MBA1704 How to Know Exactly What to Work on in 2021

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Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred dollar Powerful business lessons delivered to you every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, the Complete Business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn how to know what exactly to work on in 2021. 2021 is in full swing and many of us are wondering what we really should focus on. What we should work on? What are the tasks, the projects we should take on 12 months it's easy to get overwhelmed. It's easy to say I want to do everything. But of course that doesn't work. You need a plan of action and a way to evaluate what are the things you need to work on now? What's really going to move the needle? And what tasks, what projects, what things will help you reach your goals. That way you can dedicate your resources to making it happen. I'm going to walk you through the process we go through at Webinar Ninja, our webinar software and I'll show you how you can apply it to your own business. Whether you have a team or you're a sole solopreneur, you'll get crystal clear on what you need to work on now and in the next few months and throughout the year. And you'll have conviction that these are the things that will help you achieve your goals. No if, ands or buts, no second guessing, just clarity. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Podcast before we get into the process of choosing what to work on to achieve our goals, we need to be super clear on what our goals are or what we're trying to achieve. One of the biggest mistakes I've done in the past, and I've seen a lot of entrepreneurs do, is that they have too many goals, right? They try to achieve too many things and therefore they don't know what to work on. They don't know what takes priority. They say that everything's important. We want to have a bigger market share, we want to grow more customers, we want to be more profitable, we want to have more revenue, we want to lower costs, they want more free time, they want more autonomy, they want to hire more people. They say all this stuff, we want to do it all. And this is is what makes it difficult to choose what to work on, because certain things will help you achieve one of these goals, but other things won't. And this makes it difficult for you to know what to work on because you don't know what takes precedent, what resources you need to spend or use on what tasks or projects. It can get really overwhelming. So I want to challenge you as we start this year to reevaluate what your goal is for this year. I want you to choose one goal, one focus for the entire year. I mentioned this before. This is something I learned from Noah Kagan, who was employee 30 at Facebook, and he learned this from Mark Zuckerberg. And at Facebook, they only have a singular goal. Now, that goal may change from one year to the next, but for that year, that's all they focus on, one singular goal. For them, it was growth. For them. When Noah was there as employee 30, it was getting as many users on the platform. Now, what's great about this is that anytime they make a decision what to work on, they just have to ask the question, does it help achieve their singular goal? If it does, they do it. If they don't, they don't. Now, of course, there's going to be a lot of gray area in between, and we'll talk about that in a moment. How to evaluate what are things that will get me closer to that goal or not. But none of this is possible if we have too many goals. And it's a lot easier if you just choose one goal. And now this is where the fun part comes. You get to choose what you want from this year. Now, remember, next year, you can choose a different goal, but just choose one. What is the one thing that if you achieved it would make 2021 a success for your business? Maybe you want to take home more cash, you want to be more profitable. So profitability is your goal. Maybe actually you're already profitable and you're really happy with that level of profitability. And now you want to make your goal reaching more people. So growth, if you're, let's say you're a fitness coach, you want to double the amount of people you impact. Now, as you can see, I'm choosing goals that are quite broad, but at the same time, they are specific to a certain outcome. So be careful. Don't choose things like, I want to improve my blog. Well, why do you want to improve the blog? What's wrong with it right now? Well, I want it to be like this. Why do you want it to be like this? Well, I want to attract new customers. What's the point of attracting new customers? Well, I want them to convert and I want to grow my customer base. So is growth, customer growth really what you're looking for? That's really the goal. Because improving your blog is a task, right? It's one of the tasks you might focus on this year to help you with growth. But really, improving the blog has an end goal. Really go deep. What's the end goal? So now that we have one goal, one focus for the year, we make that a big, bold statement. This is what we're shooting for. Okay? Now, there's a ton of things you can do to achieve a particular goal. Let's say, for example, we're going to use Facebook's growth goal. They want to bring in as many users, as many customers as possible. They have users because they don't really sell a product. They sell advertising. But the point here is that, let's say you're trying to bring in as many customers as possible. Now, remember, if that's the goal, you're willing to do things to achieve that goal, meaning maybe lowering your prices to get more customers or running more sales or more offers, or doing partnerships or spending money on marketing. See the point here? You're going to sacrifice something or you're going to spend something to get that ultimate goal. So your goal is growth. Let's say, what are the things that you can do this year in your business to help grow your user base to bring more customers in? One of those things might be, I want to start a YouTube channel. Another one could be, I want to create a free course on my website so people can opt in, get on my email list, and I can convert them into customers. So another one might be a marketing campaign where I'm gonna do weekly deals on my products and services. Another one might be, I'm gonna launch an affiliate program so I can get other people to bring in customers for me. So these are just a list of projects that you can just do a brain dump in a document. Now, the title, today's lesson is what do you work on? But we're really specifically, what do you work on now next? All that kind of stuff. So I'm gonna tell you what you're gonna do with this list, if you have a team and if you're a solopreneur. So let's start with a team. And this is a concept that we borrowed from