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SFM: Ep4 – The One Hour Productivity Secret
Welcome back to an incredible new episode of the Sales Funnel Mastery podcast.
In this episode I’ll be covering the simple, yet incredibly effective secret I use to skyrocket productivity of myself and my private coaching clients.
Here’s what we’ll cover…
- How to avoid the trap of putting out “fires”
- A guaranteed way to get your #1 most important action item done for that day
- Why working on “what actually matters” can have profound impacts on your bottom line
Resources Mentioned
Listen To The Podcast
[powerpress]Transcription
Hey, welcome to another episode of Sales Funnel Mastery. This is your host, Jeremy Reeves. I want to welcome you back. Hopefully, you’ve been getting a lot out of the past few episodes. I want you to know I’m actually recording this inside my car in a shopping mall center. My wife is in Michael’s right now. I’m not sure how long you’ve been following me, but if you don’t know, my wife has epilepsy and I’m the only one that drives in our house.
Sometimes it’s a challenge getting out on errands and doing all that kind of thing. We have two little boys, so as you can imagine, there’s a lot of errands to be run. I, obviously, run the business and wife is a stay at home mom. It’s sometimes a little bit hectic.
What we’re going to talk about today is taking charge of your productivity and getting things done, even when you don’t have time to do them. That’s why I’m actually recording this podcast in the car, because it lets me get work done while also out on errands and doing family things.
One of the things that I really see, I work with a lot of coaching clients, a lot of private clients, where I write copy and things like that. A lot of these people are six, seven, sometimes eight figure business owners. Even with that high level of a person that’s working on their business, I find a lot of people and a lot of what gets in people’s way is having excuses for productivity. People, they wake up, they get their morning coffee, and they come back down to their desk.
They open their email and they get hit with 1,000 different emails. There’s a million fires to put out. It’s just, you get to the point in the morning where it’s—you’re not working on anything to actually grow your business. You’re just putting out fires. You’re running the hamster wheel, just trying to keep your head above water and really not getting anywhere.
When I work with—especially when I work with coaching students—one of the first things that I do with people is get them on track with their productivity, because one of the best ways that you can grow your business isn’t by implementing a great sales funnel. It’s not by implementing some new marketing techniques, or new product lines or a new service or anything like that. It’s actually increasing your productivity.
One of the things that I really try to overcome with my coaching students is overcoming those excuses for bad productivity. Usually, there’s not really good ones. What you have to focus on—and it goes back to the quality versus quantity argument. It’s not technically, obviously, the more quantity you put in for productivity the better. However, there are a lot of days, just with my schedule, with my personal life and the way that I have to do things. There are a lot of days where I need to be done working by 1:00, 2:00 in the afternoon. Usually, it’s about 2:30, 3:00 o’clock, so I have to be really, really productive. In those hours that I’m working, I have to be extremely productive.
This is the case with a lot of people. A lot of people these days don’t have time to work from 5:00 in the morning until 7:00 at night. That might be nice. You might want to it as an entrepreneur. I know most entrepreneurs like to be in the game and work that long. Usually, that doesn’t really happen. Things pop up. Employees are coming in your office bothering you. There’s lunch. There’s you have to exercise—hopefully, you’re exercising. There’s family things that you have to do.
What you have to really focus on is what really matters in your business and what’s going to actually give you results that you’re looking for, things that are going to increase revenue, decrease costs, improve your margins, improve your customer relationships, thing like that; the things that actually matter to growing your business.
Everybody has to deal with fires. Everybody has to deal with getting caught up in the everyday minutia that you have to deal with. You’re a business owner and that happens. What I’m recommending for you today is put in somewhere around, you could start with whatever number you want, but I would recommend starting with one hour a day.
In the first hour of everyday, you wake up, you make your pot of coffee or tea or pu’erh, whatever you drink in the morning, water, whatever it is. You take it down to your desk or drive to your office, if you have an office, and you do not check your email. You do not go on Facebook. You do not check your reports, nothing like that. What you do is you write out your number one thing that you want to get accomplished during that day. You do this the day before, so that it’s already done and on your desk when you come in to your desk in the morning.
You get that and work for one hour, no distraction. There’s actually a really good app called “Self-control App.†You can block out URLs so you can’t, essentially, get on the internet. During this time, you do not check email. You do not check text messages. You do not check Facebook. You do not check anything except that one thing that you’re working on. That one thing that you’re working on has to be directly related to something that’s going to grow your business.
For example, a lot of the things that I have that my students work on is starting to build out their sales funnel, starting to brainstorm a new product idea or brainstorm a new strategy that’s going to give them better positioning in the market or brainstorm how can they increase their price to improve their margin without decreasing conversions. That’s a really important thing to do, because as you increase your price, it goes directly to your bottom line. That’s one of the things l like to work on with clients.
Whatever it is for you, you have to set that one thing in the morning and work on that for—personally, I wake up at about 5:30. I get down to my office at 6:00. I work from home in my basement. I get up at 5:30, work from 6:00 until 8:00 on my business, on growing, increasing my systems, putting out new marketing strategies. Right now, we just launched a new Facebook campaign, so we’re testing all different kinds of things like that.
There’s all kinds of things that you have to work on in your business. These have to be, again, directly related to something that’s going to increase your results, increase your revenue in the current year, or it could be a long-term strategy, too; but something that’s directly going to improve your business.
That’s the tip for today. I hope that helps. That’s about all I have for you and if you enjoyed this episode, please go over to iTunes and if you’re a first time listener, subscribe to the podcast, write a review for me; hopefully, it’s a good one, but any feedback helps.
If you have any feedback for me, if you like this episode and you want to tell me if it really changed your thinking, shoot me an email, and I will talk to you soon.
