How to Achieve Your #1 Business Goal in Just 90 Days

Welcome everyone to Close the Gap 2.0. This is the second or third time that we've done this workshop. You are in the right place if you signed up and have indeed showed up to be at this workshop to define and accomplish your number one business priority in the next 90 days or less. The rules of engagement are very simple: receptivity, restraint, and responsibility. Receptivity: keep open loops, hold space for consideration. If you already had all the answers, you wouldn't be at a workshop like this. So keep an open loop. Consider the things that I'm saying to you. There's going to be some things that you've never heard before, and then there's some things that are going to be said that you've heard before, maybe even from me, but because it's a different time and you're in a different place, they will land differently. And then restraint— just avoid the human default programming to close the loop, to create certainty, false or otherwise, that you fully understood it, that you like it or don't like it. Don't leap to any value judgments, just keep the loop open. Show some restraint when it comes to how you're taking in and considering these ideas. And then responsibility is, I'm responsible for my presentation, for the words I say and the way I say them. I am here to do nothing but to be as absolutely helpful and useful as I can be to everyone that's here. You're going to get the entire process in as distilled and actionable a way that I can. I'm not responsible for the impact that anything I say has on you based on your interpretation of what I say. If for any reason I say something that you find offensive or triggering, I'm happy to have a conversation about that after the workshop, but know that I'm here simply to be helpful and useful. Everyone that's here is going to get a free follow-up resource, and that is the Close the Gap flowchart and process guide. It's basically a 3-page distillation of the entire Close the Gap process that we're going to go through today with some action steps that you can take. For those of you that are in the Solopreneur Success Circle, I have a 90-day Business Objective and Success Plan worksheet. What we're going to do is basically we're going to go through the worksheet, and you'll be able to make significant progress in clarifying your 90-day business goal for the first quarter of 2025 and establishing your action plan for accomplishing that goal. And you'll have some tools, some strategies, and resources for closing the gap with greater ease and velocity. The first step is you have to clarify your lifestyle goal. We all became solopreneurs because, yes, we want to make a difference, but we also want to make a living and we want to design a business around the ideal lifestyle that we would like to be living. And so you have to know what that ideal lifestyle is. If you want your business to fund and fit around your lifestyle, you must define that ideal lifestyle. So the question is, What does your ideal day look like? And what I want you to think about is when do you wake up? Where do you work? How do you spend your time during the course of an entire day? Who do you spend your time with? Define all those things. The more specificity that you have about this, the more clear it will be in terms of where you're heading. So an example might be, I wake up at 7:00 AM. I spend the mornings with my family. I work for 4 hours on fulfilling projects. I then enjoy personal hobbies. Hobbies in the afternoon, and then I spend family time in the evening. That level of specific— specificity is good enough to get started. I would encourage you to go even deeper. So you don't need to do this now, but again, answer the question: what does an ideal day look like? Second question: how much income do you need to support this lifestyle? Consider your annual and personal business expenses. Most of us as solopreneurs don't really distinguish between our business and personal expenses. And your savings goals and what your discretionary spending looks like. Now, after you pay for the mortgage or the rent, your car payment, your insurance payment, where does all the discretionary money at your disposal go? That is very important. The most common answers here were, I need $10,000 a month, or I need $100,000 a year. Going to talk a little bit about the danger of arbitrary figures like that here in just a second. But if you do an actual audit of what your current expenses are and define that gap, you'll have a much clearer idea of what you actually need in order to fund that lifestyle. The final question here is what specific time freedom do you want to achieve? And so just consider how many hours a day am I working per week? And what are the non-negotiables in terms of my schedule around when I am entirely unplugged from my business, whether that's spending time with friends, family, hobbies, what have you. Okay, so those are the 3 questions that I encourage you to answer. What I want to do now, based on the 100 assessments that I did over the last 4 days or so, is I want to issue 3 cautions and I'm going to give you 3 resources. These resources will come after the workshop is over when I send out the announcement about the replay being ready and when I send out the follow-up resources to everyone. The caution is, first of all, recapture and reallocate. Most people were pretty clear about where they wanted to go, almost Nobody gave