Preparing for 2020 – It Starts With You

Hey, Hey. Hey. Welcome to a brand new episode of Raney Day Talks Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Sakowski and I’m so excited to have you here because guess what? 2020 is knocking at the door. Are you ready? Did you accomplish? I’m coming in hot today. Okay, you ready for this? Did you accomplish your goals that you set out to do January 1st, 2019 think about it. I’ll give you a second. No, you didn’t. Or are you like me declaring that I’m not done yet and this year isn’t over and you’re still gonna ride it until the end to accomplish what you’ve set out. Whatever it may be. If you’re like me each year, try to be better. Try to grow bigger. Try to change it up, right? Cause I want to be the best me today than I was yesterday. And then to do that, we have to take a look at not just the business and how we are in the business and our employees and our clients, our sales. It’s not just that it’s starts before that because if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, if you are a hustler, mom, boss, I’m looking at you.

It all starts with you behind the business. So looking at the content and the episodes that we’re putting out for the end of the year, I wanted to line up some awesome guests that can bring it. That we talk about our emotional health, how we show up mentally, how we show up physically. How do we set those goals? How do we get started? So what I did is I lined up some awesome guests and then I wanted to start it with just me. Here I am talking about my own experiences, but setting the tone. So the very first thing that we’re going to start with is you. One quote that I keep on my desk is I want to be better than I was yesterday. Every day. Today I want to be better than I was yesterday. Hmm. Do I always hit that? Absolutely not. But is is something that I strive for, cause if we think about it as business owners, it’s easy to think, Oh like it’s a skill right from home and work and we try to balance it.

That’s baloney. I tell my son that all the time. He laughs at me when I’m like, that’s baloney. Well it is baloney? Cause it’s, it’s not a scale. Stop trying to give up something to fit something else and you know what? You can have it all. That’s my firm belief. You can, you can figure it out. You just have to let go of a few things. Let go. For me it was having everything in this perfect package that that’s, that’s unrealistic. It’s messy but also awesome and beautiful. If you’re able to flow between being a mom to a wife and then jumping right into business. I think that’s awesome. You know why? Because I’m fricking doing it right now and I don’t usually talk a bunch about that, but dang it. We’re doing some awesome stuff in my business and I’m super proud of it.

And the only way that I know to keep that going is to talk about how I flow. Cause even today, mom bosses, I’m, I’m talking to you right now where you start out super early. Maybe you have your daily habits. We’re going to talk about that. Set your tone for the day, hitting the gym, coming home, getting the kids off to school, trying to rock out business while one’s in preschool and the other one’s in your office. I did it today talking with my content strategist on zoom and with the little one in the background and run it back and forth. Going take it her potty and coming back. Melissa’s listens. I know she’s cracking up about it because we were too. And then going straight into doing some housework, taking a couple of calls from clients, prepping for a meeting tomorrow and then getting dinner prepared and the husband gets home, he strolls in, takes over and then allows you to just to go up and knock out some work.

That was my day. Now, if that was a balancing act, I feel like it would be more rigid and it’s not. It flows. And obviously you, you might not have a supportive husband or a spouse or significant other, you might just be doing it all by yourself and God bless you for it. Single parents everywhere. God bless you. I’m very fortunate that we’re able to do that and we tackle it together. So for me, how I start, I have the backup and there’s an exercise that I’ve done before and it keeps coming up is if you set, it’s called Destination Happiness. So if you take some time and to really evaluate, what would an ideal day look like? Not just in business, but the whole day of how it goes. What does that ideal day look like? What does that ideal week look like? What is your ideal weekend? So take some time and pull out a sheet of paper. Call it Destination Happiness and write it out. Okay, write out what, what you want.

