Archive - Priorities RSS Feed

One Thing by “Randell Mark” Olson – FEED THE FARMER B4 THE ANIMALS

November 2, 2011 in Guest Post, One Thing, Priorities with 5 Comments

Olson Family

Here’s another episode of the One Thing Series. Where I have asked successful entrepreneurs and those doggedly pursuing their goal of self employment one question: “What is the one piece of advice you would give someone if they told you they were starting a business and you could only tell them one thing to help them out?” Today’s guest post is brought to you by “Randell Mark” Olson, who is the founder of The Intentional Legacy Group, LLC. Here is Randell Mark’s One Thing:

If I could only share “one Thing” with someone just going into business, it would be this…”Feed The Farmer B4 The Animals”. Using the metaphor of you as the farmer, and the animals as your business, you need to be “well” in order to grow a healthy business.

This has not always been my philosophy, but I wish it would have been.  In 1997 I walked away from a job with great pay, great benefits, and tons of flexibility to pursue the dream of self employment.  My wife and I had four kids, our oldest was 13 at the time, and the youngest was 4, yes we were just entering the most expensive years of raising a family…what was I thinking?

The way I had it figured was, if we don’t feed the business first, then it will not be able to provide for us, which makes perfect sense, and carries an element of truth, but is fundamentally way off. If you travel this path long enough you will probably end up frustrated at home, and blaming your business for it…after all it gets everything first.  I made the same mistake that many business owners make, of always paying themselves last.

The business bills always came first, the electric bill, gas bill, advertising bills, job material bills, while bills at home went unpaid, or paid at the last possible minute, including our mortgage.

After battling this for years, I finally realized that I needed to pay myself first.  Just as the farmer cannot properly care for his animals if he is not strong and healthy, we as business owners cannot give our business the attention it needs if our own core needs are not being met. For instance, how can we possibly have the energy to focus on our business if we are worried that our electricity will be turned off at home, if we can’t afford groceries for our family, or if we’re avoiding phone calls from bill collectors.  These distractions steal our energy, rob us of our creativity, cause pain in our relationships, and shoot huge holes in our confidence.

To build a strong and healthy business, we as business owners need to be giving our best self…we need to be “whole”.  Here is a quick example of how to prioritize the finances of your new business:

  1. Pay your Taxes First…do not pay anything until you pay your taxes. Despite what you may have read, the IRS is not that friendly.  If you don’t pay your taxes, they will visit you, usually without an appointment, and at the worst possible moment.
  2. Take care of your Family’s Core Needs.  Pay yourself enough to cover Food, Shelter, Utilities, and Clothing.  Once these basic needs are met, it is a lot easier to focus on growing your business.
  3. Pay business bills.
  4. At this point it comes down to Values. Invest in family fun, and business growth as you see fit.

If you will practice these principles you can avoid much of the stress and pain of starting and growing a business that will leave a Legacy for years to come.

“Randell Mark” Olson,  The Intentional Legacy Group, LLC

“Randell Mark” Olson is the founder of The Intentional Legacy Group, LLC.  He is a life long entrepreneur whose heart beats strongest for Frustrated, Worn-out, Exhausted, and Confused entrepreneurs who just want their Lives Back!

Randell is currently co authoring a book (“ExceptionZ break the Rules”) with Rob Clinton, and travels and speaks about Intentional Living, for an Intentional Legacy.

Randell is married to his junior high sweetheart Karen, they have 4 grown children, and 1 grandchild, and reside in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

www.intentionallegacy.com

Investing in Multiple Areas of Life

October 21, 2011 in Friday Free Form, Priorities with 8 Comments

It’s FREE FORM FRIDAY!!!

In an earlier post, “Where are you investing?” I wrote about The Wheel of My Life by Dan Miller. The center of the wheel is comprised of seven areas for a well rounded life. They are: Career, Financial, Social, Family, Physical, Personal Development, and Spiritual.

We all make deposits or withdraws from each of those seven areas on a regular basis.We’re either working on improving our family by spending time with them and letting them know we love them, or we’re making a withdraw by ignoring them and taking for granted the fact that they “know” we love them, even when we don’t tell them.

We spend time exercising to maintain or improve our physical health, or we spend time lounging on the coach, eating junk food while our bodies go to pot.

You get the picture.

Dan goes on to suggest that we really should picture these seven areas of our life as a honest to goodness wheel. Why? Because if a wheel is lumpy or out of balance, here it would be comprised of investing unevenly or making too many withdraws from one area, the wheel won’t roll right. It will be bouncy and wobbly and be all over the place!

To get the wheel to roll right we need to invest in the various areas somewhat evenly.

This brings you to my point for the day.

As a full time self employed individual running my own business I am already seeing the tendency to ignore pretty much every area of life except for the two that are directly (at least as I see it from a number’s guy standpoint) related to my business, career and financial. The other areas will suffer unless I’m intentional about investing in them!

That’s why today I want to talk to you about investing in multiple areas Are you investing in more than just those areas directly related to your business or are you ignoring everything that isn’t directly impacting your business in the here and now???

