Do you work a lot but when you look back at your day
you realize you really haven’t accomplished much?
I’ve found myself in that situation and I suspect many of you have as well. When I really look carefully at what I did that day, I see that my activities could be diagrammed on paper as if I were walking in a maze, jumping from one thing to another. What I did that day was all over the place.
A good example of this is the process that I took while building a website and creating a Mentoring program for new gift basket company owners. I came up with the concept back in 2012 and started creating the basic site. I got the wordpress site set up and even completed the first few pages. But then I got sidetracked by other things and never got back to it.
Until someone asked me if I would coach them in their business.
As I explain in the site itself and to her, I don’t have time to be a coach. I’m too busy filling orders, maintaining my own e-commerce site as well as the other sites and businesses that I run, creating the monthly magazine, working on e-books (many that I have never finished) and, course, taking time to just enjoy life.
But when she approached me about being a coach, it took my thoughts back to the website that I began in 2012. I went to that site (which you can find at STARTAGIFTBASKETBUSINESS, reread what I had written and realized, “Hey, I can and should do this!”
The next question I asked myself was, “Is there a need for this?” I reminded myself that there are other coaches out there who charge a lot of money as well as resources on how to start a business, Facebook groups specific to gift baskets, and even a couple of small conventions.
But did all these meet the needs of those who were in the beginning stages of their business or just thinking about starting a gift basket business? And could they afford the $250 on up for coaching and the several thousand dollars to attend a convention?
Perhaps they could or perhaps they couldn’t? Since I don’t know most of these people who are developing an urge to be an entrepreneur, I didn’t didn’t have the answer.
But I strongly suspect there is a need and I had the beginnings of filling that need. Even more important, I had the experience, the knowledge and the background to share as an expert. You can read more about that here. I’ve never been one to “toot my own horn” but I knew that I had to do some of that if those who didn’t know me were going to trust me to help them.
That led to the decision to not call myself a coach but to be a Mentor (defined as “an experienced and trusted adviser”) instead and I wasn’t going to charge an arm and a leg to do it.
So I made a list of what I needed to do to get it up and running and ran down that list, completing each task one after the other. I made the decision about what I wanted this program to be, how much it would cost, and how I would fulfill my promises. Then I created the sales page, added a way to become a part of it, created a mail list on mailchimp, reread and updated the ebook, “What I Wish I Had Known,” and uploaded it to mailchimp so that it could be downloaded by those interested.
Four years after starting a project, I was finally following the advice that I have handed out to others to make a list and just put one foot in front of the other.
What I had done back in 2012 was the easy part. The harder parts that should have followed were put off until they were forgotten. Sound familiar?
The word we all know for this is PROCRASTINATION. It’s all about putting off the NEXT THING in favor of something else, and it’s the reason so many people who are so close to success don’t get there.
Success in business is all about getting things done. Whether it’s finish a project, writing the copy for a sales page, putting up a buy button, driving traffic. . .
It all comes down to THE NEXT THING that is needed to push the project forward, which is better done “as the crow flies,” than “taking the scenic route.”
If you want to succeed, determine what the NEXT THING is you need to do, and put that at the top of your list. Then, do nothing else until you’ve got it done.
And then, do the next thing. . .