This is the site that greeted me early this morning – was up early to see my daughter off on a three day trip with school

(This is my first day back at work after the Christmas holiday)

It’s all the business post we’ve received since 19th December when we closed the doors on work.

I’ve dipped back into my office to connect with clients, my private group, contacts and so on but I’ve never been tempted to open a single one of the letters on this pile.

Closed means closed – at least to people who send letters. Our support desk was fully functional right through the holidays for online stuff.

Although to be a fair a lot of the post that we get comes from our offline businesses where the majority of people still deal with paper and envelopes.

More and more it seems that physical mail requires me to ‘do stuff’ and over the Christmas and New Year hold the only thing I was doing was having fun.

It’s harder to ignore an envelope because it’s physically there in front of you (hence one of my ‘things’ this year will be to expand our direct mailing efforts), whereas email can be clicked away swiftly and without remorse…

…but I never have any problem NOT opening letters. The older you get, the less pleasant the experience seems to work out, unless of course it’s a cheque.

Which is why it’s going to take a strong cup of tea and a choccy biccy to even get me near this pile.

Bet you 50% of it is junk anyway…

 

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I got asked about choosing outsourcers the other day.

If you hire outsource workers using a site such as Odesk or Freelancer you’re going to get at least 30 replies. This means 30 CV’s to go through with the probability of more trickling in each day as you draw up your shortlist.

My advice?

When you find a candidiate that is 80% suitable, if your need is pressing, stop and hire them.

You could go through all the CV’s but that would take you a long time.

You could draw up a shortlist of say 5 or 6 and give them all the same task to do and then hire the best one but in reality this is going to take DAYS if not weeks and at the end of it there’s often no clear winner.

So what I do if the job I’m outsourcing is a pressing one, is to hire the first person who fits MOST of the bill.

You can teach them the rest.

Chances are that even if you DO go through all the CV’s you’ll not find Mr or Ms Perfect anyway and you’ll have wasted days that you could have been spending on your business.

Find the ‘almost’ candidiate and hire them.

The instinct to ‘wait and do more investigation’ is a strong one but takes your focus off your business.

Hire quickly.

Works for me. Most of the time anyway.

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My favourite advice for the new year, or just for a new DAY goes something like this:

“You are NOT your history”

To me that basically means that everything you’ve done up to this point doesn’t define who you are and you can change direction NOW without any reference to who you’ve been and what you’ve done in the past.

 

Are you bad with money? Useless at saving?

Change it NOW

 

Have you always wanted to write but always abandoned your projects in the past?

Change it NOW

 

Have all your past attempts to create a home-based business withered and died in the past?

That doesn’t matter. Your history is yesterday, not today and bloody definitely not tomorrow! Change things. NOW 🙂

 

The beauty of abandoning your past (or at least the bits of it you’d rather dump and we all have those) is that you start to look at things from a different angle.

Don’t underestimate how important this is. I’ve written ebooks that have made me thousands by taking my laptop into a room I wouldn’t normally work in (honestly) and inspiration has come simply because the view is different and that seems to make my thought processes work in a different way.

Memories are wonderful, and experiences are incredible.

But some of them aren’t, and they turn into baggage that gets heavier and heavier the older we get.

Personally I try to dump baggage that has a negative effect on my life or business.

Because I’m NOT my history 🙂

I can start afresh right now…

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So we were driving home from a family get-together last night when the snow hit out of nowhere.

We’d driven over in our big, comfy seven seater which (we now know) is about as much use as a one legged man in an arse kicking contest in even a few inches of snow

Leaving that the car that WOULD have been better on the snow at home…doh!

So we were forced to abandon it pretty much in the middle of nowhere and walk the three miles back to our village

(The pic is us on the trek home before rescue)

Two miles in and the kids were getting tired as it was mostly uphill and the snow was coming down quite heavily

Then out of the blue a chap and his wife appeared in a Land Rover and were kind enough to drive us home

Total strangers that lifted my faith in humanity.

