The One Secret To Keeping Your New Year’s Goals

At the beginning of each year people make a lot of plans for resolutions. I don’t believe in waiting or starting around a specific date, but the new year does bring a sense of hope and newness to many, so it can be a good time. In a few months some of these new plans never come to fruition, mainly because of one thing: no measuring. A good recipe for success is measuring progress and tracking the status. Goals need to be specific (“I will get 3 more clients this week” instead of “I’m going to try to get more work”) but they also must be trackable to allow progress to be charted.

Have you ever started a diet? Working out, eating right. What do you do almost daily? You weight yourself. You look to see your progress. You advance in your goal, you slip back, you have a bad day, you have a really great week. Along the way you are monitoring to see the results of your efforts. Now imagine starting a diet and never weighing yourself. Ever. How could you know how you are doing? How would you find out if you are matching the expectations you set for yourself?

People make goals all the time and never “weigh in”. They don’t track, they don’t measure, they don’t write down the progress, nothing. How do they know if they are even in the ballpark of accomplishing what they set out to do?

It does not matter what day you start your goal, it only matters that you track it. This could be via a spreadsheet, whiteboard, notebook, anything. Your resolutions are important enough to you to be created, keep them important daily by charting your progress.

More career tips at: http://www.franklinmcmahon.com

Is Your Brand Just a Technical Service or is it Emotionally Compelling?

There is a big difference between a brand and a service, a brand is more of a story and a service is more of a task. So when you do networking with potential clients, how do you describe yourself? Do you stick to talking about the task? I have always disliked the term “freelance”, I always prefer that people position themselves as a company, even if it is just them. But freelancers, especially when they are just starting out, often stick to just describing the tasks they do. For example if they do web work, they will mention they can do all the coding, host the site on a server and maintain the site on an ongoing basis. They sometimes just stick to the technical side, just the facts. The problem is they have no leverage. Another person could describe the same exact thing. Just rattle off the list of tasks. There is no compelling reason to go with you as opposed to the other person. Even if you both do good work, it is tougher for the client to choose, and then it becomes more of a coin toss.

A brand on the other hand, has some depth to it. It puts the technical side in the background and puts the human side up front. Describing your brand and what you do becomes more cozy and inviting. You could describe how what you love to do is help companies achieve their goals and grow their brand. You work to put the best elements of what the company does out in front. You discuss how things will be marketed, best use of design to get the main message across, what kind of feeling should people get when they discover the new website, new ideas to keep the site fresh and inviting, and so on. You are still, in the end, creating a website.  But you are describing it in personal terms. You are also highlighting what makes you different from the competition.

Is your brand just a service? Do you describe it in technical terms or human terms?

Sharpening the Saw – Close the Web Browser and Open Your Mind

We’re all busy, we all have lots of tasks, projects, things going on. We are focused on growing our career. This could mean networking, gaining new clients, making things happen. But what about you personally? What about your skill set? Your talents? Self-improvement and self-growth? Author Stephen Covey covered this in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, in fact it’s the 7th Habit, sharpening the saw. You are the saw and you are always engaged in keeping things improving, growing and sharper. This could cover many areas including your mind, spirit and physical body. Pertaining to your career, it is often essential to learn new skills, become better at things. But who has the time?

Schedule the time.

It’s important to be busy and productive but it’s also very important to become better. It’s an investment. It should be near the top of your weekly to-do list, but often it is on the bottom, or not on it at all. Also many people substitute knowledge gathering for skill development. You could spend an hour a day on the web looking through news items and keeping up with your industry. But in the end you are looking at what everyone else is, in addition to the news not being very relevant going forward. There is little leverage.

Now imagine spending an hour a day learning a new skill, a new piece of software, a new creative task, something that makes you more compelling over your competition. Your career and often your income range directly ties in to your skill set. However your skill set could become dull and stagnant unless you grow it weekly. Outpacing the competition often involves being smarter and more talented than the competition.

Surfing the web you may find some good nuggets, going to a seminar may spark an idea or two, but nothing will give you a higher bang for the buck as good old fashioned learning of a new skill.

Crack open a manual. Take a class. Watch a training video. Listen to an educational audiobook. Grab some coffee. Dig in.

Close the web browser and open your mind.

It’s a time investment that pays off big. But it has to be scheduled and you have to make time for it. Or your skill set may not grow.

