Collapse Time To target

Welcome to another episode of Creative Our Purpose Live. I'm Scott Perry, your host and your guide in the Close the Gap 90-Day Solopreneur Success Accelerator. And this is the final, the third of three episodes where I'm wrapping up the launch of my new book, also titled Close the Gap. It's a guide to building a fulfilling and prosperous solopreneur business on your terms that funds and fits your ideal lifestyle. Now, in the previous two episodes, first we covered the idea of clarifying your direction. What's the lifestyle, the ideal lifestyle that you want your business to fund and fit around? And then once we have a destination in mind, we establish where we're starting from and what we're starting with so that we have Clarity of direction. Then in episode 2, we talked about clarifying your path, which is just establishing what are the 2 or 3 things that need to go right for me to get from where I am to where I want to be. Now today we are going to talk about collapsing time to target. What we're talking about here is setting that 90-day quarterly goal, the thing that if we were to accomplish it would move us the furthest and fastest toward accomplishing that ideal lifestyle that we want our business to fund and fit around. So we talked a little bit about establishing that 90-day goal in the last broadcast. Today we're going to talk about how do we collapse time to target. So just to give you a little context and an example that you can, uh, apply these concepts to, and then of course please apply this to your actual Lifestyle, ideal lifestyle goal that you're trying to achieve. But for me, it was trying to redesign my business around a lifestyle that allowed me to become the full care daycare provider, or I'm sorry, the full-time daycare provider for my grandson. And so I had roughly a year to take a business that was reasonably profitable, but a business I was putting in 10 hours a day, 7 days a week into, uh, in order to achieve that, that income goal and distilling it down to 2 hours a day so that I had 9 hours a day, 5 days a week to take care of my grandson. So that was the lifestyle goal that I was going for. And then when it came to, you know, and I took an audit of where I was spending all my time and attention and also my revenue in terms of, you know, trying to just get a business that was heading in that direction. Once I had my starting point, my destination in mind, then it was a matter of, okay, well, now I need to find the 2 or 3 things that need to go right in order for me to do that. And what that ended up being was I had a decent offer, an offer that was compelling, that was I was doing a, a reasonable job of putting in front of the right audience that was eager for the offer that I had, but my sales and marketing system was really out of whack. I was spending 80 to 90% of my time and my attention and my effort on marketing and sales activities, which was preventing me from becoming the best in the world at doing what I do in the way only I can do it, which is the best way. To create a sustainable business that consistently earns you the revenue that you're looking to make. So what I did was I spent my 90-day— I set up a 90-day goal to distill my activities in my business down to just a few hours a day from 5 to 7 AM in the morning so that I had the rest of the day to spend with my grandson. Now, in terms of collapsing time to target, what we're looking for is, with my 90-day objective in mind, what am I trying to accomplish today? And the question that I suggest that you ask yourself is, once you have an idea of what you're trying to accomplish today, to identify, is there a step before the step I'm about to take? So if you're trying, for instance, to get your offer in front of the right audience, then your instinct might be, well, I need to create a post for Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and my YouTube channel and my podcast and my email list and my blog and just doing all the things. But instead, the step before the step is How do I have conversations with the people that are already within my sphere of connection, people that already know, like, and trust me? How can I initiate conversations with them so that instead of just sending out email blasts or social media posts, uh, out into the ether, out into the void where they are often going to be ignored, how do I establish more meaningful direct conversations with people that want my— feel my messages are anticipated, personal, and relevant. That's an idea that comes from Seth Godin's Permission Marketing. So asking the step before the step helps me avoid just repeating what I've been doing, which is just throwing out email, random emails to everyone on my list, or blasting social media where things are going to be either not seen or just ignored, and instead focusing on the people that are already connected to me, that are anticipating hearing from me, that, um, I can share relevant personal communication with. Because that's the fastest path to cash, is meaningful conversation with people, with the right people. So identifying the step before the step helps you identified that one thing that you could do today, in this moment, in the next hour, what have you. So I think of that as the force multiplier question. What's the step before the step? That helps me distill things down to the very next micro step that I can take into possibility in my effort to collapse time to target. And it— the next thing is to ask yourself better questions. Or asking better questions. And this comes from the Engage the Field Handbook, which is a handbook that is distributed to people in the Arena, which is a program created by the Guardian Academy. I have an offer called Arena Catalyst that allows you to get into the Arena at a discount, but also get my assistance in getting oriented and into that ecosystem. And in the Engage the Field Handbook, we ask ourselves a couple of questions to help us define what the next best step into possibility is. The first is, what's worked in the past? It's more often what we need to do is more of the things that were already working and refine and iterate and improve those systems rather than try to find the next shiny object or the next, um, sexy new tactic or tool that some digital marketer or some online guru