Activity Jar

Let me share an idea. I used with great success to monitor my own activity when I was in a startup mode. And that is the old activity jar. Now this comes into the area of managing yourself. If you can't manage yourself, you can't manage anybody else. This really is important because when you're starting a new business from scratch, you're the only one there. And if you're not working, nobody's working. So you got to get yourself on track, keep yourself on track. And sometimes that can be the hardest person to monitor. And you've got to get some kind of thing where you can keep clear to yourself that all of this seemingly mindless, time wasting activity that I'm doing, activity is money in the bank. This, these phone calls, this paperwork, this fixing the office up, checking here, following up details, seeing people, all of this activity, all this mumbo jumbo, I do that and most of it, it seems to go nowhere. It all will add up. So here's what I told myself. I told myself this, that I had a certain amount of calls I had to make. In other words, over the next, if I wanted to be successful and let's just say wanted to start making money, which is what you want for a business, I had a certain amount of work I had to do. And the first work you've got to do is you've got to find clients, you've got to build, find recruits, you've got to go through contact prospects, turn them into clients. So you've got to go see them. No matter what it is. You've got to set an appointment and then go see them, show them, and do that enough to where you're going to have enough sales to survive. And then you reach the point where your business is humming. Now here's the question mark, the great question mark is how long is it going to take to get started? You know, I don't mind doing the work, but how long is it going to take? Because this gives me hope, this keeps me on track, this makes me feel like I'm making progress. So here's what I told myself. I said I don't know how many appointments I've got to make before things really start to click for me. I, I don't know how many phone calls I've got to make, appointments got to set, people I've got to go see. But I know there is a number, it is probably a big number. Now what that number is, I don't know, but I don't know if it's five, I don't know if it's 50, you know, 550, 500, 5,000. Yeah. I don't know what it is, but I do know the quicker I can roll through the numbers, they can't all say no. If I keep beating my head on the wall, eventually I'm going to have success. If I keep throwing my axe at a tree, eventually that thing's going to fall down. So I've just got to go through the numbers to get this thing cranked up. I've got to pay my dues. I've got to pay my price. Now, how much of a price? How much? You know, how many dues, how long before I find some good core key people and maybe transition to another mode? I don't know. But right now it's all up to me. So I said this. I don't know how many, but as fast as I can go to the numbers, the quicker I'll get there, whatever the number, and the quicker I can get to whatever this mystery spot is, the quicker I can get over into the high, happy, smiley face, profitable stage. So right now it's only the lonely. I'm in the Sahara desert, but there is a happy time in front of me, but I got to fight my way through it and eventually I'll get there. So how do I get myself to stay on track, to keep going and to not lose focus? So I had a problem. How can I manage myself? And here's what I did. I went, I went down to the mall and I found one of those places where they engrave things. And I got myself a. What I don't drink. So I found out later was a brandy sniffer. And let's just see if I can draw. You know, it's one of these things was, it's got the little stem and it had this big round top. And I said, what I'm going to do is this, this is going to be my activity jar. And what I decided was of the activity, I had to make phone calls. So you have phone calls and not every phone call do you actually get someone on the phone. So you got a certain amount of phone calls you got to make. There is a certain amount of times where people will actually answer the phone. You know, you'll get someone on the other, you know, you'll actually get someone to answer and make your presentation. So you'll be talking to them, trying to set up the appointment. Then from that there's a certain number that you will actually set appointments. And then from the ones who set appointments, not everybody, you Set up appointment with. If you heard the Rule of three tape, you'll find out for a guaranteed appointment. For every guaranteed one you want, better set three. There's a batting average in the Hidden Laws of Success and that's on another video. But you better set three appointments for everyone you want. So of those I set, they didn't all show up. So there were actually appointments where I made a presentation. See, all of this work is getting to the point where you can actually sit down and make your presentation as somebody. Then I would give, you know, the next thing along the way is you make the presentation. Then of those, where you make the presentation where they decided to do business with you, made a sale, or if you tried to recruit them, you recruited them. But anyway you were successful. So here is the process I had to go through. And there's a whole lot of these that lead to less of these, lead to less of these, lead to less of these and less of these. So you got to keep yourself on track and feel good about yourself. You've heard about long term goals. My long term goal was to crank up my business and build a profitable business. But short term, I had to keep my mind on activity. So the idea is to. This is kind of the grunt work and I wanted to grind that stuff. The way you get through grunt work without having it bury you or stop you is you move through it fast, you make a game out of it. So here's what I did. I went over and I gave, I assigned money to these things. I said, okay, I'm going to put a penny, I'm giving myself a penny's credit for every phone call I make. This sounds stupid, but folks, it's just you and a phone or you and your life all alone. If you don't get through this, you have to have some way where you can create a plan or a track where you can focus on, on the thing that will get you out of nowhere into somewhere. So I gave myself a nickel credit for actually getting someone to answer. I gave myself a dime credit for somebody. Every time somebody would actually set an appointment and every time I made a presentation, that was a quarter. And then if I made a sale, that is a 50 cent piece, go to the bank and get some 50 cent pieces. So here's what I do. I would start the day and I'd make the calls and I would go over here and I'd call, call, call, call, call, call, call. And then regardless of the results, I'd give myself credit regardless of how many people answered Whatever. I got to put money in there. So if I put, say, let's just say make 15 calls. And I would give myself credit. A call is if you run into somebody just out circulating in the community and happened to strike up a conversation with them. That's a contact I give myself. I count that as a phone call. So anyway, here you go. I would put 10 pennies in here. So they, you know, I'm starting to build up with the pennies. And then out of that, I might get, you know, three appointments, you know, or three or four people answered. So then I put in nickels. I put in some, you know, the three or four nickels, they're a little bit bigger. Then of that I'd set. I'd have two or three where you'd actually set appointments. So from that I'd have, you know, a couple of three appointments. So I put those in and then I'd go out when I appointed time, then I'd go out there and when I got to make a presentation, then boom, I put in another one quarter. And then to make enough of those, occasionally you have a bigger 50 cent piece in there. Now my job, I gave myself was fill this thing up. And as if my act, if I'm filling my jar up, this is like the symbolic bank of my business. This was, in effect, an activity bank. It was a way I had to keep myself on track and not forget that my activity was money in the bank. In other words, this is going to pay off for me now from this. I kept this going for 90 days before I couldn't keep up with it anymore. And I don't know how far I got up in that thing. But, you know, the thing was, I didn't have any friends. I didn't have anybody to check on me. I didn't have anybody to monitor me. I was in business for myself. It would have been easy to goof off. But see, this was a way of keeping me honest. If I wasn't working, that jar sat on my desk and just stared at me. If I was working, it was going up. It was a. Gave me a feedback. I could feel good about myself. And so that launched our explosion. Now, my main goal was to try and recruit and build an organization. And so what did we do from that? Well, eventually I'll get into talking about that. But the first year, here's what that led to. The first year, we wound up recruiting 56 people. I made like $45,000. The second year, we recruited 1800 people. I made $225,000. The third year we recruited 7200 people. And I made, I'm thinking it's around 400. I have to go back and I've got that written down somewhere. It's around 400k more or less. And so probably not a lot of money to you. But see, when I started this year, it was me, only the lonely little airy, sitting there with an empty jar. And it was only because I treated that jar seriously and worked like a dog on filling that thing up that it turned into these kind of results. Down the road, folks. Find something that'll work for you to get you to do what you need to do to launch what can turn into a life changing business for yourself. That's the activity jar.