I know that I am not investing in many areas at present. As Skye pointed out to me last week, “I knew you were going to spend a lot of time working on your business, but I didn’t realize you were going to spend every, waking, moment working on your business.”

Right now, I”m almost 100% focused on investing in my “career” (aka “my business”) and my financial health (increasing financial health by increasing business conducted through A Better Way of Business). At the expense of everything else!

And this has got to stop!

That’s why I’ve instituted a new morning regime of 30 minutes of quite time with God and 30 minutes of exercise. I’m going to be very intentional with starting my day on a firm footing by devoting time to my God and my health.

I’m also going to be more intentional in investing time with Skye and and Alexander. I want them to know they are loved, not just through my words, but through my actions as well, by spending quality time with them where I will purposefully not talk about business.

But I ask you, are you investing in all areas of your life, or are you neglecting certain areas in an attempt to improve others?

Just know that an out of balanced wheel will not roll as desired!

Make the effort now to correct any imbalances before there’s serious damage!

And let me know if I can help!

~Ivan

Who’s doing the work?

September 14, 2011 in Action, Priorities with 4 Comments

Photo courtesy: dreamstime.com

We’ve all seen it. Typically on the side of the road. They’ll be some sort of construction just off the side of the road and they’ll be one or two men digging a ditch while 6 to 10 men stand around and watch the ditch diggers. A few are “in the trenches”, the rest are just bystanders.

It dawned on me the other day that even when we’re starting our own businesses we sometimes get confused as to who is supposed to do the work. Who’s supposed to take action. Who’s going to initiate a transaction where goods and or services are exchanged for money?

Sometimes we’ll be so busy “in the trenches” in one area of our business, we’ll ignore other, equally as important areas of our business. You might find yourself devoting days and weeks to making your website the best it can be, but you’re ignoring the accounting and the financials of your business. Or you might find that you’re devoting a lot of time to building relationships online, but you’re TOTALLY IGNORING your local community.

Sometimes, we find ourselves “in the trenches” focusing on areas that are not as important as what we should be focusing on. For instance, we may spend considerable time and money to have a logo created that catches attention and yet we are SHUNNING THE SALES PROCESS because we’re afraid we might hear a “no”.

In each of these examples we’re “in the trenches” in one area and being the bystander in the other.

In the past I have been guilty of this in many ways.

The first that came to mind are the various blogs I’ve attempted to start before. I honestly can’t remember the number of blogs I’ve started and let die. Somewhere between 3 and 5. Each case was the same. I would stumble upon an idea that would inspire me to write a couple blog posts. So I’d quickly crank out 2 to 5 posts and sit back and wait for the millions and millions of subscribers I was going to have.

There are NUMEROUS problems with what I just described, but for the sake of this discussion let’s just focus on two. My “trench” in each of these examples was the content that I produced for the blog. So I’d get busy for a few days on writing about whatever the idea was for the blog. And then I would TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY ignore any effort on my part to draw an audience, to build a community.

Another great example happened when I attempted to sell real estate. Here my “trench” was really diving in and trying to get to know the local inventory on hand so when I had clients I could take them to the PERFECT MATCH for their requirements. So I spent days and weeks combing through the inventory of houses in the local market. I made notebooks of all the details.

BUT I COMPLETELY IGNORED GOING AFTER CLIENTS! OK. Not completely, I sent out a bunch of letters. Thousands of them (we could mail 300 letters for free each month for the broker I worked for). So I passively went after clients.

Now tell me, what good does knowing the inventory do if you NEVER HAVE CLIENTS to show the inventory to???

NONE!

I don’t think I fully realized it then, but I occupied myself with being in one “trench”, knowing the inventory, at the expense of missing the most important “trench”, going after clients who could and would make a purchase.

So I ask YOU, what “trenches” are you currently in that should be taking a back seat to the truly important tasks in your business? Are you trying to design the perfect backend to the sells process but you’re ignoring actually finding clients? Are you focusing on producing content, but ignoring building a community of people interested in your content? Are you putting all your efforts into growing your online presence, but you’re COMPLETELY DISCOUNTING your local market?

Don’t confuse action with productivity.

Figure out the right “trenches” and then maximize your efforts THERE!

~Ivan

Quantity vs Quality

September 8, 2011 in Blogging, Motivation, Priorities with 2 Comments

Quantity vs Quality

So I’m a numbers guy.

As a kid I grew to love baseball. And do you want to know what turned me on to baseball? It wasn’t the actual game. I had to FORCE myself to watch the game. It was long, and boring, and I only had about a five minute attention span (it’s up to 10 minutes now!).

It was the cards. Specifically the back of the cards, where several years worth of stats were kept. I LOVED looking at those stats. What was the batting average? How many doubles? Homers? RBI’s? Who had the highest average, per year, for the cards I had? Most homers? What about for 3 years? Add up the total number of hits for three years and divide by the total number of at bats. Who has the best average???

I loved it. I would make my own note books and hand write out all the stats from the back of the cards so I could then analyze the players easier (I wasn’t introduced to Excel until my college years). I would even go so far as to create my own stats and see what kind of numbers I’d get. Let’s give John Smith 605 at bats, with 203 hits, 47, doubles, 39 homers, and 146 RBI’s. Is that realistic?