is trying to get us to purchase. So looking in the rearview mirror, defining what's worked in the past, and iterating and improving the things that we have already tested and have proven to be viable means of achieving what we're trying to achieve. After that, we could also ask ourselves, what's the smallest move that I could make right now that would give me the most significant improvement towards achieving what I'm trying to accomplish? What we're looking for are outsized gains, asymmetry to the upside in terms of the investment of our time, attention, and effort, right? Risk— anything that we do that's new, any action that we take has inherent risk in it. But if we look at the things that we could do that have an asymmetrical upside value and mitigate any downside risk, then we're going to get an outsized gain from that effort. Another thing to think about is completing the statement, "This is impossible unless..." So achieving that revenue goal or that enrollment goal in your program or a sales number for your product or service. It would be impossible unless— and then you, you can define your sales system. If you use a discovery call model to fill your program or to sell your thing, how many calls do you have to have to get a certain number of sales? How many conversations do you need to have to get that number of calls? How much content or communication do you have to create to get that number of calls. And so being really thoughtful and deliberate and paying attention to what the past evidence has shown you can be really helpful. And then the last question is, which move has the best worst-case scenario? In other words, it's a variation on the second question, but what we're looking for again is an action that you can take that will give you a win if it works out, but won't take you out of the game if it doesn't work out. Now, after you have defined that next best step, the next thing to do is to test. We call this engage the field and the arena. And so when you're engaging the field, what you want to do is look in the rearview mirror, look at the things that you've done in the past, take the learning and the knowledge that you've already gathered, and reflect on what, what you know. Test it in the wild, test it in real life. Let it collide with reality by doing something with that knowledge or understanding that you've had in the past. And after you've done something, you've created a feedback loop. And what is the feedback loop telling you? Reflect on what you've learned, or what data have you collected from the action that you just took. And then the last step is to engage in what Dan Nicholson calls in his book Rigging the Game the CASE process, C-A-S-E, and that process is collect, analyze, strategize, and execute. So we've defined the next step that we need to take, We've engaged the field and taken that step and done the thing, and we now can collect the information, the data from that experience of engaging the field, analyze it to see what worked, what didn't work, what could be improved, what could be left out next time, strategize how we're going to reapply that step the next time and then actually execute that next step. And we, by doing this, this roots and repeat of the CASE system, we are creating tight feedback loops that are constantly feeding us new information, new data that can be analyzed, that can be the foundation of our strategy and our execution of the next step. And by this process of microstepping, towards a 90-day objective by identifying the next most immediate constraint and the next most immediate step, the next micro step that we can take to test our hypothesis or our assertion about what will help us close the gap. We create those tight feedback loops that allow us to make daily progress towards that 90-day objective. And that is how we collapse time. Target through a rational, reasoned application, a discipline, a daily discipline of microsteps toward a goal where we are actually paying attention to what the feedback loops are telling us and then analyzing and strategizing and executing based on that evidence. So that is the last of the 3 steps in the 3-step, uh, Close the Gap system. We are clarifying our direction. Where, where are we heading? Where are we starting? And what are we starting with? We craft our path, which is what are the 3 things that have to go right in order for us to accomplish that thing that we want to accomplish, get that, achieve that big life vision of the, the business, or I'm sorry, the lifestyle that we want our business to fund and fit around. And then how are we collapsing time to target? So if these ideas are interesting to you, there are some links wherever below this video, wherever you're watching it, whether it's YouTube, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and you can grab yourself a free copy of the Close the Gap book. Uh, you can check out the Close the Gap 90-Day Solopreneur Success Accelerator, and, uh, you can also just simply sign up for the Substack Success Stack— I'm sorry, the, the Solopreneur Success Stack on Substack. And if it feels like a good fit, you can join the Solopreneur Success Circle, which is the paid subscriber membership where we have weekly calls, monthly deep dive workshops. In fact, one of those is coming up this weekend. And, uh, and you can also have access to a library, uh, that includes a curated curriculum of resources that will help you DIY your way towards a more profitable, more fulfilling, more prosperous business. Or you can actually participate in the workshops and calls, which will help you close the gap. So I hope that these, uh, these broadcasts have been helpful. It's been a pleasure to be doing these over the last 3 weeks, and And hope that we see you in the Substack Conversations, or even better, in the Solopreneur Success Circle community. And if you're interested in any of the resources that I've shared, feel free to reach out. So this has been another broadcast of Creative on Purpose Live. You can please, you can drop any questions or comments wherever you're watching this video. If you're tuning in as a podcast episode, please rate and review this episode. It really helps more of the right people collide and benefit from this content. I hope that you have a great day, and we'll see you wherever we see you next.