any indication that they were clear about where they were actually starting and what they were actually starting with. You want to do an audit of your finances. Where does all the money go? You want to do an audit of your time. Where does all the time go? You want to do an audit of attention and energy. Where am I focusing my attention during the day? Where am I investing my finite effort and energy? If you have a clearly defined starting point and a clearly defined end point, you now have a vector. You can create direction. Over and over and over again, what I find is everybody's clear on their destination, but because they're not clear about where they're starting from and what they're starting with, it's impossible to really craft a plan. And so people just end up adding more tools, adding more tactics, taking— reading more books, listening to more podcasts, doing more things like adding YouTube channels or podcasting or, uh, starting a blog or whatever. And it's not helpful because more will not get you closer. This idea of more will not get you closer is a systems reliability problem. It is math and science. So it's true. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, which means you don't improve a system through addition. System reliability is determined by the product of the efficiency of all the components in the system, which means every time you add something to your to-do list, every time you add a new piece of software, a new automation, every time you try a new strategy or apply a new tactic, you are by definition driving down the efficiency and effectiveness of the system that you had before you added that thing. That's what system reliability means, which means, again, The reason why I ask you to do an audit of your finances, your time, your attention, and your energy. Anything that you can take out of your system, anything that you can take out of your day because it's underperforming or unnecessary automatically drives up the efficiency of your system. So you can start to do better in terms of closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be right after this call by doing an audit of all the things that you're already doing and eliminating anything that's not giving you a discernible return on investment. We talked about this on the Friday call with the Solo Preneur Success Circle. When I onboard anyone into the Close the Gap 90-Day Accelerator, the first thing we do is we do this audit, this recapture reallocate audit, and it has never not happened that we are not able to eliminate at least 70 or 80% of what they're already doing and have no discernible impact on their revenue goals, which means we have already recaptured a ton of time, energy, attention that can be reallocated to the 2 or 3 things necessary to actually make meaningful progress to getting closer to your goals. So in addition to the Recapture/Reallocate as a financial exercise, there's also— and I'm going to give everyone these articles. I'm going to click on this weekly schedule. When I say audit your time, the minimum amount of detail that you're looking for is this. When I started my business or when I was looking to optimize my business, this is how I spent my time. 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., 5 days a week working in my business, working in my business for 5 hours on Saturday and, and more, and 7 hours or more on Sunday. I left a little bit of time for my family and I left my time for my sleep. But this, and this is not, if this looks crazy to you, I think if you do an actual audit of your, you know, if you have an existing business and it is not performing the way that you want, I bet your schedule doesn't look very different from this. I've never met someone that is looking to optimize their business and improve their revenue that is not working at least 50 or 60 hours a week. Oftentimes it's more like 70, 80, or even more. And then when you're mapping out your ideal, week, you want to get really clear about what your ideal week looks like. For me, it was working 2 hours a day, 5 to 7, 5 days a week, spending 7 AM to noon with my grandson Jasper. We're the primary daycare for our grandson. Having flex time from noon to 5. This is time I spend with my wife and my grandson or with clients depending on the day. I have flex time on the weekend as well, and then I improve the amount of time that I'm spending with family. And again, the flex time, I can put it wherever I want. When I want to put it in my business, I do. When I want to put it into my hobbies or my family, I do. That's the level of specificity that you want to have. And that's the only way that you're going to be able to actually have a true account of the gap that you're trying to close. You have to know where you actually want to be. Where does the money go? Where does the time go? Where does the attention and energy go? You want to know exactly where you're starting and what you're starting with. Where are you spending your time? Where are you spending your money? Where are you spending your attention and energy? You must know those things if you're going to define the gap. And if you don't define the gap, you can't close the gap. All right. That brings us to step 2. Just while I'm— I've got you all on camera. Is everybody tracking with me so far? Give me a physical thumbs up if everything is— everybody's tracking with what I'm saying. Awesome. Okay. Step 2 is identify your 90-day objective.