Imagine you are driving through a snowstorm at night. The snow is swirling in your headlights, the lines on the road are obscured, the road is slippery. How do you respond? Do you speed up and try to get through the snow quickly so that you can get to your destination before it gets worse?…
After Tuesday’s message, you’ve narrowed down your expectations for 2022 to just the most critical initiatives, things that have to be accomplished. Good work! Now let’s make sure that they happen. How have you done in past years? Looking back over past years, what percentage of your annual goals got accomplished? Not how many did you…
Do your goals for this year involve starting a bunch of new initiatives? Expanding your marketing efforts? Landing new clients? Offering new services? Of course they do! I’ve never seen a company founder whose goals were, “Let’s do the same things as last year – just a little bit better.” What do you think your…
Agency owners are laser-focused on profit and productivity. And rightfully so, if we’re not productive, it’s hard to make a profit, and without profit, it’s hard to have an agency! But we need more than profit and productivity Think about your work, was there ever a time when it was produce, produce, produce, all day,…
You have something you want to accomplish in your life. Whatever it is, it’s a dream because you don’t have a direct path to get there. You can see it in the distance, but if you knew how to get there, it wouldn’t be a dream; it would be a plan! What’s standing in the way…
Life is short. The life expectancy of college-educated Americans is 78.8 years. Take off 20 years for childhood, and our adult life is about 515,088 hours. If we sleep for a third of those hours, it leaves us 339,958 hours. If we work for 40 years at about 40 hours per week, that’s 80,000 hours or…
In my work with agency owners, the topic of uncertainty comes up constantly. We’re always looking for ways to reduce uncertainty. Why can’t we get a solid forecast from our sales team or better estimates from the production folks? But no matter how accurate we make our forecasts, intuitively we know they are either lucky…
On Tuesday, I discussed how my journey to grow my business required more than hard work and book learning. I tried working harder and reading all the right books, but I still wasn’t seeing all the success I wanted. I also wasn’t the leader I knew I needed to be! Instead of getting closer to…
Building a business is hard work. There’s lots to do and lots to learn. But if it was just “work hard,” most of us could handle that. I gave “working all the time” a try, but I learned that growing a business is more than just putting in the hours. As my business grew, I…
On Thursday I confessed that I’ve given up on goals as a tool for motivation and direction setting. Though goal setting had worked for me for a long time, I found myself getting over-invested in my goals – to the point where it drove unhealthy behaviors. But, if I got less invested, I’d set goals…