Joe and James EO look Forward - Thought Leadership Forum #EOLooksForward

Hello everybody and welcome to the EO Thought Leadership Forum. My name is Joe Apfelbaum from EO Brooklyn.

And I'm James Ashcroft down in EO South Florida. Happy New Year, Joe.

Happy New Year. Welcome to the program, everybody. I'm so excited to have you all here for our last episode that we're doing. That's right. Me and James decided that we want to launch something new in 2016, and we did a lot of this EO Thought Leadership stuff in the past, and you can go to YouTube and search EO Thought Leadership Forum, and you'll see over 15 episodes that we did together talking about writing and talking about all types of interesting things where you would get a lot of value. So James, tell the audience what we're going to be doing together.

Well, Joe, I think we were looking at doing something a little more specific to our EO Nation out there and working hand in hand with EO to provide some new content that we can all rally behind and bring on guests. So we're just really looking forward to kind of maturing this interview, podcast, whatever this videocasting is that we're doing. Really be buttoning everything up and making it the best we can. So I'm just really excited about it.

So EO has a campaign called #EOLooksForward, and they asked us to talk about some of the things that we look forward to in 2016. So if you see this video, you'll see the hashtag called #EOLooksForward. And today I want to talk about some of my goals, some of the things that I want to accomplish this year, both in my personal life in my business life. And James, you could share some of the things that you want to accomplish with your— in your personal life and in your business life. And maybe that will inspire other people to think about what are some of those things that they want to accomplish and how can they get closer to having their goals achieved.

Absolutely, absolutely. You want to start, Joe? You want me to start? What do you— what do you want to do?

I'm happy to start. Thanks for offering. So for me, in terms of my personal brand per se, there are a couple of things that I want to accomplish this year. So as many of you know, last year I went on a rampage and I wrote my book called Average Joe to CEO. I didn't publish it because I only wrote the first draft of the book. I wrote 40,000 words in 20 days, doing 2,000 words every morning, getting up at 4:00 AM and hustling and doing that really early in the morning. And I got it out of my system. This year I'm looking to finish draft 2 and get it out to the world, figure out if I want to publish it with a publisher or self-publish or do something with that. So that's my big hairy audacious goal for 2016 from a personal brand perspective. To support that, I've launched my TV show called growtime.tv, and I've also launched a podcast called ceomojo.com, which you can find on iTunes and on SoundCloud. And I'm really excited about launching Grow Time University. A lot of people ask me for advice and I'm a mentor to many young entrepreneurs and people tell me, I would love if you made some of those courses about networking, about sales, about how to read a P&L, about things that you know how to do that you didn't necessarily know how to do when you launched your business. So maybe I'll do a course with James on, on Grow Time Academy, and you'll see some of that going on live in the coming months. So I'm excited about doing those specific things in my personal brand. And then in my business, our vision for Ajax Union is to have amazing clients, amazing employees, and to be an amazing company. So what, what is amazing? Amazing for clients is we have a 5-star system to define what amazing is internally. So we want to make sure that we have a certain amount of amazing clients. And that we could offer them amazing service. And in terms of employees, there's also a 5-star checklist of things that we want our employees to do. Everything from learning and growing to training, to making sure they have their goals aligned, to making sure that they're the right type of person, have the right attitude and the right skills to make sure that we can offer the best possible service to our clients and truly be a successful and extremely profitable digital marketing agency. So this vision is clear. It's written on our wall. We have weekly meetings to review what we are each doing individually. individually and collectively as an organization to make the vision a reality. So everybody has their own rocks, their own priorities that are aligned with the priorities of the company. And we're measuring it with individual KPIs against the scoreboard that we have in our company. And we're really excited about making all this a reality, to have a world-class digital marketing agency that could be an example to everybody else as how to build a beautiful culture and how to have an intentional company. So really excited about doing quality over quantity this year. And so that's some of the personal goals. I obviously have family goals. I have personal fitness goals. Over the past 3 years, I lost 75 pounds.

Congrats.

Thank you. They say that you size your body in the kitchen, but you shape it in the gym. So this year is the year of the gym for me. And I'm going to get a trainer and do that properly and all that. So I'm excited about that.

