope they worked. If they didn’t, I’d keep trying and researching util I found something that did.

Over time, through making mistakes, researching, and reading, I gained KEI. And now, it’s very rare that a client will bring me a problem I can’t solve quickly. And if I don’t know the solution right away, I’m always confident that I can do some research and figure it out.

So what do I do with this knowledge?

I think it’s important to maximize KEI as quickly as possible. Here are some ideas for doing that:

  1. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Experience comes from both successes and failures, so both can be beneficial to maximizing that experience.
  2. Gaining as much knowledge as you can from external sources is critical. Reading and learning are so important.
  3. Above all, action is key. If you aren’t applying your knowledge, then you aren’t getting experience and it is essentially wasted. Sometimes it’s better to act instead of seeking more knowledge, and it’s almost always better to act instead of becoming paralyzed when you aren’t confident enough to make a decision.

I think these ideas are particularly helpful for accomplishing more nebulous goals such as “being successful”.

It’s just so hard to know what path to take, but knowing that the path will become more clear with more knowledge and experience should be key to actually achieving it.