Category: Goals

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I’ve Already Maxxed-out my Freedom – What Now?

I’ve long thought that I’ve achieved a relatively high degree of freedom in my life. Just a general sense of freedom is very important to me and it’s something I’ve strived towards for many years now.

It started when I was young, and I always wanted to start my own business so I could have the freedom that comes with being my own boss and choosing what work to do.

It was supercharged in 2019 after I decided I wanted to travel a lot more and started working to reshape my business to allow for that.

And over time, things paid off. While my business income flatlined at first as I reworked everything, it eventually picked back up and is now far higher than ever before, and it’s almost entirely recurring revenue for services we’re good at and can manage without too many headaches.

By early 2020, I felt like I had achieved my goal and could finally travel whenever I wanted. Obviously the pandemic caused some problems there but I was still right.

Fast forward to more recently. I am approaching the end of a year where I may not have spent as much time total outside of the country as my peak, but I have gone on more trips than any year before. Most of them with others who – like virtually everyone – have very limited vacation time.

And I realized I have sort of already taken for granted where I’m at. People really appreciate the very limited vacation time they have, as they should. But that whole concept almost feels foreign to me at this point, and from there I realized…

I don’t just have “a lot” of freedom. I have… Essentially the maximum amount of freedom. I’ve built a life in which I can truly be anywhere at any time, with limited notice, with essentially no consequences.

I’m not merely relatively free compared to the average person, I am exceptionally free. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met another person – including in all my travels – with this degree of freedom or even close to it.

It’s not that others couldn’t get to this point, but they don’t. I’d say very few would even choose it.

At my age, most people have children, which would immediately make it impossible. Those that don’t typically have frequent in-person commitments that would prevent them from traveling when they want. And those are things that people generally choose even if they were in my shoes.

The people that I’ve met that have come closest are generally young and single, working for a company or easy job that’s entirely remote. But they rarely make much money and are pretty limited in terms of where and how they can travel.

Even young trust fund babies typically have lots of commitments that prevent them from doing what they want.

I want to make it clear that none of this is a judgement on anybody else or pride that I have this level of freedom. It’s just an observation.

Looking back, I think I’ve valued freedom over just about everything else. I think if most of my friends felt the same, they would be in the same boat as me.

But in contrast to them, for example, when faced with a choice between money and freedom, I’ve chosen freedom every time. And I continue to choose it, basically every single say, spanning at least a couple decades.

The results took a long time to show but they are here now.

I’ve always valued freedom and sought a life that maximizes that freedom.

And I can now safely say: freedom has been maximized.

It’s a difficult goal to truly formalize, so I’m not sure I ever really did in writing. But it has always been there in the back of my mind.

Because it was never formalized, I don’t know that I ever really had a moment where I decided that I achieved that goal.

But now I’m looking at my life, and it’s pretty clear not only that it was a definite goal and that I achieved it, but that it has probably been my most difficult and greatest accomplishment thus far.

And now that I have it, it’s great, but… It sort of feels like… What now?

It was really fun working towards it and making progress, and now there’s really no need to go further.

I’m looking at my life and trying to decide what big, ambitious goals I should set for myself going forward.

I think there are a lot of directions I could go. I could target relationships, or accomplishments in my hobbies. Maybe I enter photography competitions with a goal of winning some. Maybe I finally put together some photo books.

Or maybe I try to write and record an album on guitar, or perform a big show.

I’m definitely working hard to achieve rapid fluency in French, so that one is happening regardless of whether I formalize it.

Or perhaps I put all my energy into my business or making money in general and an early retirement.

I have always wanted to have the option to retire at 50. At this point, it’s honestly looking likely.

I’m not sure that I do need to formalize any of these, because I’m looking at them and realizing that some of them are already in motion and I’ve always kind of worked towards them.

But on the other hand, it might be better to actually make more specific goals and work aggressively towards them. I am definitely more motivated when I can see the path to something.

In fact, in French, I calculated how much time I’d need to finish the entire Duolingo track and also thought through what else I’d need to do to achieve the level of proficiency I want. And I’m way more motivated as a result.

