12X Revenue in 12 Months

[pmaloneus]

Some background:

Former slowlaner who got a couple of breaks with some solid mentors who helped me learn how to build a business and now I’m a semi-fastlaner. It’s a small start, but still a start. I sell various products but I know I have been not fully executing for a variety of reasons. Looking to use this progress thread mainly as a way to hold myself accountable, share insights during the process, hopefully help a couple of people, and achieve my goals (below).

Some things I’m looking to fix:

• Sporadic thinking, I like doing multiple things. I still feel this is a good trait, but looking to make sure I focus where opportunity is known.
• Overworking - want to make sure I’m rounding out my time properly.
  
• I don’t plan often enough, I think strategically, but not nearly plan enough.
• Be a better leader to team. I know I can’t succeed without others, so need to make personal/professional growth a priority.

Some things that helped me start my business

• Talking and learning from mentors/bosses
• Trying and testing a lot of ideas. Many didn’t work, but the seeds were planted
• Ruthlessly focused, willing to grind, and actually enjoy the process/journey/hunt
• Strong support system around me, and more importantly belief that things could be done.

Breaking down some goals as many has suggested on this forum. They could use some work, but It’s actionable enough for me and I can easily tell if I’m on the right track.

Daily Goals

• Wake up at 5:15 AM
• Sleep by 10 PM
• 1 hour exercise
• Eat right

Looking to build daily habits that will create some momentum and easy things I can track and hold my self accountable to.

Short-term Goals (1-3 months)

• Launch & test 4 new products
• Grow newly launched product revenue by 20x
• Outsource/Automate 50% of my non-essential tasks
• Be on budget for Q1

Mid-term Goals (12 Months)

• 12X Revenue
• Grow new product revenue to become 50% of total revenue (diversify assets/risk)
• Get SBA loan to accelerate growth
• Hire 2 full time paid employees - Part of the focus of getting non-essential work off my plate

Long-term Goals (5-10 years)

• A lot of these are fluid and TBD - I know it’s important to focus on this as it will help fill in the gaps in years 1-5.
• Definition of success for me right now - be wealthy enough to do what I want, when I want, for the reasons I want.
  
• I know it’s vague, but best I have for now.

That’s my introduction to the progress thread. Just post and let me know if you want me to add anything that the group would be helpful. Thanks for reading, excited for the journey ahead.

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Today: Prep/Prepare for the week

One of my mistakes is not planning enough and sharing the plan with the team. So that’s what I did today, planned, shared, and made sure everyone was on the same page.

Sometimes it’s easy to feel like planning is not doing ‘work’, but it can be immensely helpful, and really makes people feel better, even if you only have one other person you are working with.6.

Would rate the day about 6.5/10 in terms of REAL progress being made, plus I didn't hit all my daily goals.

 

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[pmaloneus]

First update of the day:

Just had to deal with production issues that impacted my ability to do future work. This was a 'friendly' reminder for me to always look for ways to let my business tell me something is wrong and put stop gaps and backups in place when things do mess up.

You gotta plan for issues, early and often, sometimes you get hiccups that remind you.

 

[pmaloneus]

End of Day 1 update:

Had to fix some issues that came up, but still got some time to do 'real' work. Should be able to launch new product tomorrow. More and more I'm realizing that I'm doing stuff that I shouldn't be and that I need look for ways to get more non-critical tasks off my plate.

On that note, saw some real progress with some on the team today. Thinking more like producers than consumers and solving problems themselves. It's great to see, and in my first post mentioned how I want to focus more on that, because I know I can only grow so fast doing so much myself.

Some lessons learned today:

• Issues will come up, create backups and backup plan.
• Picking who you work with is critical, not only in your team, but also in the vendors you choose, you need reliability.
  
• When actually tracking my time, I procrastinate and read 'useful' articles. Found some areas I can improve.
• One of the things I learned from one of my mentors is you always need to thinking what's next. There's always another product, update, process tweak that needs to be done. Just got your first order... awesome! What next, how do you get your next 10, what can you do better/improve.

 

[pmaloneus]

Day 2 Update:

Sometimes getting work done doesn’t go as fast as you want, and with an endless supply of things to do, you can easily get anxious. Which is where I was at today, there was a lot of solid progress made, but always feel like we should be further.

This feeling can be exasperated even more, when you know your competitors are work right there with you.

This is why being able to priortize your goals and actions are critical and this is one of the one things I want to focus on going forward as well. Understanding my priorities and why they are important.

Read a decision making process by Warren Butfet. He says take all your priorities, whittle them down to 5 and only focus on those 5, everything else is a distraction. I sometimes feel overwhelmed with the amount of things to be done, and do not follow Warren Buffets process AT ALL.

Members…. How do you manage your priorities, what is your process to decide what gets done?

 

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