Jonathan:
It’s nearly the end of January. Have you accomplished the things that you said you were going to get done this month or the things that you said you were going to get started with right away at the beginning of the year so that you’d set yourself up for having a great year or a great first quarter? Think about those things both personally, that you said you were going to change or do, and think about those things in business that you said you were going to do. Maybe you told yourself a story at the end of last year, “Hey, next year is going to be better because this winter, I’m going to work on this thing. Starting at the very beginning of the year, I’m going to start working on this thing, fixing this thing, changing this thing.” What are those things that have stalled, that aren’t moving forward as fast as you thought they would or that you’ve been distracted from doing them, you’re now working on other things, and you need to get refocused?
My encouragement to you would be to think about your single most important business objective for the next three months, for the first quarter of the year, and I would define what you want to accomplish. Let’s use an example. Let’s say that you know on average you convert one out of every two leads you bring into your organization. That means you have a 50% conversion ratio on leads. So when two people call you on the phone asking about service, one buys. What if you were to focus on bringing in more leads?
They call this … Think of it as a funnel, so at the top of the funnel you’re pouring in leads. As they come down your funnel, talking to your sales team, things of that sort. You go out and meet with them and give them an estimate. Some of those individuals fall out of … Those leads fall at the bottom of the funnel as clients. All right? So if you know that you convert 50%, what could you do to get more clients? You could dump more leads into the top of the funnel, and at a 50% conversion ratio, you can almost predict for the number of leads you dump in the top of the funnel how many new clients you’ll get. All right?
So if there’s one thing to focus on, maybe it’s not on getting better at selling or getting better at estimating because you’re already converting at 50%. I’m not saying you don’t eventually work on that. The biggest lever is to right now work on getting more leads in January, February, or March. Because if you dump 100 more leads into the top, you’re going to get 50 more lead sells out of the bottom, assuming some process doesn’t break inside your organization that drives your conversion rate down. Hopefully, you get the idea.
So you’ve got your one thing. The one thing that will move the lever, the most important thing to focus on in my example would be leads. And so you say, for example, I had 40 leads in January of 2000-whatever, in our example here it’d 2018, so if I want to grow my leads by 30%, then that means you need 12 new leads. So that’d be 52 if my math in my head is correct. So I need 52 leads in January of 2019 because, again, we had 40 in January of 2018. So that’s the goal for the month — 52 leads every week.
And you have that number written on a whiteboard, carry it around in your pocket, whatever. You’re talking to the team about it, and every week you’re saying, “Where are we at? Okay. At the end of week one, we have 10 leads. We’re slightly off track. We’ve got to be producing roughly 13 leads a week to be on track.” Then in week two, “We’ve got eight leads. Okay, now we’re running really behind. What can we do? What do we need to change? What initiatives can we run? Can we up the Facebook marketing? Can we put out some door hangers? Can we go knock on doors?”
When you’re focused on that number, you’ve got to get 52, and every week you’re reporting on that number, it zeroes your mind, it zeroes your team’s mind, “What do we have to do to fix this thing? We’ve got to hit at least 52.” And everybody’s marching in the same direction. If you’re working on 20 different things, 20 different projects, then this lead thing isn’t going to play out for you. You’re not really going to hit it because not everybody’s thinking about it.
That’s an example of going and getting what you want. You had something you wanted to change at the beginning of the year. What is the single most important thing you could change? Make that a goal, and then every single week report on your progress towards that goal. Make that the thing you think about.
One last example. Imagine it’s a personal goal. All right? So I know in my life that the single biggest lever for me in terms of making sure that I carry out my daily routine of eating healthy, of sleeping, things of that sort is working out in the morning. Now, I’ve been traveling for nearly a month, and my routines are all screwed up. And as a result, a whole bunch of other junk in my life is not a disaster, but it’s not what it was 30 days ago. Okay? Because one of my most important routines is off, and it’s really not even been … I’ve not even been perfect at this routine. It’s actually a goal for me to get even better at that because I’ll go back to what I said. I know that my lever is working out.
So I’ll give you an example. I was in Boston for seven days. During those seven days, I didn’t work out. Well, I worked at one time. The night I got the least amount of sleep, like four hours of sleep, I got up and did a CrossFit workout at 6:00 a.m., and that was the day I felt like I had the most energy, even though it was also the day I got the least amount of sleep.
But that’s an example in my life of how getting in that workout really makes me feel better. It changes my mindset. It’s the lever. And as a result, then you eat better later in the day. Then when you sleep later at night, you sleep better. Everything piggybacks on that one decision. So for me, I know that is the single most important thing in my life that I will admit on video that I’ve been screwing up lately, and so that’s the most important thing, if I could only pick one thing.
What’s your one most important thing that if you were to do this one thing in your personal life, because you’ve got five goals, what’s the one thing if you did it would make all the other goals easier to accomplish? And back to my example, if I work out, then I’m more likely to eat better because I haven’t screwed up my day. I don’t want to screw up the tone I’ve set for the day. I’m feeling good, so I’ve got more energy and mental willpower, I suppose, mental strength to persevere and do the things I know I should be doing.
So if that’s the goal, then you should have a metric around it. Maybe your metric is I’m going to work out seven days a week. That doesn’t mean you lift seven days a week. It doesn’t mean you do cardio seven days a week. Maybe it means you do that stuff four days a week, and three days a week you walk at least 25 minutes. But the easiest way to measure would be to say, “I’m going to do seven days a week, period. I don’t care what happens. I’m going to do this. Even if I’m running on hardly any sleep, even if I’m home at 11:00 at night, I’m still going to get in my 20 minutes.”
And then what you do is you run a streak. Kind of the social media concept. One of my sons is into Snapchat. I know all about streaks from Snapchat. So that kind of concept. You’re not going to break your streak. Everyday, you’re going to hit this. Everyday, you’re reporting on it. Everyday, you’re thinking about it. That is your most important goal. And when you think about it that way and you measure it and you work on it and you obsess on it every day, odds are you’re going to get the thing you want.
How can you apply the two examples I gave you to business and to your personal life, if you’ve not achieved and are not achieving what you said you were going to get in 2019? It’s still early, plenty of time to course correct, but it’s on you to go do it. So what is the routine habit process you can create to make sure it happens and you get what you want this year instead of just telling yourself feel good stories and sort of repeating what happened last year? How can this year be the year you get what you want? Go execute.
So what is the number one thing that you want to accomplish in your business, and what is the number one thing that you want to accomplish personally? What’s that big goal over the next three months that you’re trying to accomplish? Comment down below. It’d be interesting to see what everybody’s working on as their most important thing, the most important thing that they’re working on, the most important thing that they’re trying to achieve. So comment below and let us all know what is your most important thing. It’ll be interesting to see what everybody’s doing. Thanks a lot. Have a great week.
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