Is it you’re working two days a week? With the kids three days. You shut down at four o’clock, you’re able to slide in at home prepared dinner. Maybe it’s something else. Whatever it is, write it down, make a list. Cause then the next thing that I want you to do is to back up. So for me to do that, to me to have that and be in them, that attitude, that mental space, what do I need to do? And that’s where we start adding the meat to this. Okay. So for me and for the individuals that are super successful that I’ve interviewed in the past, it all starts with your morning routine. And here’s how I operate. And if you look at, I know I talk about it and one of my favorite books is high performance habits by Brendon Burchard. Check it out cause he’s all about this set intentions, setting the tone.

And another one is Rachel Hollis. She’s a rock star. She talks about this, she has a whole journal out there for this but it’s about setting yourself up to be the best version of you every day. And for me it’s starts with those daily habits. What are the non negotiables that have to happen for me, I want to get up early before the kids. I want to go to the gym or workout at home. Yeah, because let’s face it and we’re talking about it’s, it’s for training, for training, for life here. So I want to make sure that I put the time in. Then the next thing is I come home, I write out my gratitudes, five things in the last 24 hours and I am grateful for that. I am so thankful that either it happened a moment maybe it’s just something to in general, sometimes it’s I’m thankful for coffee.

Just kidding.

Not really.

Then I go into writing out my goals as they’re already happening. So I try to think big and then I write them down every day because I’m going to shatter those. Then I take some time. For me, it’s devotion. I want to get into my Bible. I want to take some time to pray and I want to take time to connect. And then I go into what are my top three things that have to happen today? So when I lay my head down at night, what are the three big rocks, big things that have to get done for me to feel like, okay, today was done. I did it. And sometimes they’re big, big, big tasks that I have to break down into little tasks to chip away at them, especially if I have the kids at home.

Other times it might just be, I know I need to have to connect with this person, or maybe it’s, I need to bake this cake for my husband’s birthday or whatever it is. But I put all that together because once again, for me, it’s not a balancing act. It’s going to flow. So I’m going to allow myself to embrace them. Messy parts of life that it’s not perfect. I have little humans and they hijack my schedule all the time, but I’m going to do my best. These are my three things that I’ve focused on, cause I have a very hard time to stay focused. My husband is all time, is telling me that, Oh look, shiny object because it’s true. Don’t tell him I’m agreeing to that. But it’s true. I have a hard time focusing. And for me being able to go to back to that one list at one place that helps me.

So, and then from there it’s, I try to drink half my body weight in ounces of water. I tried to connect with just somebody on the personal side, whether it’s my mama, whether it’s my sister, girl from back at home through Snapchat, whatever it may be. I try to connect with somebody cause it’s easy when you’re working virtual like me to get behind the computer and to feel like you’re on an Island. So it’s important to reach out and build and keep those connections, those relationships. Because if I always think quality over quantity, sometimes your tribe might be one or two people and that’s okay. But it’s important to take time to reach out to them. And, and so then it goes on from there. So for me, because I love the quote that says you cannot pour out of an empty cup, right?

You have to fill yourself up just like a vase by keep pouring the water, the water would eventually trickle out, right? So whatever it is for you to set yourself up to be in that mind space, to be successful, you have to pour it into you first. Mama’s, I’m specifically talking to you right now is that it’s easier to take care of everyone else, but you got to take time and they know your business. I mean, being as a Boss, having a team, how often do we get into this mode of helping them meet their goals and helping them work through sometimes personal stuff. So I’m business up, let’s be honest and it’s easy just to feel deflated constantly. While I’m challenging you is going into the new year, sit down, write out your destination, happy place. Then write out your non-negotiables, those daily habits for you to be able to do every day to be your best self. And with the last point with that first section of the talk if you get off track during that day and you don’t do one of your non-negotiables, don’t beat yourself up because it’s the hard thing cause no offense, I’m talking to myself here.

90 miles a minute I get something in my head and I’m going to nail it. I’m going to do it. It’s going to be great, but stuff happens. So let it go, acknowledge it and then start again the next day and keep that habit of everyday setting out the intention, doing your daily habits. And if it gets off, that’s okay. You’ve got a new day. Thankful we get new new day, full new grace and mercy every single day. So just get up and try again and keep, because every day that you try that, every day you set your intention, guess what? It will be become a habit because that’s my first point.