We’ll be dropping a bottle of wine at their door when we go to retrieve our car when the snow clears

(Usual apology to US and Canadian citizens who are used to snow and wonder what all the bloody fuss is about)

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Went Christmas shopping in Leeds the other day.

Very pretty in the Victorian Quarter (the pic above) although I couldn’t help wondering how much of the glass of fizz we were given in the Jo Malone perfume shop was built into the price of the fragrance…

Traditionally London is THE place to go for Christmas shopping (but I’ve not been there since last year) but more and more it seems to me that northern cities can more than compete in terms of shopping, gigs, nights out and culture-stuff.

The main difference between Leeds and London seemed to be the number of people wanting handouts for nothing and those who were spending uncontrollably without a thought in their heads.

In London that is…we don’t have the royal family and the government in Leeds 🙂

 

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I just discovered that the phones we have in the house have an intercom function.

We have handsets in my workroom, the kitchen, the living room and my wife’s workroom which is right at the back of the house.

And I was bored and messing with the handset on my desk yesterday when I realised I can use my handset to call any of the others in the house.

I kind of knew it could do this but hadn’t tried before.

Now I can call my wife at any time while she’s in her studio from MY workroom!

So when I’m bored I’ll call her about five times in three minutes.

Asking her to make coffee (she’s nearer the kitchen than I am), reminding her to forward relevant emails to me (she never forgets but hates being reminded) and recently just to play the banjo to her down the phone.

She swore at me that time 🙂

She knows I’ll get bored of it soon but I must admit to chuckling to myself while I write this…

 

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Well it’s Christmas again…

I Love it

One of the great things about getting older (as opposed to ‘growing up’) is that you really don’t have to give too much of a flying shit what people think any more 🙂

Gone are my teenage years when it wasn’t cool to be enthusiastic about anything, and adopting a cynical attitude to everything was the only way to behave. Bloody hell I must have frowned for the best part of 5 years!

Sadly there are still many adults who think this way (miserable gits) but that’s their problem.

These days I find that if I see something that’s interesting (and there’s a LOT out there) I’m like a 5 year old asking questions and investigating. Both my children (not yet teenage cynics but getting there) were mortified with embarrassment when I found a stall selling fake snow at a Christmas market the other day.

This was some kind of harmless powdered polymer that when you added water to it, behaved in an unusual way – becoming cold, expanding and taking on the characteristics of a kind of ‘dry’ snow.

Well both kids politely refused the stallholders invitation to try it out (a nice gentle sales technique I thought – put the product into the hands of your prospect)

But I got elbow deep in the demo tub, squishing it and flicking at around, asking all sorts of questions about chemistry and their business model.

The smallholder obviously thought I was trying to pinch their business especially when I asked if they had the patent (they don’t) to the product. But I wasn’t. It was just fun. I bought two lots of it but neither of my kids seemed that interested 🙂

I’ve read in so many motivational and inspirational books that developing a child-like sense of wonder can do remarkable things to your outlook on life and I’m lucky in that although I’m a quiet bloke, this comes naturally to me.

Life of course can FORCE you to take things seriously – I’m not denying that – but it does your soul good when you get the chance to act like a dick now and again, even in the smallest ways. Having kids of course gives you a great excuse, because you can get weird looks from people otherwise.

But Christmas can be a good excuse too. Our house is currently decorated like a gay brothel but what the Hell? SOME of it will go back in the decorations box after Christmas (although some won’t), so I reckon it’s time to celebrate how much fun can be found in life.

Not constantly – that would be knackering – but just now and again it’s good to get enthusiastic, make a fool of yourself or prod something to see what happens.

It’s a big part of why I love this time of year…it’s a great EXCUSE 🙂

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Just the past four years of course, because before then I hadn’t worked out this stupidly simple method of making sure my income increased week after week, month after month, and year after year.

While this works incredibly well for me I can’t guarantee it will work for you.