That's really great. I love that saying about the kitchen and the gym. That's true. I tend to have— not on the gym side. Gym is different for everyone, right? So as you know, Joe, I do a lot of running and biking, so I'm not in the gym, but that whole concept of the gym— the kitchen is my issue. Or I should say the pantry. I size myself in the pantry. So something I will be working on over this year. So, uh, thanks for sharing those, Joe. So for me personally, I've been doing a lot of reflecting over the past— probably since Thanksgiving, um, through this week, kind of, um, framing, um, what I want this year to, to look like for me. I've, I've been a historic underachiever when it comes, um, time to perform on my resolutions. So I said this year I'm not going to hit midnight at December 31st and January 1st and attack, you know, with my list. I was going to kind of ease back into the year. And kind of evaluate what was going to be important to me. And as they kind of bubbled to the surface, then I was going to write them. So I just published, actually on my Facebook feed, my resolutions. I almost consider them more like evolutions though. I think evolution has more of a sense of purpose to it. I believe that general resolutions have bad DNA in them, so I wanted to evolve them like like Good DNA does over time. So, they're my New Year's evolutions. That's how I'm going to treat them this year. So, on the personal front for me, as you know, Joe, I'm going to be— I'm the upcoming chair of the EO Accelerator Program here in South Florida.

Huge.

Yeah, I'm really, really excited about that, where that's going to take me. I've just found that I just need to be around people that I can impact at the highest level, and for me, I found my home in Accelerator. I'm very, very excited about that. So that's going to inspire me to continue reading. I've set a goal of 42 books this year. It's my age. Tomorrow's my birthday, so 42 years old. So I'm going to read 42 books this year.

Happy birthday.

Thank you very much. Thank you. And so, you know, I've got these other goals running. I'm doing a 1,000-mile challenge with Jack Daly and Andy Heck and Govind. We are going to be running 1,000 miles this year. So these are kind of my fitness, personal, but all ties in together for me. You know, I'm at my best. I know this about myself when I'm running long distances, pulling a Forrest Gump, running down the street, give myself plenty of time to reflect, contemplate, so I can provide my team the vision they need in order to excel. So, you know, in my companies, I'm going to be doing a lot of working with my team. And using them to integrate my ideas, my vision for the company, and have them execute on it. So I'm gonna spend a lot of time this year mentoring my team and really empowering them. That's my goal. You know, I certainly have my metrics of revenues that I want to hit and some other things. Like, I'm going to be implementing the Traction EOS into one of my businesses. I just think it's an absolutely fantastic program, which I see you're reaching for the book. You probably have it there within fingertips. Exactly right. It's a great program. I'm sure like most of the EO members, we know about these products, you know, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, the Traction's out there. We don't fully implement them. So this will be the year to implement them fully. So I'm very excited. And just to cap off the overarching theme of everything, last year for me was 2015, the year of taking action. So I took a lot of action, a lot of changes underway in both my businesses and my personal life. You know, I got my book out like you, Joe. I wrote a book and got it out there. And some changes to an ownership structure in one of my companies, and we have a new CEO coming in. for another business of mine that I'm super excited about. So, so 2015 was the taking action and 2016 is going to be acceptance. That's my theme. I'm going to accept my strengths, really understand them and roll with that and accept other people for their strengths and build, build a structure around their, their, uh, their strengths. So that's going to be in the forefront of my mind.

Powerful stuff. Powerful stuff, James. So in terms of your strengths, Is there a tool that you've used to be able to identify what your strengths are? I've used StrengthsFinder 2.0 to figure out what my actual strengths are. I took a test there to figure out what my top 5 strengths are, and that was very, very eye-opening. As a matter of fact, I had our entire team take the StrengthsFinder 2.0 test to figure out what each person's individual strengths are so that they can set goals based on what your strengths are. Have you done anything like that? Do you recommend any tools like that?

Yeah, you know, Joe, I've done the StrengthsFinder too, which is fantastic, and I've done DISC profiles and all these things. But really what's been— what I've been working on for the last month or so is getting back to just that Myers-Briggs personality profile and really dialing in. I've taken many tests, and, and I don't think you can just take a test and rely on that. I think you have to take the test, understand the dynamic of the test, take another test, and then ultimately kind of get the ballpark of where you are, and then do some research into it and really dial it in. So I've been, I've been doing that. I'm reading a book right now about my personality profile, and it's— wow, it's knocking my— it's blowing my mind. Just, just— and it's really helping me with this acceptance of why I do certain things.

Mm-hmm.

Like, you know, I do have a tendency to get very curious with things, put a lot of energy into something, and then Move on to something else, you know, and reading why that is, um, it has been very eye-opening and it allows me to accept that part of me. And now what do I do with that knowledge now in order to put a team together, for example, that I know I need someone— what Traction calls an integrator, someone who can actually operate and execute on my ideas. I'm very good at getting in there on the operations side at short spurts, but long, long long periods of time. I'm just not the guy. I get in the way.

And most entrepreneurs are like that as well. We're the ones that are the fire starters. We can get the fire going, but to maintain that fire, to keep that going, we need to find other people. And the entrepreneurs that are not making it are the ones that don't know how to delegate. They don't— they can't be able to allow other people to let their vision become a reality through others. They want to be able to get the credit for it or whatever it is, whatever fear they have stuck inside. And the fact that you're doing that, finding somebody else to help make your vision a reality, is a very powerful thing that many entrepreneurs could learn from.

