MBA1971 How To Ensure You Become a Better Business Owner in 2022

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Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show. Because haters are gonna hate. That's why you gotta create the business you want every single day with our daily 10 minute for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's lesson, you will learn how to ensure you become a better business owner in 2022. Here's the reality. If you don't improve who you are as an entrepreneur, as a business builder, if you don't add value to yourself, you can't add value to your business. You can't add value to the marketplace. And here's the kicker. The more valuable you become, the more valuable your business becomes. Why? Because the quality of the work you produce, the products you create, the ideas you come up with, the decisions you make, all are a result of the quality of you. So we all have to improve ourselves as much as possible on a regular basis. But it's very impractical for me to just tell you, go ahead and improve. Improve, get better. Instead, I'm going to give you an action plan. I'm going to give you some practical steps you can take to ensure to make sure you are actually getting better. You actually are gaining skills. You're actually doing things that are really going to help move your business forward. As a business leader, as a business owner, I'm going to lay out my own plan. What I do to ensure I become better. I am a better leader for my team. I'm a better decision maker. I shore up some of the areas that I know I need to improve. Get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Getting better, improving on a consistent basis all starts with you being honest with yourself. This is probably the hardest step of all where you gotta just sit down alone by yourself, make yourself a cup of tea. I like to kind of step out in nature. Maybe, you know, step out on a balcony or a patio or maybe go for a walk in the park and give yourself a good amount of time to just be honest. Honest about what? Well, we need to decide three areas you believe you just need to get better at. Now, what are some of the criteria? I'm not asking you to identify your three biggest weaknesses. I'm asking you what are the three areas that you know if you got better, would really help improve your business, would really help move the needle, or really help you bring in more customers and grow your brand. For example, you might say, I want to become a better leader. I want to be able to lead my team and inspire them so they can produce great work. So leadership might be one of those skills. Another one might be maybe you feel a little bit weak in sales, you don't know how to have sales conversations or write sales copy. And maybe you want to go deep into learning how to become better at sales in your own way. And the third one is maybe you just need to learn how to do some simple stuff on your WordPress website. Maybe you just want to become better on managing your website. Maybe you're just tired of asking for help or feel like if you just mastered a few skills, you could speed up your opportunities to publish new content, to add New pages to experiment. So we're going to use these examples throughout the episode. Leadership, sales, website design. And even when you establish your three, question them. Ask, is there anything else that would be more beneficial to me and my business? Maybe it's my communication skills, maybe it's my ability to negotiate. And a good thing to do to help you out with this exercise is just to kind of rule out your strengths, things that you know you're good at. Like, I'm really good at this, this, and this. I don't need to worry about it. But what are some areas where I can improve and get a little bit better at? So just get honest. Choose three areas. Now, listen, don't spend too much time on this. Don't like, spend hours. I would say spend an hour max, because guess what? We're going to choose three just for this year. But you can choose three different ones next year. Okay? You will have endless amounts of time. Well, not endless, but you have plenty of years to work on some other things. We're just looking at the top three things that will make an impact if you improved on those areas. Well, why three areas? Well, we're going to be doing different activities to improve these areas in the next year. And I like to choose three because one, it's not too many. It's not like I'm trying to improve 10 things in one year. I'm not going to get overwhelmed. But at the same time, hey, if at the end of the year I level up in three areas, it's definitely going to make a significant difference in my business and how I lead my team and how I move my ship forward. Also, I like to choose three because you need a little variety. Okay? If you just focus on one, then it can get kind of boring. Learning the same thing over and over or improving the same thing over and over. It's good to have three, so you can switch up here and there. So now that you identified your three areas to improve, what are you going to do? Well, there's going to be three activities we're going to do throughout the year, and I'll tell you when to do them that will help us improve these three different skills. The first one is books. Okay. I've been doing this for a very long time, 20 years in business. I can tell you in terms of bang for buck, best value for your money. Nothing beats books. I know I've tried to find, you know, different other mediums, but actually books really cover all the bases. They actually get you the information you need and help you In a tremendous way. Now, if you don't love reading actual books, then the alternative would be an audiobook. Okay, but books is the first resource we're going to use to improve our different areas. And we'll talk about how to find these books. What kind of books do I recommend or mediums I recommend in a moment. The second way we're going to improve is online courses. There are a plethora of online courses from experts, from companies, courses that are actually laid out as playlists on YouTube. There are tons and tons of resources when it comes to online courses out there, and they're a great way for you to learn something, especially something new. Also, it has the visual and the audio aspect, so retention is going to be quite good. But regardless if you're reading books or if you're doing online courses, I highly recommend you have a journal where you take down notes. Taking notes allows you to retain the information more and allows you to be able to write down how this is going to be applied to your own business, in your own day to day life. And the third way we're going to improve is what I call practical exercises and projects. When I was a schoolteacher, one of the things that was really reinforced by management was you gotta get the students actually do practical projects to implement what they're trying to learn. This actually shows that they understand and know how to repeat it. And they were right. So you're gonna do practical projects on these three different areas to help you improve. And I'll give you some examples of how to do them. So we know what we're gonna do, we know the resources we're gonna use, how to actually get better. Well, we're going to do