I believe we can achieve all the goals we set for ourselves and our businesses if we just focus on the fundamentals.
So why don’t we?
Well, it’s hard.
We live in an “on-demand” world where we want everything RIGHT NOW and it’s led many to believe that there are these magical silver bullets that lead to success…
Or some magical tool will get us the results we want.
Thinking that the answer is some software tool or tactic is wayyyyy easier.
The reality is…
Growth is hard.
It requires a lot of work.
A lot of consistency in your efforts. (Most will give up too soon)
If you follow any successful business and analyze the owner they really just NEVER stop doing the fundamentals.
Over and over and over.
They show up to do the work.
And it’s not the work you’d imagine or think about in most cases.
It’s not shiny.
It’s not a tactic.
It’s unsexy work…
The boring work…
It’s probably time you cut out some of the “fancy” things you’re doing for the fundamentals.
Here are some examples for you to apply to your business to get back to the basics.
Transcript / MP3
The reality is that your probably not doing the fundamentals in your business that are required for you to take your business to the next level. I say that because I just got off the phone with a uh, a potential mentor that I’m looking to invest in for the upcoming year. And we were kind of assessing my business and we kind of were having the conversation of well do you invest in knowledge and getting help through mentorship or do you invest in, you know, getting help internally on the team. And it was interesting how he dissected who I needed to hire in the activities that I needed to do really down into three things. And those three things were things that I had previously had outsourced to other people that are now currently back on my plate and on, on my plate along with all the other things that I had added onto that plate when I had originally out, you know, kind of handed them off to somebody else. …And now because I have all of this stuff on my plate, some of those fundamentals, some of those things have been neglected. But those are the fundamental things that are going to help grow our business. And I’m sharing this story because one of our new core values has become do the unsexy work. And for a lot of you out there, uh, you either aren’t focused on the fundamentals because you’re too busy in your client’s business or maybe some of those fundamentals you actually offloaded to somebody else and they’re not doing a good enough job and you actually need to take them back. But the fear that I think we all have is, well now that means more work for me and I don’t have that time to do that yet. When you really look at and ask yourself what will make the boat move faster, what will make the business get to where we want to get to? It’ll probably hinge on those, I’d say three to five fundamentals, possibly even less. And there are specific activities that you could be focused on each and every day too. Take care of those. Uh, you know, those fundamentals that will actually help your business get to the next level. But the fear is that we’re going to likely have to take a step backwards in some degree in order to focus on those. We might need to stop doing some of the fancy things that we’ve started doing, uh, that really aren’t helping us get anywhere. We might need to let go of a client in our done for you service that, you know, is eating up a lot of our bandwidth and maybe we need to let someone on our team go. One of our clients literally just had to let a key team member ago, but put four grand back in his pocket every single month now to reinvest in himself. One, actually pay him what he deserves because he wasn’t paying himself like many of you probably aren’t paying yourselves what you should and now he gets to actually focus on going back to those fundamentals to then bring the appropriate, the right person on with the foundation set if this is making sense. And so I think as agency owners, service providers, it’s very easy for us or early on we, we’ve gotten used to bringing on freelancers or having contractors come in and do certain pieces of our business and in many ways probably relied on them too heavily. Maybe even pay them way more than we’re making. Thus we’ve sacrificed and at some point you’re going to reach a place where you have the handcuffs and you can’t invest in the things that are required of you to move the business forward because of how you’re currently structured. And some of that might require you to take a couple steps, a couple steps back temporarily in order to make the transformation that you want to make in your business and start to hit the goals. And I think part of it’s a little bit ego. If I’m speaking for myself and for those of you that aren’t going to have real talk with yourselves, maybe you’ve reached a certain level in your business where you haven’t been doing certain things and the thought of doing them again, you know, feels beneath you or maybe it’s something else in your own mind. But the reality is that if you want to take your business to the next level, typically you’re going to have to, you know, do the things that uh, you know, new things that you’re not used to because we’ve all heard the saying, what got you here isn’t going to get you there. And so I know last year I had to sort of clear the decks so to speak, and kind of simplify some things, remove myself from specific mentors and coaching programs and all that just to sort of clear my head and take, take a step back in our growth trajectory that we were on at that point to really set a more solid foundation. And that foundation comes with doing the unsexy work. And I think I mentioned this already, but that’s become a core value. And I want to ask you, I want you to comment below what are those activities that you know you need to be doing that maybe aren’t the sexiest but are really the things that you should be focused on right now to take your business to the next level. If you are an agency owner and you’re like one of our clients adding on a leverage program like high ticket consulting or coaching to your existing services that compliment them, it might really just be sales acquisition and you know, making sure that you have, uh, a good fulfillment system in place, right? Because it’s leveraged. You should be able to remove yourself from fulfillment, to give yourself freedom and bandwidth to focus on, on the acquisition and the lead generation and sales. And those are the activities that sometimes, you know, are things like Facebook that you got to get right, that sometime, you know, you know, take some work and repetition. Maybe you got to do some outbound. Maybe you got to reach out to some people in your, in your existing pipeline, your old pipeline, um, people on your email list, like doing the activities that generate the sales and all the things that you want to be talking about, but you haven’t been doing, what’s that work right now in your business? Because I’m betting that there’s two to three activities at least that you probably would put into the category of the unsexy work that if you just focus more time, energy and bandwidth on those, that you would actually start to see some of the results that you’ve been yearning for in your business for the last three, six and 12 months. But for whatever reason, we haven’t been doing those, those things. And when I look at those ahead of me, mentors, successful business owners, the one thing that always rings true is that they never stopped doing the fundamentals. And I know for me that in order to move our business to the next level, I needed to take a couple steps back, which meant letting someone go, which sucks, which meant, you know, sacrificing some revenue opportunities and maybe lowering our revenue temporarily in order to do the right things and set the right foundations to take it to the next level, which are hard decisions, right? They’re hard to do because it’s the unsexy thing. Nobody wants to talk about going backwards. But if you have to go backwards a couple steps to go to exactly where you want to get to in the next 12 months, then it’s a different story. So comment below, what are the unsexy activities that you’ve been neglecting that you know of? You just put some time, energy and attention to each and every day, each and every week for the next 90 days at least. Where would your business be? You know, the things that are going to help you get there. What are they, what are they? Comment below? Uh, excited to hear what the unsexy work is that you’re going to commit to over the next 90 days, and we’re going to report back on what those have been for us in an upcoming episode. If I give you five to 10 new clients, would you or your agency break if so, your current agency model is broken? I struggle with this too, until I found a better way. By adding online programs, training and coaching to our agency, we doubled profits without adding more hours. If you want to work directly with me and my team to transform your agency, visit my scalable business.com to learn more.
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