But it will 🙂

Basically this is simple human psychology.

The same sort of thing that existed in Athletics for decades.

Many said the four-minute mile just wasn’t possible for humans. It stood for, well bloody ages, until Roger Bannister broke it in 1954.

46 days later someone else broke it.

Because he had seen it was possible.

Rather than go out and run a mile I decided to adapt the theory to my business and began to record my daily sales totals.

The theory was that if I could ‘see’ what I was earning I could increase it.

Doing this daily is a bit pointless if you actually try to beat your daily totals (too hard – at least to start with)  but if you look at it monthly it gets a hell of a lot easier.

Do record your totals daily though.

The basic method is this:

Look at what your sales are monthly, and try to increase them by just 5% the following month.

So for example if you take $1000 in April, you should be aiming to take $1050 in May.

It’s easier if you set yourself waypoints – I do this weekly – to see if you’re on track or not.

And it works…

If you’re aiming for a goal it’s SO much easier than just wandering along ‘trying to make money’ each month.

The real secret of this is that you’ll probably find that although your ‘official’ target is to increase your income by 5% each month,

you’ll actually do significantly more than that.

You’ll mail out an extra promotion a month, for example.

Or maybe write a viral report or create a WSO.

Perhaps you’ll email an extra JV partner or run an extra solo ad.

Whatever you decide to do, you’ll almost certainly find that the extra effort you put in pays off each and every month.

If you see what’s possible you’re far more likely to improve on it.

When you just get started in IM earning $1,000 a month can seem like a dream. Get a year or two in, and if you don’t make $1,000 from a single promo you’re disappointed.

It’s all a matter of being able to see your targets so you can improve on them.

I track my sales daily, weekly and monthly. If I find my sales by the end of week 1 in the month are down on the previous month’s, I find myself making an extra effort to try to ‘beat’ last month’s figures.

Sometimes you’ll get small jumps, sometimes huge ones…

This (daft really) little competitive game has increased my profit month in month out for over four years.

I just wished I’d been doing it from day one of my online business

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You ever considered a VA share?

I’ve seen this happen a couple of times successfully when newer marketers who are maybe strapped for cash but are reaching the point where they need to outsource their support or site building have clubbed together to hire a full-time VA or techy and they split her time equally among them.

It works well in a group where there’s close communication, trust and regular contact, such as a mastermind group or private Facebook group.

Odesk seems to be the best freelancer platform to use for this from what I’ve seen because they screenshot the work so everyone can see they’re getting their fair share.

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Most successful people I’ve worked with have what my gran would have called ‘character’

I see the same thing with the successful clients I’ve coached.

It’s tricky to define character but for me it shows up as self-reliance, ability to take responsibility, not blaming other people for their situation (biggie that one) and having confidence in your own belief.

Character.

And that’s usually the definition of character in films and books too.

The upstanding, confident, moral and self-reliant hero saves the day.

But they’re missing something…

As well as all the above traits, the successful people that I know personally and that I’ve worked with all have two other characteristics that I would say are vital to their success:

Humour and a slightly maverick spirit.

They often see the funny side of things going wrong.

They also have the ability to give you a cheeky sideways grin and say ‘Oh bugger it – let’s try it and see what happens :)’

They seem to know what things to worry about and what’s not important…

…and it’s often exactly the opposite to what most people would think.

Possibly the most interesting thing about success traits is that they don’t always seem to come as a package when you’re born.

I’ve seen people work to actively build the one or two traits that were missing to make the whole ‘success’ package and go on to be really successful in their niche.

Weirdly though it’s usually something that they work out for themselves.

If there’s a bit of the puzzle missing they often develop it – almost by saying ‘what attribute would make this situation work?’

If humour would get them past a certain hurdle then they’ll add that to their arsenal – if confidence would, then they’ll work to develop that.

It’s fascinating to watch when you’re working with a client like this…

…and even more fascinating to try to put it into action for yourself.

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