something called the four hour challenge. Is this some sort of hit challenge that's all over the Internet? No, it's just something I made up for myself. It's called the four hour challenge where I dedicate four hours a week to improve myself. Now you might think, wow, four hours, is that enough? Is that too much? Well, that's what I figured out. You know, if you really want to make a lot of progress in something, four hours a week is actually just enough. It's enough for you to actually build upon and get some momentum. Now you can break them up into four different hours at different times during the week, or you can go four hours straight or two sessions of two hours up to you. But I don't recommend you breaking it down less than an hour a day or hour a session. You need some continuity, you need some deep Time for you to consume the information or do the work. So four hours a week. If you can't carve out four hours a week for some reason, look at your weekends. Look at how you can maybe wake up early on the weekends and get things done. Maybe you're a night owl, you can stay up an hour or two later. You got to carve out four hours. And this is one of the most important parts of this process, is actually making the time, getting into your calendar. Open up your calendar and put in the time. Now, if this is kind of hard for you to kind of figure out, like, when do I do this and how do I do this? Just do four hours straight on a Saturday morning. That's how I got started, okay? And that was kind of a way for me to just get it done. And basically professional development time was Saturday morning time for me, and I just got it done after I had breakfast, four hours straight, I was done. I can then go out for the rest of my day and do my thing on the weekend. You can then adjust from there if you'd like, if you want to move those hours somewhere else. But it just ensured that I got it done every week. Put it in the calendar, book it. Now, the next thing you're going to do is you're going to open up a spreadsheet and you're going to basically do some research. You're going to find out what books, what courses, and what exercises you can do to be able to improve in your three different categories. For example, one of mine was leadership. I wanted to get better as a leader. So I looked up all the different resources I can find on leadership. I went on Amazon.com, i looked up all the best books on leadership. I found some really great books like the Million Dollar Coach by Eric Ries. And I popped that in. I read that book. I found a masterclass by Gino Orima on leadership and leading winning teams. He's an NCAA women's basketball coach, and he takes the lessons he's learned over the years and teaches them to everybody else who's running businesses and running teams. And by the way, in the course, I found some great ways to implement and some practical exercises, like how to delegate to my team. And so that was one of my practical exercises where I was like, I'm going to do this next week with my team, where I'm going to practice what I've learned. I'm going to put this into practice, see how it goes, and actually do and learn from doing so in my Spreadsheet. I have books, I got courses, I got practical exercises. And by the way, Google's your friend when it comes to exercises, especially when it comes to practical things like learning how to design your website or how to write better copy. There are great exercises you can Google up and just do. So have that bank, have those lists in your spreadsheet, and then just get started. My advice is spend four hours on each thing at a time. So for example, I would spend four hours reading a book and at least give it four hours. So if I finish the book in four hours, awesome. I can move on to something else. But if I don't finish the book, I have the option to keep going with the book for my next four hours. Or I can move on and maybe pick up the course and switch it up a little bit for four hours. But if I don't finish the course in four hours, I gotta go back to the book. Okay, because you don't wanna forget what we learned. We wanna have some momentum. So this gives me some flexibility at least of taking a break from one medium to the other and also just jumping into something new. And that's pretty much it, guys. You go ahead and you implement four hours every week in your three areas and you can mix it up. You could do four hours of reading a book on leadership, and then you can do a course on sales, and then you can go back to the book on leadership and then go back and finish the course on sales and then pick up a practical exercise on how to become a better leader. You get the point. This creates an incredible amount of momentum. What I felt was like, wow, I feel like I'm getting better. I'm learning. I feel like I'm improving. I felt more confident. I felt like I'm no longer feeling like these areas are weaknesses. They're more like things I'm becoming better and better at every day. And I started to have more of a growth mindset. I started to realize if this is possible, if I can get better in these areas, I can get better in other areas. I can take on bigger challenges. Take the four hour challenge and organize things so that you have a bit of variety, but at the same time, you're getting things done.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like, what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work from HR to Payroll ADP helps Businesses take on the next Anything ADP always.

Designing for people to wrap today's lesson. I love the four hour challenge because it allows me to work on me and not just on the business and not always do my to do tasks and putting out fires. It makes me feel like, okay, I'm being constructive. I'm actually building something here. I'm building skills, I'm building myself, I'm building confidence. I'm also helping my team because I'm leading by example by showing them, hey, if I improve, so does the business. So how about we spread the love? So one of the things I like to do is just share what I'm learning with the team. Maybe in the beginning of meetings or in just in the chat. Or maybe have a channel in your chat in your team like Slack or Basecamp or whatever. That's just all about sharing what you know where. Other people can also feel encouraged to share what they're learning and how they're improving. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss an episode. By hitting subscribe, you get access to over 1900 business lessons in the archives. The only way to get access to it is to subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app. Before I go, I want to leave you with this the cream always rises to the top when you're choosing things to consume. Courses, exercises, blog posts, books. It's going to be easy to find the best of the best. For example, go to Amazon. You'll see the number one bestsellers. You'll see the ones with 5,000 five star reviews. That many people can't be wrong. If you search for best exercises to learn WordPress, you're gonna find the best of the best blog posts on the first, second and third page. That's just how search engines work. Don't be too picky about it. Just get started, especially in the beginning so you can get the ball rolling. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.