I’m in a brief lull with my guitar, but I’m realizing that I was playing a ton when I had the fairly nebulous goal of being able to play a bunch of songs around a campfire with my family and friends this last summer, and I did learn a lot of songs and was able to do that.

So goals absolutely do motivate me, even when they aren’t hyper-specific.

I don’t need to decide now, but I think I do need to set some goals and work towards them. That definitely gets me going.

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Regrouping on Growing the Business

I’ve sort of trailed off recently when it comes to working on the business and growing it. For a while, I was really hitting the SEO stuff hard and totally revising my site, and it was working! But then I stopped, and now my traffic and results are dropping again.

Right now, I want to circle back on doing two things in particular.

First, I think it’s time that I actually write a newsletter and send it out to my clients. This will involve a few steps:

  1. Finding out when I last sent out a newsletter, then finding out which new clients I’ve added since then and adding them to the newsletter list
  2. Figuring out what big changes have happened in the industry to include in the newsletter (chatGPT?)
  3. Compiling maybe some of my recent posts if they are helpful
  4. Actually writing the newsletter and sending it out
  5. Coming up with a schedule to send these out quarterly

I think that it’s key to keep in touch with all my clients. They need to know I’m around and I need to be top-of-mind for them. They want to know I’m active and working on their best interests. This is the best way to do that.

I’ve made a note to prepare for this tomorrow and proceed with next steps.

The second thing I want to do, is to start producing content again. I need to be posting regularly in my blog if I want to rank highly. I’ve really been slacking here. I’m not sure when my last blog post was.

But if I can keep posting regular content, it should greatly improve my results for all posts. Maybe I should come up with a schedule where I write a new post every couple weeks, and maybe revise an old one every two weeks, too. Something like that.

That’s it for today! I think it’s really important I focus on growing, since I haven’t been the last couple years and that has been a problem.

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I Need to Get Serious About Paying for Leads

I’ve decided I should actually put some work into paid ads and trying to acquire clients that way.

In talks with a business owner whose business I wanted to acquire, I learned that he had been using paid ads on an obscure directory site and was paying $60/lead.

He was then profiting like $80/month on each of the clients he got.

Even if only 10% of those leads signed-on, this would still be a great deal. Considering the going rate for a business like this is 1x annual recurring revenue.

So in his case, each client should be worth around $1200 to him.

And I need to start looking at it that way.

Obviously these aren’t as good as acquiring a company, because every client will require onboarding, and there will be lots of sales work I’ll have to do. So I can’t pay that much.

But if I’m trying to sign them up for services which will yield $80/profit per month, I’d argue I should be willing to pay at least… $800 per new client. That’s still far less than I was willing to pay for his company.

That’s a lot of money to be able to throw around. And they’ll still pay themselves off quickly.

If I could pay $800/lead and get… Say 5 new clients each month, I’d obviously be spending a lot on it but I’d be adding $400/month of extra profit, every single month in the future. And I’d be adding to this number each month.

After just one year, I’d have another $4800 of profit coming in each month, or $57,600/year. That sounds pretty good to me.

Granted, I will have spent $48,000 that year in advertising, but it would be worth it. Because these clients would keep paying for years.

It’s also worth noting that I would literally be cash-flow positive even in year one. It would be a lot of work taking everyone on, but absolutely worth it.

With this in mind, I need to get aggressive and try a ton of things. I need to try ads in various directories, Google, Google Maps, and wherever else I can find.

I will have to do research to figure out what keywords to use. I’ll need to track things so I can figure out which keywords are the most successful and which ones are a waste.

Regardless: I just need to do it all. The specifics remain to be seen. But I need to put some serious money into this because it will still be profitable.

One advantage I have over most is that my overhead is basically zero, so I don’t need to be as profitable as the bigger shops. I can afford to spend a lot more on each lead because my margins are still high. Once you have a large staff, an office, and a bunch of other pricey things, it gets difficult to maintain.

