Consolidation and Focus

[illmasterj]

I'd not planned to start one of these threads, but @Andy Black encouraged me. I have some spare time today so thought writing a few things down may help. After taking a step back it seems that there is too much going on day to day for focus.

A scattered focus leads to scattered results. Instead of one business that thrives, the polygamistopportunist has 20 businesses that suck. Ten businesses earning $10,000 cumulatively are not better than one business that does it singlehandedly. When you segregate your effort among assets, you build weak assets. Weak assets don’t do heavy lifting, and they don’t build strong pyramids. Weak assets do not generate speed. Weak assets do not scale to multimillion-dollar valuations. Weak assets do not accelerate wealth; they build income to pay the month’s bills only to start over again next month.

Big Picture Goals

• Financial independence: live from yield
• Freedom from 9-5: not from hard work
• Financial security: for me and my future family
• To socialise with interesting/open minded people
• Exercise or be active every day
• Have fun, be happy
• Freedom to travel: I do not expect to outsource my businesses and work a 4 hour work week, but I want to work towards being strategic, rather than essential to every day operations.
• End the budget: I don't need to live a billionaire lifestyle, but I want to buy things and never consider "can I afford this?"

Strengths

• Highly analytic
• Problem solver
• Resilient
• Driven

Current Projects and Responsibilities

• Providing consulting/digital marketing services
  • 1 agency client, with 9 sub-clients
  • 1 entertainment client, with diverse products
  • 1 outdoor goods client, eCommerce
• A marginally profitable affiliate blog ($100mo)
• A private label product using FBA ($500mo profit)

The marketing company is not my life's work, but there's good potential for semi-passive income. I estimate that if I spend 6 months hard work with the eCommerce client, I have a minimum of $25,000pa coming in. This has potential to be closer to $50k. If I take care of this client, they will be instrumental with helping me in the future for my own business.

The entertainment client will pay per lead. I have projected the potential to be $50,000pa, but in theory this could be $150,000.

Everything else is hourly or marginal retainers. Good money but lots of "noise" - too many emails, Skype meetings when I'm trying to get things done, one client enquiring when I am deep into another client's work.

Time and Direction

I work a minimum of 40 billable hours each week. On top of that are company administration hours, writing on my blog, answering Amazon enquiries, then mainly reading/planning.

When I have a truly busy week (start the day around 8:30am, work through until 10pm for ~6 days), I become reactive, not planned.

My partner came on board with the marketing company and that helped for a few months, but now we're both flat chat. More money, but still slowlane.

My goal is to start a business that sells high quality, intelligent outdoor recreation products. With the product in hand, I can set up eCommerce, manage inventory, build social accounts, market using SEO and paid advertising, outsource inventory. I just don't know how to get the products prototyped and created (without losing my shirt).

It seems my focus should be on the clients that allow me to earn a semi-passive income. This will allow me to take time away from hourly consulting (slowlane) and spend it developing products that I can scale (fastlane).

Actions

Time Saving

• Automate monthly reports: time saving, ~10 hours/month
• Set up hosts file to block myself from checking affiliate sites. This is already automated, checking achieves nothing: time saving, ~1 hour/month
• Check Amazon Seller Central once per month. Urgent emails will come to my mailbox, the rest is noise: time saving, ~1 hour/month
• Find a reliable, English speaking developer that knows PHP/CSS/HTML and how to optimize sites using SEO best practices: time saving, ~25 hours/month
• Find a reliable, English speaking AdWords and social media marketer that can help be to continue to build traffic for my clients: time saving, ~15 hours/month
• Forget about blog?
• Abandon Private Label FBA Product (let stocks sell out)?
• Find VA to manage my emails?

Semi-Passive Income

• Generate $2083mo commission from outdoor goods client
• Generate $4166mo commission from outdoor goods client
• Generate $3125mo in leads from entertainment client
• Generate $6250mo in leads from entertainment client

Develop Own Brand/Products

• Write down products
• Assess total addressable market for products
• Of the viable products, pick 3 to start
• Draw and describe them as best I can
• Visit contacts in China/Taiwan, get the low down from them
• Find designer to design them (pending cost) OR
• Learn Sketch Up and design them
• Have the drawings assessed/evaluated by those in the industry
• Get prototypes made
• Evaluate myself, get feedback from others
• Build website/social accounts/branding
• Get production run ordered
• Develop 3 further products
• Generate $86,000mo

I guess this is basically a 3 step process - free up time to do the highest value work, to generate a stable income from less work, allowing me to step back from pay for time and spend that time on creating value in the form of products, which can scale and be be fastlane.

Thanks for reading, I welcome any feedback. I'm not here to make lists, I'm here to be accountable.

 

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[J_Lock]

Use that analytical mind to apply the 80/20 principle to help your time issues.

Its a great read if you havnt already.

http://richardkoch.net/2012/11/the-8020-principle-2/

Well done for making yourself accountable!

I look forward to the continuation of this thread

 

[illmasterj]

Well it's been an interesting 24 hours. After being bombarded with videos/conversations/articles about FOCUS, I decided it was time to limit my "busyness" and continue to simplify.

Emails

I thought a VA to manage my emails was required at first, but after creating mail rules my life is already looking much better.