the people at Basecamp, Jason Fried and David Hanemeier Hansen. One of their team members, Ryan Singer, wrote a book called Shape Up. I highly recommend it if you're in the software business. But it's their way to decide what to work on to improve the product. Product management. But the concepts in there can be applied to any business. And one of the concepts I want to share with you today that will help you choose is this idea of pitching and betting ide. So, for example, at Webinar Ninja, we have a goal, and we have a list of ideas of ways we can achieve that goal. New features, new initiatives, all that kind of stuff. And people in the management team are responsible for creating a pitch for each idea. So each of us will take on two or three pitches. And what is a pitch? It's basically a message, AKA a document inside of Basecamp that just really advocates for why we should do this task, why we should take on this project. So, for example, somebody might say, you know, if we want to grow our customers, we should have a free plan. So they'll write up a few paragraphs, put in some thoughts, maybe some sketches, and say, you know what? This is why I think we should work on the free plan first or next. And everybody will do their pitches, and we'll throw them into basecamp, which is our project management tool. And we'll all read these pitches. And then one day, we meet together on a video call, and we do what's called the betting table. This is what they call in shape of the betting table, and it allows us to. To bet. We get to argue for what we should and should not do. And as a team, we collectively say, you know what? These tasks are the most effective things we can do to get us to our goal. And in this exercise as a team, we discover which things we should do first, second, third throughout the year, because we are going to work on the things that are really going to move the needle the most first. Now, even if you don't have a team, maybe it's just you, maybe you're a solopreneur, you can still do this. You can still write down your ideas, write some details about these ideas, why you think they can help your business. This exercise of advocating for this idea and writing it out is not just for fun, okay? It's not just to go through the procedure. By writing things out, it forces you to really think about, is this really something that's going to help and not just on the surface. Ideas on the surface all seem. Okay, they seem like good ideas. But often when we have to defend these ideas and explain why they can really allow us to achieve our goals, or our singular goal in this case, we start to realize maybe there are other things that are better to do. Maybe it's not as ineffective ideas I thought it was, or maybe it's a good idea, but it's a nice to have and not a must have. So even if you are a solopreneur, write down the reasons why these ideas should be implemented for. And then once you have all these pitches for yourself, you can score each pitch from 1 to 10, one being least effective and 10 is most effective in terms of achieving your goal. This will allow you to at least have a rough way to kind of score each pitch and then order them based on how effective they can be to help you achieve what you're looking to do this year. The whole point of this exercise is to get the ideas out of your head, onto something else, onto the computer, onto a piece of paper so that you can analyze them so you can evaluate. Okay, living in your head, bad idea. You need to be objective about your business. Sometimes you need to really look and say, hey, as an investor, as somebody outside of the business, which one is the right move? And not just go with maybe my gut feeling or what I want to do or what I've been wanting to do for some time.

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So you have a singular goal and you have all these pitches. You've agreed on what is going to be done first, second, third. The last piece of the puzzle is the execution. And I'm going back to shapeup. They do six week cycles, meaning that every six weeks they have a cycle where they complete a project or two. Each team implements a project. They have teams of three, so depending on the size of your team, will have a lot to do with how many tasks or how many projects you can do in a cycle. But let's just say that you only have one project per cycle. So every six weeks you're working on something to achieve your goal, and what you can do next is then just plug the calendar every six weeks what you're going to work on for your business until the end of the year. Now, Basecamp in Shapeup, they recommend doing two weeks of cooldown between each cycle. And this gives you a chance to evaluate what happened, maybe change some things, fix some things, maybe get some feedback. It gives a little buffer between each project. And what this does is that it allows you to do six to seven projects or six to seven cycles every single year. Think about that. You're really going to be improving your business dramatically if you're doing six or seven things every single year to move you closer to that singular goal. A lot of us underestimate how much we can get done in a year, but we overestimate what we can get done in a week. So use this method. It could be helpful if you read Shapeup. It's free online. If you can download the PDF@basecamp.com that's basecamp.com Shapeup and it really talks a lot about software development, but but if you can just stay focused on the procedure, you can apply to any business, really. That wraps up today's lesson. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 OMBIE Show. If you loved today's lesson, if you found it helpful in any way, the best way to pay it forward is to share it on social media. Share with your friends and family. Let people know about the 100 Ombier show so we can have more listeners just like you listen in every single day. Keep listening, keep sharing, and we'll keep pumping these great lessons out. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Unstructured ideas is the definition of confusion. Okay, when you have ideas floating around in your head, I want to do this, I want to do that. And you don't have a structure to organize them, to prioritize them, to have an order of operation. Those ideas really just fall flat. They never get implemented. So force yourself to not just think of ideas, but to write them down, to justify them, to defend them, evaluate them. This is why I highly recommend people to start a blog. Because blogging requires you to write and express ideas and question those ideas as you read them back to yourself. It's a great exercise for you to have clarity, because ideas don't just live in your head, they live in the world. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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