I’m feeling excited, though, because I’ve never really taken paid ads seriously and I’m only just now realizing how incredibly helpful they could be.

I’m hoping to kick this off within the next few weeks and I’ll report back with results.

 

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I Need to Tune Up My Website and Focus on Improving SEO

I have a large website and tons of useful content. Until recently, it was getting a ton of traffic, too.

But it’s been consistently dropping despite adding new content regularly, and at this point I’m at like 20% of what I had just a year ago.

It’s time I figure that out.

The first thing I need to do is fix all the issues identified on my site by SEMrush and Google Search Console. I’ve already done the most critical ones and some of the low-hanging fruit, but there is way more to be done.

The biggest things remaining are that I need to make sure all images have alt tags. It will be slow-going, apparently, because some of the ways images are used on my site apparently do not automatically load the alt tag data even though I’ve entered it.

Regardless, I need to get my traffic to return, if for nothing else than to attract sellers of their website hosting companies.

I have a list of things I can fix, and we’ll see if those things make a difference over time. I’m hoping my traffic starts to creep back up again.

If not: I think what I’ll do is share some of my data with the SEO community and see if they can help with ideas, or possibly find and hire someone with lots of experience to take a second look.

But this should be my priority for the time being.

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I Want to Lead a Life of Improvement and Accomplishment, not Just Enjoyment

I think the underlying concept of this post has been brewing in my mind for quite some time now, and maybe I’ve said similar things in the past. But more recently I feel that it’s come to a head.

I think I’ve been so preoccupied with my own enjoyment of the world that it has sort of distracted me from my goals.

Now, perhaps more than ever, I want to pursue grand goals and work tirelessly to achieve them. Even minor accomplishments feel more satisfying than ever, and meaningless entertainment or pleasure-seeking seems to leave me feeling more dissatisfied than ever.

Rather than lament why that is, I think it’s easier and more effective to just go with it. To start moving away from those things and, instead, really dive headfirst into accomplishing my numerous goals.

This doesn’t mean I can’t ever enjoy myself, but it does mean establishing what it will take to achieve my goals and sticking to those things.

It probably does mean avoiding some activities in favor of others. For example, I have found that nature-based activities and things that are more physically-active in general are far more rewarding than, say, just going out and drinking.

Plus they have the added benefit of being healthy and making me feel better long-term, vs. drinking which is the exact opposite.

I sort of feel like I’ve been so preoccupied with some internal things and other parts of my life in general that I’ve lost focus on my goals for quite a while now.

In the last year, specifically, I feel like I was too distracted to actually accomplish anything beyond that.

I knew that at some point I’d start feeling like I am now, and that time has come a little earlier than expected.

And I see it as a very good thing. It requires confidence, initiative, and a positive outlook to really feel motivated and disciplined enough to have this kind of focus. And those things were conspicuously absent to varying degrees for the last year.

I’m not sure if I will immediately start to turn things around but at this point I’m feeling like that should really be where my focus is.

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I Think I Need to Start Ramping Up Marketing Efforts Again

I’ve had a lot going on personally. Both in the last few weeks and even, more generally, in the last year.

But I’ve made tremendous progress and I feel that I am approaching the time when I can really start focusing on other things again.

I’ve lost a surprising number of clients in the last few months. Much of it seems to be just coincidence, as a shocking number are simply retiring and winding down operations. A handful are switching to another platform like Squarespace.

Very few simply left for competitors.

Much of this is to be expected. However, I have not added very many new clients in the same time frame. That portion has definitely died down.

I’ve also been getting less and less traffic to my website, which is discouraging.

But none of it should be surprising. I’m really not doing any marketing at all. I’m not advertising, I’m not networking, my blogging has fallen to almost zero, and I really haven’t been making changes to the website, either.

So obviously, those things will need to change.