Ask yourself how much more talented you are now than last month, or last year.

Do you schedule time each week to learn? Do you sharpen the saw as often as you need to?

Are You Ready To Perform The “Is This Helping Me Grow My Business” Experiment?

Are you ready to try an experiment? It can be fun and it can show how effectively you may be running your own business. The truth is too often we pour enormous amounts of energy into items with little to no payoff. Take a look at your to-do list and then examine your next week, next month and someday to-do list. Chances are you may have hundreds of items. You’ll sort and analyze them at some point, but how you do that can be the difference between stagnation and success.

If you look at successsful people who run their own successful company, and then review their to-do list, you’ll see that just about every item is laser pointed at growing the company and gaining clients. From networking to advertising to new sales to taking care of exisiting clients, the list is designed to make things happen and make things grow.

You’ll also see some to-do lists that are all over the map. Interesting ideas, note to check something out, hey how about this, new random thoughts, doing some stuff that others are doing. It’s diverse and has a lot of variety, but you could go through and trim out half of the items because they ultimately don’t tie in to the main mission. As a result some people work an incredible amount of hours, more than the norm, just to fit in the important and the not so important.

Try an experiment I suggest to my clients: take a sheet of paper and write “Is this helping me grow my business?” and lay it on your desk. Go through your normal work day, sit down at your computer, take calls, do whatever you normally do.

But keep an eye on that sheet.

And ask yourself, throughout the day of tasks, the question on that sheet. If you are around others and you don’t want a huge sign sitting on your desk, you can use an object to remind you, a toy, a fork, an unusual item that sits right in front of your computer or phone. Start to track. You may find yourself working on a lot of things all day that actually are not helping your business grow.

What counts and does not count? Direct tasks. Answering an email inquiry to a potential client counts. Constantly checking emails to see if something came in or popping in to websites to see if something is new, does not.

Writing the sheet in the first place? Counts.

Try the experiment. Start to measure your performance in this small way. Look at the results. Work to improve them and grow your business.

How Desperate Decisions Can Destroy Your Business

One of the most powerful skills you can master is decision making, especially when it comes to your career. Many books have been written supporting the fact that impulse decisions, that is going over the facts and then deciding rapidly and affirmatively, is a good way to proceed. The argument is that even if you spend hours going over the pros and cons, ultimately the best path is the one you initially lean towards. We all know people who can decide quick and move on, who don’t second guess themselves. One of the things we hear more often is that to get better at decisions, just make more of them.

But the bottom line remains: decisions are tough. But why are they hard? Because most of the time, people don’t have a lot of options. For example, say you are a web designer, you have built up your business through marketing and networking. Several businesses are actually courting you, they want to work with you. You have three potential clients who want you to design a high-end site for them. But you only have time to work on one of the three projects.

This is a great position to be in.

You have options. You may pick the highest paying client. You may choose the company you will learn the most from by doing their project. It does not matter who you choose..it only matters that you have three options.

Let’s look at a different scenario. You have not been marketing too much, clients are few and far between. Finally the phone rings. It’s a potential client. They want to work with you. They don’t have a real budget to speak of and they want stuff done immediately. You do a quote and they can only afford a fraction of what you typically charge.

But you take the job.

What choice do you have? Things are slow and you really don’t have any other options. The problem is this can easily snowball. You take on several new clients that are low paying and they encompass huge amounts of your time. Clients you would never take if you were busy. Problem is, these clients take up so much time they prevent you from marketing and networking for good clients. This cycle can often continue and repeat.

The key is when you have one option, decisions will always be hard. If you have two or three options, decisions not only get easier but the benefit to you and your company dramatically increase. Marketing, ramping up your empire, networking, advertising, spreading the word about what you do…all of that work provides more options.

Decisions won’t always be a piece of cake, but you can definitely move away from constantly being backed into a corner, taking low paying jobs and being dragged down by needy clients.

If you are reading this blog right now, or blogs like this, reviewing many of the articles and implementing the ideas and concepts, you are taking steps in the right direction. Most of these articles tie in to spreading the awareness about your empire. Getting out there and letting the world know what you are doing in unique ways. This expanding scope will typically provide an increase in options, allowing you to make decisions based more on your preference and not by desperation.

Decisions are hard. But they don’t have to be.

Is it easy for you to make decisions? What can you do to make decisions easier?