Email Rule #1:
Where my name is not in the To box, move it to the folder 'Noise', except if:

• sent only to me
• sent from important email addresses/domains
• the subject contains 'urgent'
• the body contains 'introduce' or 'urgent'
• it is marked as high importance

Email Rule #2:
After sending a message with 'clientdomain' in the recipient's address, defer delivery by 76 minutes except if:

• the subject contains 'urgent' or 'website down'
• the body contains 'urgent' or 'website down'

Next up I changed my phone so I do not receive any business emails before 11am, and after 9:30pm.

This gives me time in the morning to focus on tasks for the day ahead, means I can use my phone to do my Duolingo exercises and speak with family/friends in a different timezone before knuckling down for the day.

I figure I'll check out the Noise folder when I have some free time, but it's clear that the emails aren't urgent. I tend to get CC'd on LOADS of emails I don't need to be on. It's a poor culture on the senders end - otherwise it's a good business relationship so I prefer to do what is in my control to make life easier.

Rule #2 stops the back and forth email conversations with one of my clients. I still answer their questions, but it slows down the conversation. I see this as training them to work better with me rather than send thoughtless emails from their smartphone which they already knew the answer to, or encourage them to send me all of the information I need in one email rather than having to ask 5 times for information that could simply be in one email.

Recruiting

I always said I'd never employ anyone, but here I am. I've had a developer working with me for months now but after giving him endless chances and trying to teach him skills that he clearly isn't interested in learning, it's time to replace him. I spent this morning trawling the internet looking for potential candidates and put the feelers out.

I've been working with a great Analytics guru for the last few months. I don't have to double check his work which is great. He told me he can also do AdWords, so I lined him up to start a campaign by tomorrow. After stalling on it all week, today he's informed me that his new "AdWords rate" is 70% higher than what we've been happily working with for a while. I planned to give him a bonus actually but not only can I not justify the rate, leaving it to the last minute smelt a bit like extortion to me. I countered with a 30% increase but they knocked it back. Looks like I'm building an AdWords campaign tonight! Luckily it's pretty simple and I have loads of scope to fine tune it in the coming weeks.

I assume that it's only a matter of time until they ask for a higher rate so hopefully when I find a suitable AdWords team member they'll also be an Analytics guru and will take over from my previous guy.

 

[illmasterj]

So it's been an interesting couple of weeks. New opportunities, new frustrations and some great income.

Scaling HR is absolutely a challenge and there's been times where I've been ready to chuck it all in.

Then I discovered this podcast: http://www.businessunleashed.com/million-dollar-consulting/ I don't remember where I found it, it may actually have some from someone else on this forum, but I'm not big on podcasts. Usually it's 15 minutes of talking about stuff that doesn't matter, followed by some uneducated facts from an "expert" on the topic, a couple of ads, then an infomercial on a revolutionary new information product. Rant over, this podcast was a half hour of high quality info.

It made me realize that one of my biggest shortfalls in my business is that my services aren't "productized". One minute I'm tweaking AdWords, the next I'm deep in php, after a quick Skype with a client I am researching keywords for SEO. I enjoy a lot of this work, but not when it's 15 mins here, 20 minutes there. Maybe business is chaotic right now because I am trying to grow it and I haven't been able to fill all of the roles yet (I need a client relationship manager but can't afford one yet!), but it's clear now that I enjoy taking businesses from A>B>C. Not from A to C to B to a revised version of A then back to C. How this plays out in the real world, I don't know just yet.

 

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[illmasterj]

Well I jumped on a plane to take a bunch of meetings. If nothing more, it will be worth an additional 35x my flight price for revenue over the next 12 months (from one proposal). Looking forward to hearing back from the rest.

It's definitely time to let go of the concern over outgoing funds. All going well I'll need to find 2 new contractors to take on some of the additional work.

 

[illmasterj]

Considering selling off my affiliate blog and FBA product (same niche). Been a long time since I have sold a website (last time was through Flippa) and prices seem to have gone up quite a lot.

They don't really take a lot of hours each week to maintain (mainly social media channels, which I have been working to grow), but my concern is that it's removing my focus from the real money maker in my life - my agency, where I should be spending more time developing the business. It's all about the distraction - it's something else to think about.

Domain age is good (5+ years), social accounts are small but see solid engagement, organic traffic has been growing month on month despite no recent content on the site, revenue is modest but reasonably consistent and diversified... I guess I'm saying it's a legit site - where would be best to sell this type of site in 2016?

 

[illmasterj]

Current projects/distractions:

Digital Marketing Agency
Private Blog Network
FBA Product Sales
SaaS Tool

I'm now actively working sell the FBA Products and at least my biggest distraction blog, leaving me with the agency and the SaaS tool. The agency can get a lot of value out of the SaaS tool, which is why I'm sticking with it.

The reason for this is that is seems the agency is my best shot at going Fastlane right now. We've doubled revenue and I see no reason why we can't do that in the next 2 years too. I haven't found the time to read Built to Sell or the E-Myth, but I watched some summary vids on YouTube the other day and my one biggest takeaway is that the roles need to be clearly defined and SOPs need to be produced if you ever want to sell.

I've trashed the windows with whiteboard marker (my wife loves me) on all of the SOPs I need to write. It's a long list, but I can already tell it will help with onboarding new staff in future. As much as it would be nice to be able to hire someone that "knows what I want", the reality is that I can't rely on this, especially if I want to sell the business one day.

So that's it, time to get to it!

 

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