Author: brianjohnson

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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I Need to Revise My Website

I’m realizing that I really need to revise my website. Some of the content is just very out-of-date and doesn’t reflect what we do anymore. If I want it to convert, I’m going to have to do a better job.

There are a few things I need to do:

  1. Come up with my value statement/tagline for use throughout the site
  2. Make a list of the other things I want to touch on throughout the content
  3. Review my pages and actually write some new content

It doesn’t have to be super difficult, but I really should do it. I think there might be some issues in there that reflect the recent drop in search engine traffic.

Also, in reading some of my oldest posts here, I’ve had two completely unrelated thoughts:

  1. My original goal was to write “10 minutes per day, every day” in this blog. I haven’t come close to that, but it might be a good idea to start trying.
  2. In a very old post, I broke down how I wanted to be spending my time in the business. I had something like 20% allocated to planning for the business and implementing major improvements. I think that’s a great idea, and it’s something I’m definitely not doing now.

I wonder why I’m not doing that? I really should be! I feel that most of my time should be spent either planning for growth or actively implementing it. Working on the business instead of in it.

So I’d like to start making that much more of a priority.

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I Should Always be Reinvesting Back Into the Company

I had an epiphany the other day and it’s that I really need to be utilizing all of the credit I have available to me and reinvesting large amounts of the money I make back into the growth of my company.

Maybe this seems like an obvious things for many people but for me, it was a total departure from how I’ve operated. Historically I’ve never paid for marketing and my costs have always been very low, so anything I made was basically just straight income for me.

But now that I’ve successfully purchased another hosting company and quickly grown my business that way, my mindset has completely changed. What if there was some magical way to continue spending my revenues on things that will get me new clients?

I say that tongue-in-cheek, but it really is so different from what I’ve done historically that it’s actually a novel idea.

I actually had the thought while reading the book Sapiens. The author is discussing Consumerism and Capitalism and describes how the wealthy capitalists reinvest all of their earnings back into growth, while the consumers, well… Consume. They spend what they make on stuff.

While he by no means glorifies capitalists, it still made me think about how I’m running my business and realize that I could really be doing things differently.

So now that I’ve decided to do that, the question is: where do I spend this money?

One of my top choices is to simply buy more business. You get a lot of clients at once, on-boarding is simpler, and it just works. There is little-to-no sales process which is great. Plus I get all that link juice which is super nice.

But I haven’t tested whether it is repeatable to just continue acquiring businesses. I’ll have to reach out to a bunch of owners and see if I can find any that are looking to sell.

And then there’s the other options of paid advertising. Ultimately, I have some idea of what it’s worth to me to have new clients. If spending on advertising costs less than what clients are worth, I should proceed full-steam ahead.

The main thing is that I need it to be repeatable and scalable. Unlike in-person networking (which I can only do so much of), the right paid ad could be completely scalable. Spend more: make more!

So over the coming months, I need to work really hard to test out different marketing methods, and figure out which once I can repeat over-and-over again. I’m thinking that if I can get new hosting clients for $100, it is absolutely worth it to do so.

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Sign-up Form Results – Lots of Spam

So I’ve been letting my last experiment run for many months, and while it’s gotten more than 2,000 submissions… It’s pretty much all spam.

I was getting many submissions per day, which seemed great! But when I looked at the submissions, they almost all had throw-away Russian email addresses. Never a good sign.

So I decided to add a Captcha. Submissions plummeted, unsurprisingly.

It’s been about two weeks since I added that, and I have gotten a handful of submissions. However, I ran them through the website cleantalk.org, which identifies spam addresses, and learned that most of these, too, were spam.

It looks like I got maybe on legitimate submission in those two weeks.

I also didn’t have a single person legitimately reach out to me to start hosting, so I think that overall, there was 0% conversion. Not ideal

So I think it’s time to try something new.

New ad content is:

“Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress website? Email me at brian@pagecrafter.com and mention the code #FreeHosting10 for two free months of lightning-fast WordPress hosting. We will even migrate you for free!”

I can’t imagine it will be a whole lot more successful, but we’ll see! We could also make a variation that has a form submission but this seems nice and clean.

Stay tuned.

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2020 Goal – 100 New Hosting Clients

It’s 2020 and it’s time for some serious goal-making. And you know what my goal is? To add 100 new hosting clients over the course of the year.

A couple interesting notes on this: it’s actually fewer hosting clients than I added in 2019. However, that was just because I purchased a hosting company with more than 100 clients, so it was kind of cheating.