Second is training. So all of what I just said, it’s all about training. Do you think a pro athlete just shows up on the field and kicks a 45 yard field goal? Like it’s no big deal and be like, yeah, here I am.

No, it doesn’t have like that. They train for that. They train every single day. And so for me, for this life, I am getting the mindset that I’m going to train every single day if it’s moving my body, being healthy, making healthy choices with food. Drinking water too. Connecting with my team to setting goals and being intentional of my time in the office too. Putting on boundaries, whatever it is. Like we are training. So I want you to just take comfort that it is a process. Oh, it’s a freaking process. And quite frankly, if it’s not uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong. Because if you’re trying to commit to a change in your life and in your business, it’s not going to be perfect. Every single day it’s going to be uncomfortable. You’re going to want to revert back to old habits and just keep pressing forward.

I can’t stress that enough. Just everyday get up. Start again because it’s, we’re training here. This is not, it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon. We’re going to every day get up and try and start over again. Cause that’s how you chip away at huge goals. That’s what you took away at building massive success for yourself. Next point is knowledge is power. Oh okay. This is good. So do you wonder why at night that you know that you busy all day long at the office or you know you’re running around the house all day long but you sat down and you get ready for bed and you’re thinking, what the heck did I do?

You have that feeling of like I was I really productive today. I did a lot. But what did I really get done? I’m going to ask you, where are you spending your time? I’m going to let that sink in. Where are you spending your time and do you know what two easy tools/tricks there is is there is this thing called RescueTime and this is not an ad, it’s not a promotion. I just, this is something I’ve used and it gives me a report every week and I’m like, Hmm, okay. What it does, it’s a free Chrome extension. You just add it to your computer and it will track what sites that you were on, what you’re doing and it will give you a breakdown and it’ll tell you if you like, tell it what’s productive for you and what’s not. It will give you a report at where you’re spending your time, like how long are you on Facebook?

You sit in there watching YouTube videos all day, calling it research. I don’t know. Where are you spending your time? Another great tip is if you have an iPhone, I’m assuming all the other phones have this, but if you go in your settings or swipe to their right, it’ll say screen time. If it breaks down by app and the percentages of how much you’ve been looking at your phone. Talk about a rude awakening. You spending two hours on Facebook for the week, that’s two hours that you can be reading a book to help you be a better boss. That’s two hours that you can be spending looking over your numbers and looking to see what expenses that you need to cut so that we can need to put more money back in your pocket or more money back into the business. Maybe you need a higher, so I, I truly believe that knowledge is power.

So how are you to move forward if you don’t know where you’re spending time right now? So you’re going to take a few to just go through, maybe it’s just pull up in a sheet of paper and track your time during the day. I’ve used tools like toggle, we use teamwork in our business and I use that a lot of times. I have my own project to where I drop things that I have to get done on a daily basis. And I do try to track my time to see where am I spend the most time.

So that I think it’s important to just evaluate that, see what time that you’re wasting and that you could apply it if something that’s more productive and getting you closer to your goals.

Lastly, let’s talk about if you’re wanting to grow your business. Here’s a an awesome acronym that I’ve learned about managing your sales. And like staying focused is if you write out L A P S laps, okay? And if you think of those as buckets, so the L is a bucket a is bucket, P is a bucket, S is a bucket, okay? So we were already talked about, you know, on the personal side and then showing up and then evaluating your time and addressing that knowledge is power, right? So when you put all that together and then you’re like, okay, like I want to grow my business. So how do you grow your business?