I don’t need to go crazy all-at-once, but I’m thinking that focusing on some website work and other online marketing is a good place to start. Immediate goals and tasks are:

  • Start blogging regularly again (whether website-related stuff or hosting business stuff)
  • Systematically go through old blog posts and update them to make sure they are good and relevant
  • Make tweaks to website content
  • Add Jimmy and Maria to my team page
  • Fix my portfolio
  • Fix my proposal template
  • Send out a newsletter to all existing clients
  • Add clients added in the last year to my newsletter

Those things are basically all the low-hanging fruit. Most shouldn’t even be all that difficult.

Again, I don’t need to go crazy here. The goal is to just take a step forward at a time. Over time, I should be able to make some pretty major changes without having to put in that much effort. The key is progress.

I’m hoping that my motivation and enthusiasm and energy for these things will pick up as I start to gain momentum and have successes. It’s just a little bit hard right now, know that I’m losing clients faster than I’m gaining them.

Eventually, I may even consider some in-person networking and other efforts. But I don’t want to start with that just yet.

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I Need to be More Open to Feedback and Criticism

A friend was giving me some suggestions on some of my marketing efforts and part of my website, and I realized that my natural reaction is to get defensive or dismissive.

I’ve created a business over the years in which I don’t need to rely on anyone and rarely have any genuine discussions with anyone about how to run it. I’m in charge and I decide pretty much everything.

But I wonder how much of that is just sort of a defense strategy to avoid facing any criticism? Perhaps in my quest for total independence, I’ve gone too far and now dismiss all external suggestions.

And that’s a bad thing.

Many of his suggestions were good. And I really should be actively seeking advice from others if I want to keep growing and succeeding.

I’ve never liked feedback or criticism but I feel like that’s something I should probably address. Because I need that feedback. It is extremely helpful.

This might just be a personal thing that I need to focus on and work on over time. Hopefully I’ll eventually start actively getting feedback from others in some way and make improvements based on that feedback.

It may be the only way forward!

Especially since I had a major disappointment yesterday. I had been in talks to acquire a fairly large website host and it looked like an excellent fit. I found out yesterday that they decided to go with another buyer, which was a huge blow.

I feel like I need to channel that disappointment and do better all around and improve. I need to get tactical with my efforts and really start hammering home my efforts to acquire other businesses.

It’s nice when they come to me, but I don’t think I can count on that every time. I need to start aggressively seeking them out, I think.

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I Should Focus on Opportunities, not on Worries

I was feeling pretty good this morning; better than I have in a while. And I realized that I had basically spent all morning thinking about positive, future opportunities.

A project I was excited to get started, some growth possibilities in my company, potential get-togethers with friends.

And it left me feeling good. I was also focused and productive and felt more motivated than usual.

In contrast, I feel like lately I’ve almost exclusively focused on worries and concerns. I’ve been super busy with a bunch of different things and stressed because of some projects. My mind has been focusing on what could go wrong and how I should address it and never on things that could go right and what a difference that would make.

I feel like I used to always focus on opportunities and positive things, but somewhere along the way, I switched.

I just read an older blog post where I was super motivated. I’ve come across a bunch of these. My energy, excitement, and enthusiasm before the pandemic seem to have been unstoppable.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t in as good of shape and still drank and generally hadn’t gotten my life together as much, I still seemed to have a motivation that I have never been able to match since. And I’ve commented on it while going through old blog posts.

Maybe that’s when it happened.

Maybe it was the fear and worry and general anxious atmosphere surrounding the early days of the pandemic that flipped some kind of switch in me. I started focusing on the negative rather than the positive, and maybe I’ve never come back from that.

And that’s a shame.

But more than just being a shame, it’s really counter-productive.

I think about where my head has been at, and it’s silly. I’m wasting all my time worrying about a small, one-time project I have going on. More than likely it will end up fine, but regardless: the long-term difference between the most positive and most negative outcome on my life is quite small.

This is the case for virtually everything I worry about.

Conversely, I am currently in talks to acquire a hosting company with hundreds of websites. The positive impact this could have on my business and my life is massive. Long term, we’re talking maybe 3 orders of magnitude greater than the project I’ve been worried about.