But then again: it worked! If all it takes is purchasing hosting companies to add them on like this, I feel like I should absolutely do it. I think I need to reach out to a bunch of hosting company owners and just let them know that if they are interested in selling, I’m interested in buying.

I just did a quick Google maps search for “Website Hosting” in the Twin Cities area, and what I found was astonishing. I found one company that seemed legit that apparently just shut down and literally turned off all of their client’s sites. Others seem to be fairly outdated and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they are in the same boat as Berry Bros was.

I think I’d be missing out on incredible opportunities if I didn’t reach out to every single one of these and see if there was any interest in selling. It just makes too much sense.

Alternatively, I’ve gone over many ideas for getting new clients, and I think that once things slow down a bit for me, it’s time to really ramp up those efforts. While the SEO and calls-to-action are things I should certainly work on optimizing, I think I should definitely start aggressively pursuing some paid-for marketing options.

I need to really sit down and think what a hosting client is worth to me. Are they worth one year’s expected revenue? Two? Three?

I should be willing to spend a good chunk of change on advertising that delivers results and brings new clients through the door.

Whatever it takes to get two new hosting clients every week, I think I should absolutely do. That should be my ultimate focus this year.

I want to continue posting here and monitoring my progress. Hopefully by this time in 2021, I’ll have well over 100 new hosting clients.

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Thinking About Goals – 100 New Hosting Clients?

It’s time to start thinking about goals for next year. My first thought was, “how about 100 new hosting clients?”

And it’s not a bad goal! Obviously, it doesn’t specify how I get them.

The interesting thing is that I’ll meet that goal this year. But it’s because I just purchased another hosting company and took on all their clients.

But does it really matter?

Sure, it’s been a ton of work, and I had to pay a decent amount of money for all of them. But are the acquisition costs really that different than they would be “in the wild?”

The ways I’m thinking about doing it next year involve driving all over the place and networking. All of those things take a lot of time and have opportunity costs associated with them.

It’s entirely possible that just buying these clients outright will be cheaper than any other form of taking them on.

It’s maybe still to early to get a proper sense of how everything went, but if this current acquisition goes well overall, my time may be best spent in the future trying to purchase other companies.

Sometimes the “easiest” way to do something is still the best way! It sort of feels like cheating but if it works, it works!

I think it’s just important to continue considering all options at this point and to try some new things out. I think a lot of options have merit, including going out and networking.

Unfortunately it just doesn’t seem like SEO is paying off, though it may still be too early to call. I need to review my posts about different tests and see if we can start converting visitors.

And in another post I’ll have to confirm official goals for 2019. I do like the idea of just adding new hosting clients, as I still believe that growing that part of the business is key.

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Focusing on Blog and Habits Works!

So over the past month or so I’ve made an effort to do more of these blog posts and also focus on improving some of my habits. And it works!

Lately I’ve been sleeping better, getting up way earlier, being way more productive, and just generally doing better.

I’ve said before that the blog is the most important thing I do. The reason for that is it’s the only place where I put down some introspective thoughts and then follow-up later to track everything.

Focusing on it helps be focus on growth and self-improvement and holds me to things that I’ve resolved to do. Without it, I feel like I don’t really improve at all, I kind of just limp along.

Specifically it leads me to trying out things that really help me improve. For instance, I’ve been working on establishing a new habit lately. I would say that I should always be trying to establish a new one at all times, and I really hadn’t in a while.

The one I’m working on now is to get up after the first alarm without snoozing at all. For many, this probably isn’t a challenge. But I’ve been doing it for like 20 years. Breaking that habit (which I think is basically the same as creating one) is extremely difficult.

But I’m like a month in now. It was extremely difficult at first, but it’s getting easier and easier. And only good things have come from it.

And a few days ago I did something that isn’t really a habit, but I should have done a long time ago. I tend to waste a long time on the site imgur.com, and I realized that I don’t even really enjoy it. So after years of wasted time, I installed an app on my phone and blocked the website.

Problem solved!

The interesting thing is that this one doesn’t even really require willpower because it’s blocked… There’s no choice there. That’s a good subject for another blog post, but it’s quite fascinating.

So now I instantly have a lot more time each day because I’m not on that site. I move on to other things right away instead of wasting my time.

I’ve even started doing Spanish studying on Anki again. When I’m twitching on my phone and bored, I don’t really have anything else to do now so I just do it! It’s great.

In conclusion, it’s really important to keep doing this. Keep it up.