1. Know what you want
2. Make sure they know what you want
3. Don’t fear judgement, vulnerability, failure or ridicule or for what you want
4. Have the courage to be disliked
5. Pick a clear customer to go after
6. If there aren’t lots of groups, books or communities serving that market, it means there isn’t a market. Pick another customer
7. Make sure your customers can afford you
8. Make sure they can afford to implement your advice
9. Make sure you can get them results
10. Make sure you like them – like actually like them
11. Make sure you like working with that industry
12. Make sure they refer and have communities of clients themselves
13. Spend more time qualifying people than selling to them
14. Get leads and customers to jump through hoops
15. Forget building lots of products and offers and communities
16. Focus on one killer offer that converts
17. Figure out the currency that your clients want
18. Currency is like clients for coaches or listings for agents
19. Figure out what number should go up or down to improve their business
20. Success is down to luck and other people
21. Failure is 100% your responsibility
22. The first rule of selling marketing funnels is: don’t talk about marketing funnels
23. The world is full of “thinkers” and hypothetical experts who have studied the theory and technique – ignore them
24. Be a “doer” and use your own experience
25. Success will depend on what you say NO to, not what you say YES to
26. Spend more time thinking about what the result should be
27. Spend less time thinking about what the method should be
28. What’s the #1 metric that your business categorically needs to prove it’s working?
29. Be specific with that metric – not just “sales”
30. Use a time and measurement, does it go up or down?
31. Which dashboard would you look to to see if that number is getting better?
32. What’s the #1 thing you want to improve for customers? That you would bank your success on?
33. What dashboard do THEY look at, to prove they’re getting more of what they want
34. What is that number specifically, how does it go up or down and in what timeframe?
35. If you hire someone, how would THEY know that they’re being successful without checking in with you?
36. What’s the #1 thing that you should be spending 100% of your time doing?
37. Keep a stop list of everything you do that ISN’T that #1 activity
38. Hire using that stop list as a job description
39. What are the key measurable objective metrics that that person is responsible for?
40. How will they know they’ve improved them?
41. Spend Monday and Thursday doing your work – no one else’s
42. If you can’t get your client work done in 2 days, raise your prices and work with fewer people
43. Also reduce the expectations and deliverables
44. Take Fridays off
45. What is the absolute biggest core problem that you have in the business right now, that if you solved, would make all your other problems easier, disappear or irrelevant?
46. THE only pitch you need is helping X type of people get Y results in Z time (without X headache)
47. To upsell them or convert them again, offer to get that same result faster and easier
48. Hiring 1 rockstar team member will be worth 10 mediocre team members
49. If someone isn’t going to work out, let them know sooner rather than later
50. A good test of this is if you find yourself complaining about someone you hired to your partner, friend, wife, husband etc.
51. Recurring revenue is the goal – get more of that and the rest takes care of itself
52. As painful as it sounds, your job as the business owner is NOT to deliver results or work to clients, its to grow the business
53. Outsource admin and finance activities first
54. Outsource delivery and operations second
55. Outsource sales and marketing third
56. Outsource management and leadership last
57. You’re the director – you job is NOT making the film, it’s hiring the best possible actors for the film
58. You must build a business that runs without you
59. Your job is to make yourself redundant
60. Your goal is to be the least valuable member of your own company
61. Your business is divided into 3 categories
62. Finance and admin
63. Operations and delivery
64. Sales and marketing
65. Work hard enough until you’re lucky
66. Don’t take random calls with people – forget “chats” and networking
67. Care less. You have a choice with what you care about
68. Entrepreneurs don’t starve to death, they drown.
69. There are ALWAYS more opportunities out there. The trick is sticking to one and seeing it through
70. Don’t buy apps because they’re cheap or on lifetime deals
71. No one ever made $150,000 by saving $100
72. As a business owner, you shouldn’t be on ANY of the tools
73. Limit the number of tools you use and use your TEAM to become the app experts
74. If a 95% discount is going to make or break your business, then your product isn’t profitable enough
75. Just because something is discounted or cheap doesn’t mean it’s making you profitable
76. Focus on making more money, not saving small amounts of money
77. If there’s a cheap version of something, there’s a free version – stick with the free version until you can afford the premium version
78. Spending time switching between apps is a waste of time, both day to day and “shiny object” to shiny object
79. Hire people and ask them what apps they want to use – get them to train themselves and others
80. 30% of anyone you hire’s job should be documentation
81. Get them to write the processes and SOPs for their own work and keep it somewhere
82. At most, use Loom to record what you do – your job is NOT to write processes
83. Any time you add an item to your stop list, hit record on Loom and just record it – do not try to create training content
84. You only run a business when 2 things happen
85. 1. You can take time away from the business, weeks at a time, and work still gets delivered to the client
86. 2. You make money, sales and generate income if you take time away from the business
87. People don’t buy products, they buy a better version of their life
88. You categorically do not need to be “everywhere at once” and all over social media
89. That entire premise is sold to you by people with a product or service to DO just that
90. To get to $100,000+ a year, focus on one channel/method and use that
91. Solve one problem for one customer type, with one product and through one sales method with one traffic source
92. Launch it now because you’ll want to change it later anyway
93. 99% almost done but not published ISN’T done
94. 60% kind of done and published IS done
95. Publish it now because you’ll want to change it anyway
96. Commit to the result until you get the result
97. Most people quit before they get to the hard part
98. Everyone else’s job is to keep score – your job is to decide how long to play for
99. There is NO app that will suddenly change your life and make your business skyrocket – don’t believe any of the hype
100. Ignore 99 of these points and pick one that you want to embrace