Yeah, absolutely. It just comes back to the basics. We always hear about business is people, right? And really, it's just building an organization that leverages everyone's strengths, you know? There's no point in me going into an organization and, you know, running the operations in perpetuity. You know, I can certainly go in there and build the structure. I enjoy doing that. I enjoy building the operating procedures. I enjoy like sitting down with the team and talking about operations and how it works. But I certainly do need, um, someone who is going to be my partner on the operations side who naturally loves doing that.

You know, focus on that. Absolutely. So if there's an entrepreneur out there that's watching this and maybe they didn't get a chance to sit down and write down all their goals, What's a good way for somebody to kind of do that? How does somebody get started in writing their goals down? Because a lot of people, they're like, I don't even know how much I want to make, or I don't even know what I want to do. I don't even know where to start. James, what would you tell them to get started as to what they could look forward to in 2016?

You know the old saying, Joe, people say, you know, what's the hardest part about writing a book? It's writing a book, right? So the hardest part about writing a goal is writing the goal, is getting the momentum together to turn off the phone, find a quiet spot, put your headphones on, do what you need to do, sit down with a blank sheet of paper and just start writing. But don't edit yourself, right? Don't try and put them in boxes, you know, family, personal, health, this, that. Just throw it out. Yeah, just throw it out.

Show up and throw up.

Yeah, show up and throw up. Just, just be like, I'm gonna— if, if your fitness thing is, don't, don't be like, I'm gonna lose, you know, X amount of pounds by doing this, this, and this. Just put lose weight, you know, and then just really dial in and then look at that and just pick top 5, right?

So here's, here's something that I had one of my coaches tell me recently when coming up with goals. There's 2 different types of goals. 2. There is something called a product goal, which is an end result goal. How much revenue you want to make this year, how many clients you want to have, how much weight you want to lose. That's a product goal. And then there's another type of goal, which is a process goal. I want to be able to launch 52 episodes of CEOMojo.com. That means interviewing 52 CEOs. There's no result that comes out of that necessarily, but that's a process of what I need to do. I want to launch 52 videos on growtime.tv. That's a process. As a result, will I get more exposure for Ajax Union and get more digital marketing clients? Probably that will happen, and I'll be able to meet my business goal as a result of that. But a lot of people often just set product goals and they don't set process goals, and that's why they procrastinate setting goals, because it's not actionable.

Correct. You know, and, and I think, um, and I've certainly been guilty of this, of setting these goals, um, that are so specific, and then you find yourself by week 3 kind of losing steam because you maybe missed a couple of days. So, so I put things like, one of my, my big spiritual goal this year is to meditate once a day, Monday through Friday.

Wow.

Saturday and Sunday, It's my family time, the schedule's real loose, you know, might, you know, might not get around to it, whatever. That's just, that's just what works for me. So I just said most likely to get done Monday through Friday, so that's what I'm gonna do. And I didn't put any time on it. It can be a minute, it can be an hour, it can be whatever it is for me at the time. It's gonna get done that way.

Powerful, powerful stuff.

It's more thematic. For me.

So awesome. So what's one last thing before we wrap this up that we could leave for our listeners that are watching this as part of the EO Looks Forward 2016 campaign?

Well, you know, I think that we, we as entrepreneurs, I think I said this before on the other shows, I think self-awareness is just so critical to success. Understanding your strengths, understanding your weaknesses, accepting those And then building structure around your strengths, you know. So I would highly recommend that people spend time this year, more so than any other year, really finding that quiet time. Schedule some quiet time, do some self-reflection, read your journals, you know, and really dig deep into what you can do to make this year better than last year. You know, that incremental improvement. Don't set the bar to the, you know, so high. That the change is impossible. Just be realistic with yourself and make incremental steps.

That's one thing that you're going to do. Pick that one thing you're going to do in your personal life that'll make you a better human being, that'll be able to improve you to be more self-aware, to be happier, to feel more fulfilled. Pick that one thing. If you're not journaling, James just said journal. Journal so that you can reflect back. If you don't write it down, you're not going to remember what your thought was and you're not going to be able to improve your thought. I sat down at the end of this year and read the last quarter worth of journals, and I highlighted thoughts that I was like, wow, I really need to meditate on that fact that I wrote that a few times over the course of 3 months. I really need to think about how I can change as a human being and have a lasting change, because a lot of times people change but it doesn't last. So you want to keep conditioning yourself and keep doing those things that you need to do in order for you to grow as an entrepreneur, as a leader, and as a human being. Thank you everybody for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you at future episodes that are going to be very different than this and more organized and more exciting. So we look forward to seeing you all there, and hopefully if you saw value at this video, you'll share it, like it, and comment on it. Take care everybody. Thank you, James.

Thank you, Joe.