Well, you’re either going to have to cut costs and evaluate where you’re spending your money, right? Or raise your prices or bring in more leads, turn more of those leads into customers, right? You sell more stuff. And if you’re like me, if you don’t have a perfect system or sales system in place or you’re struggling with, maybe you have like active campaign or something but are just in need just a quick and dirty way of saying, okay, like these are the people that I’m dealing with right now. It’s called laps, leads, appointments, proposals sold. Isn’t that easy? And you want to have a full bucket across the board. So you want to have plenty of leads under the L. You want to have plenty of points because once you’re a lead, do you want to either get them on the call? You want to be setting up a zoom call, whatever your sales processes, maybe you don’t have one. And this is where your starting point is.  The proposals.

So when they come in as a leads, you’ve talked to them, you know what they want you, you got what they need and you need to sell it for them. You put it in a proposal, you send it off. So you want to have plenty of proposals out, right? And then sold. So you want to turn those proposals. And you want to allow them to accept it and you want it sending the invoice and getting the deposit right. You want to sell the thing. An easy way to evaluate who’s where in your process. Your sales process is to write out laps. I usually keep it on my board as just, even though we use active campaign and you know there’s different moving parts. For me it’s easier so I know who I have to follow up and who hasn’t moved across the board yet. It’s that simple.

Of course, of course I’m, I can’t not talk about your website, right? Cannot not talk about it because although it’s soon to be 2020 if you don’t have a website, like what are you doing? We definitely need to talk.

Bottom line is your website showing up when someone searches for your product or service? If it’s not, that’s a problem. It may be even worse if you’re not sure on how you, because my biggest thing is we just put a blog post about this is that if you don’t know how people are finding your business, your products, that’s a problem because how can you put out content if you don’t know what’s attracting them? Cause then you’re just standing there with, what is it like a big horn just yelling out things and not attracting anybody that’s you’re just broadcasting. So if you take a few before the end of this year and shoot, we have, we have free tools to audit and to look at and to see where your site is ranking for a specific keyword and key phrase. We’ll do a site crawl to see, okay, what’s working and what’s not on your site, what needs to be fixed, that will allow you to rank higher.

Check out our latest blog posts. You know, I’m going to link it up here in the show notes, but I just talking with my team and talking to a few leads that were coming in. I was thinking we gotta be talking about this right now. Cause if people don’t know and the whole buzz is about content. Well how do you know what content to put out if you don’t know what people want and how do you want, when you look at how are people finding you if they’re not finding you, that’s a definite conversation to have right now.

Once again, if you don’t know how your website is showing up or if you know it’s showing up and you’re not happy with it, now is the time to address this. So that way when January 1st rolls around throughout that first quarter that you can be producing content that will attract and that will turn those leads into customers. Please do not waste any more time and evaluate where you’re showing up. So that’s it. I’m kicking off this series. I’m coming in at ya. I want you to look at yourself, how you’re showing up and how you can be the best self best or how it could be your best self every day. And what does it take to do that? You have to decide, I gave you what are mine that I know I need. You have to come up with your own that you can. If it’s not uncomfortable, you’re definitely doing it wrong. And how are you spending your time? Because knowledge is power. So use some of those free tools and just to see where are you wasting time, where can, what time can you put back? Cause if you start talking to me like Jen, I don’t have time to do that.

We’re not going to be able to talk because yes you do. Everyone has 24 hours. It’s how you’re spending it. And if your struggling with your sales process laps, remember leads, appointment, proposal sold. Their individual buckets. You want to have plenty of names on that board on each of those. And then lastly, if you don’t know how your website’s showing up, check out our latest blog posts. There’s some free tools in there. Let us help you.

>> Boost your Website Search Performance and Generate More Traffic in 2020

All right. So I hope you’re excited as I am for the upcoming guests. And if you found that this is super helpful. One, I want to see what your daily habits are. If you just #RaneyDayTalks I’ll see it. All right? And cause I want to know and I want to help you be accountable. So if you’ve taken that, definitely tag me in it posted direct messaging me, you can find me online, but I want to hear from you. And as always, do me a favor, hit subscribe, hit like, and share it with your people. And lastly, definitely check out our latest blog posts. All right, y’all, y’all have a blessed day.

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