And now that I’m thinking about it: it’s absolutely insane. I’ve been giving the negative thing more space in my head than the positive thing that’s potentially 1000 times more important.

I need to totally rewire myself to think almost exclusively about opportunities. Because the aforementioned opportunity is just one opportunity I have right now. There is no limit to others I could have. I just need to be focused on opportunities and how I can achieve everything I’m looking to do.

Honestly, even writing this out, I am getting a bit of a tinge of excitement realizing what I could be doing and how much I’ve been missing out on. I’ve gotten the fundamentals right in so many areas of my life, and I feel like I’m poised to make some big moves if I just focus on the big opportunities and implementing all of the initiatives I think of.

After all, most of the things I’ve tried have worked up until this point. Some have taken longer than others, and some have obviously led to more success than others.

But I’ve had very few abject failures, and most things have worked out in the end if I have put enough work into them.

So from now on: I just need to focus not just on being positive, but on the big picture, on growth, and on the opportunities I have.

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Update on Yearly Goals and New Habit Relating to Sleeping

I just reviewed my post about my goals for the year and wanted to give an update on my progress for that.

I’ve made lots of meaningful progress towards many of the goals and I would say that a lot of them are very much doable still. I don’t think any are impossible and few are unlikely. It’s nice to see that they are coming along.

Here is some specific progress relating to specific goals:

  • I haven’t initiated any deals to buy other companies yet, but I’ve had some nibbles, and I’ve made incredible progress towards attracting more of them
  • I haven’t reviewed business profit so far but I suspect we are more profitable than ever
  • I am well within my goal of limiting myself to 30 hours per week of work
  • My photos site is coming along nicely, and it’s entirely possible I’ll have 10 sales by the end of the year
  • Haven’t had any alcohol since I made the goals and shouldn’t have any trouble making it to next year
  • I need to make plans to camp overnight on a river island
  • I’ve been disc golfing a lot, though I haven’t come too close to an Ace yet
  • I may or may not join a rock climbing gym, we’ll see
  • I’ve biked a bit

So overall, good progress. Especially since I wrote that at the end of April and haven’t had that much time to actually get these things done. I finished tons of major projects at home here already. They weren’t “goals” for the year but they still had to get done, and now I should have more time to put towards other things.

Finally, I’d like to formally change the habit I’m working on. I’ve done an excellent job (100% success, I believe) of waking up at 7:30am and not snoozing my alarm.

However, I’m still struggling to develop my own circadian rhythm. And I think one of the biggest parts of that is that I’m doing lots of other things in bed, including not getting up right away and instead using my phone for quite a while.

For the most part, it’s to study, but I think it’s still probably a big problem.

To start with, I’m going to try to establish a new habit of physically getting up within 5 minutes of being awake, starting the day, and not returning to bed at all.

This will require studying elsewhere, which is fine.

I’m hoping that will help quite a bit. I want to generally not use my bed for anything else until I go to bed, but I don’t want to make that a hard rule until I’ve established the morning one first. I generally read in my bed and I think it would be better if I did that somewhere else.

Either way, we’ll start here and then move on once it’s established.

Down the road I could also consider mandating that I go outside and get some light first thing, never use my bed except for sleeping, and perhaps even establish a hard bed time.

But I’ve been getting closer and closer to fixing my sleep and I just need to continue one step at a time.

 

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I Could Reach out to Cities and Localities and Offer my Photos in Exchange for Links

I had a great idea recently relating to my fine art photography website, and that is that I could reach out to cities and other localities and offer to let them use my photos in any capacity as long as they provided me with a backlink.

These backlinks would obviously be very valuable, because they would make my photos rank highly for the locations which I’m targeting. Then, people would end up on my site and hopefully buy prints.

It would be a great way to raise the profile of my website, get more traffic, and improve rankings for specific locations.

It may be a bit labor-intensive unless I outsource it. But I think that once I’ve built up a decent library of photos, it will be a great investment of my time to really get the project off the ground.

Nothing is needed now because I’m still working hard to fill it out and finalize some things, but perhaps later in the summer I should really start doing that.