Work Less, Make More – Our Big Realization of 2015
To start with, this isn’t going to be a typical training blog post. Instead, it will be an honest and transparent “sharing” post as we reflect back on 2015.
In fact, what we’re going to share with you today is probably one of our biggest realizations of our entire internet marketing career.
2015 was a big year in regards to doing business activities outside of our comfort zone.
There was a constant internal struggle between…
1.) Do we listen to outside advice and do what they suggest to do in order to grow our business?
Or…
2.) Do we continue to do what we love to do and what we’re already good at and simply scale it up quite a bit?
Instead of being closed minded we chose to follow the path of outside advice and went along this path for nearly the entire year.
Was this path profitable?
Yes it was, but in the end we felt unfulfilled.
Our Biggest “AH-HA” Moment
So back in November of this year, we decided to meet with a mentor to get a different perspective on our business.
After spending about 4 hours with him we had one of the biggest “AH-HA” moments of our internet marketing careers.
It was so powerful yet simple and as a result we want to share it with you.
He first started out by identifying all of our money buckets (income streams) in our business.
We listed the money buckets out individually and next to each one we wrote down how much time and effort we spent to earn the income for each bucket.
To our surprise the highest grossing money bucket was the one we spent the least amount of time on.
This was an eye opening experience and forced us to ask the question…
“Why the heck were we spending so much time on the smaller grossing money buckets when they were taking up so much of our time? Why weren’t we just scaling up the one that required the least amount of time and was making us the most money?”
You know the saying “work less, make more.”
Seems obvious right? Well that’s what we thought but somewhere along the way we lost sight of that.
So How Do You Work Less And Make More?
Next we went through the following diagram below:
So here’s how the process went:
First, he asked us what were the business activities that we did that we felt were irritating. We listed them out and put them in the big circle.
Next, he asked us what were the business activities we did that we felt we’re okay with doing. These would be activities that we didn’t love or find to be irritating.
He put those activities into the center circle.
Finally, he asked us what activities did we love to do in our business. He put those activities into the smaller circle.
So What Does This Mean For You?
Conclusion….after analyzing our activities in our business it appeared very clear to us where we were spending most of our time.
And that’s when it hit us.
We’d spent the majority of our time in 2015 doing things that we either felt were “irritating” or just “okay”.
We weren’t actually spending much time doing the things we love to do in our business!
This was a complete eye opening experience for us!
This was a huge mindset shift for us and for the rest of the day we began to create a business plan based around activities that we love to do.
[As it turns out, most people spend far too much time on annoying or non productive activities and the least amount of time of highly productive activities or the things they love to do. After you’re finished reading this article we recommend that you perform the same exercise for yourself. It will likely be very eye opening for you too]
You might be wondering what our new business plan will look like…..well stay tuned for 2016 and it will all be revealed.
One thing we can tell you with certainty…
MOBE will still be VERY much a huge part of our business.
Remember what we said above?
We realized we should focus on the money bucket that made us the most amount of money for the least amount of time?
Well, MOBE happens to be one of those money buckets.
How To Move Forward
One of the conclusions that we took from our 4 hour mastermind session was that we had to get back to doing what love to do.
Also when it comes to the annoying/okay yet necessary aspects of our business, we’re going to apply the D.E.A.L. acronym.
D.E.A.L. stands for:
Delegate
Eliminate
Automate
Leverage
Moving forward, anytime we encounter aspects of our business that are the “necessary evils” that used to bog us down and frustrate us, we will now either delegate, eliminate, automate, or leverage them.
This will free up time for us to focus on creating content, running paid traffic to our offers, developing new lead magnets, and so forth. These are the things that really move our business forward and these are the things that we love to do!
Also, this will free up more time to provide value to our audience and help out people like you.
Final Thoughts On 2015
We’re thankful for 2015 because it was such a huge growing and learning experience.
We discovered more about who we are, what we love to do, and how we want to move forward with our business.
We share this with you because being an entrepreneur isn’t always going to be pretty.
It won’t always be profitable and you’re not always going to be happy.
In fact, you may very well question yourself (as we did towards the end of 2015) and wonder what the heck are you doing and where are you going.
This happens to a lot of entrepreneurs and this is why we strongly suggest that you have a mentor to work with through your journey.
Just know the journey is an experience and one you must go through no matter how much time, money or mistakes you make.
It’s about finding your true self and discovering what you’re truly passionate about and what you love to do.
Once you know that about yourself, you can create a profitable business that feels like it’s NOT work but something you truly enjoy doing.
We hope this post helps you with your journey and thank you for allowing us to share our 2015 experience with you.
Here’s to 2016 and we hope you’ll start the new year out with a bang!