Crunch the numbers!

It was great.

My love of stats transitioned into video games. Favorite sports game of all time? Tecmo Super Bowl. Why? It was the first game I came across that kept stats.

One of the reasons I love role playing games so much? You have to level up your characters, thereby changing and improving their stats.

To this day I’m still obsessed with numbers. Take this blog for instance. I found out I can monitor traffic at this site. I can see how many page views I get a day. I can see where the views are coming from. I can see so many numbers, and not all of them make sense to me yet.

I LOVE IT! Actually, I can see myself getting obsessed with it. Are my links from Facebook and Twitter working? How can I get them to funnel more readers over here? Do I get more views on Monday or Thursday? How can I tweak the titles of my posts to make them more attractive to drive more traffic? HOW CAN I GET MORE PEOPLE?! MORE TRAFFIC?!?! MORE MORE MORE!

You get the picture.

I actually had a bit of a melt down last Wednesday. I got to work and was pretty busy, so I didn’t check the blog until around lunch. That’s the day I wrote, “Can you accomplish everything that needs to done?” This was and is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart as I start A Better Way of Business. I was really excited about this post. So when I checked at lunch I was expecting this post to have a decent number of views, for me that would have been 20 by lunch. So I opened up the dashboard and what do I see???

To my GREAT surprise I see 1. One single, solitary, lonely page view. And that one view just so happened to be me because the way I get to my blog is by clicking on this link that I set up that takes me to the daily post (guess I need to change that so I don’t skew my stats) and then I click on the dashboard. So really, I had had ZERO page views by lunch.

I was crushed. I was defeated. I wanted to throw the whole site away as a failure.

I sent Skye a text asking her if I was making a mistake trying to get A Better Way of Business going.

About 30 minutes later it hit me. I was obsessing over the wrong thing (I do that too often). And I think I discovered what the right thing IS!

My love of numbers and stats had been telling me the IMPORTANT piece of data is page views. The more page views the more successful I am. The more people stopping by my blog, the more people who actually value what I’m saying. The higher the number of page views the more business I have…

Wait a minute…

THAT’S IT! That’s where I was wrong. I was equating page views to number of clients that actually want to work with me and have me help them and their businesses grow into their dreams.

And that’s not necessarily the case. I realized, that what if I had 1,000,000 page views in a day. I would be TOTALLY PUMPED ABOUT IT! But what if NOT A SINGLE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WANTED TO DO BUSINESS WITH ME? It would be POINTLESS to the extent that I want and need A Better Way of Business to provide income so I can support my family.

So it dawned on me. I shouldn’t be so concerned with simply having a large quantity of page views in a single day. What I NEED is a much smaller number of the RIGHT page views in a day, page views that will actually lead to clients working with me and me helping them and their business succeed better.

My thinking had changed.

It was: Quantity is all that matters.

It is now: Quality at the right quantity will lead to success.

What about you? Are you focused on numbers for numbers’ sake? Or are you focusing on the RIGHT numbers?

Can you accomplish everything that needs to be done?

August 31, 2011 in Action, Community, Direction, Getting Started, Priorities with 1 Comment

NO!

At least I can’t.

In getting A Better Way of Business off the ground I have found that there are AT LEAST 100 things that should have already been done but I have not gotten to. Of those 100 items, 50 needed to be done yesterday. The other 50 needed to be done 2 weeks ago!

And it seems like every day there are 10 more things that need to get done, for which I don’t have the time.

It can and does get overwhelming at times.

So the question is, how do you decide what to actually devote your time to?

You could simply accomplish each task as you encounter it. Although you won’t be able to accomplish every task you come across each day, you can work on the each item until it’s complete and then start the next, but realize you’ll never be able to get it all done.

I’ve found this to be ineffective. If you’re like me, you have a tendency to think of new things that need to be done that are inspired by what you’re currently working on. And if you’re like me, you’ll be prone to forget what you’re currently working on and chase after that new shiny object you just saw.

This will lead to an infinite of half complete, started and never finished projects. And if you don’t complete some of these projects your business WILL suffer.

So what do you do?

Here’s how I’m approaching it. I am prioritizing tasks based on whether or not they fall into one of three major categories I’m currently focusing on.

For instance, right now I’m focusing on: 1) Generating quality content. 2) Connecting with people. 3) A special project I’ll be writing about soon.

So each day as I come across the various tasks that needed to be completed at some point in the past I make a quick note or type a quick email to myself as a reminder of what I need to do. Then when I get home I analyze all that needs to be done and see which of the items fit into one of the three categories. If the new task doesn’t fit into one of the three categories I save it in my inbox for another day. If it does fit into one of the three categories then it gets my attention, but again, it gets my attention based on which category it fits into.

So generating quality content comes first, connecting second, and items for the special project third.

Trust me, I’m right there with you when it comes to having too much to do and not enough time. But hopefully you’ll be able to maximize your effectiveness with YOUR business if you prioritize.

~Ivan