My $1,000,000 dollar plan - Part 2

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How it started - a weird interview

Last weekend I did one of the weirdest things I’ve ever done.

I watched Alex Hormozi's video “13 brutal lessons about business“ (no, this wasn’t the weird thing).

As usual, it brought up some hard truths about my business.

I realised I had no real plan, or vision: I’d just been going through the motions.

Every day, I sit down for some arbitrary amount of time and “work on the business”. This usually involves doing things I’m already good at: building the product, and avoiding the icky stuff: sales, marketing etc.

So...I wrote out 25 questions.

Sat down and interviewed myself.

On camera.

For an hour and a half.

Why did I do it?

I did this because I wanted to see if I understood:

  • the current state of the business;
  • what my goals for the business were; and
  • what It would take to get there.

I didn’t.

I did it in this format because

  • I wanted to detach myself from the business and pretend I was talking to someone else.(I put on a Deep South accent…that morphed into an Australian accent after about 15 minutes - told you it was weird).
  • it was the method with the least friction - it gave me no chance to quit, come up with excuses, or pretend I had any answers.

What was the result?

Despite it being super weird, I’d rank it as one of the most valuable things I’ve ever done.

By detaching myself from the business and answering candidly, I was able to:

  • view it as an outsider would;
  • see the reality; and
  • come with a plan.

Too often, we get wrapped up in our own story, trying to portray success and progress to the outside world - while treading water or drowning on the inside.

Sometimes without even realising it.

It’s much easier to say to a friend, your parents, a new acquaintance:

“Yeah things are going great and come up with a load of excuses when they dig any deeper.”

Than:

“I’ve been burying my head in the sand and working on what I find easiest instead of having a good honest assessment of the problems and working to fix process and bottlenecks.”

As a result I now have:

  1. A clear and specific goal
  2. A system to achieve it
  3. The maths for how to get there

(These are broken down in later posts).

Why you might care

  1. Alex’s video is outstanding (as is all his long form content) - you could watch it.
    Click Here
  2. I think it’s a really useful exercise to really assess your business - you could try it (25 questions I used below)

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P.S. Here are the 25 questions I asked myself:

  1. What’s the current state of the business?

  2. What’s the goal?

  3. Why’s that the goal?

  4. What’s the obstacle stopping you from getting to that goal?

  5. What are the current bottlenecks?

  6. What’s stopping you from addressing them?

  7. What does your ideal customer look like

  8. Where do you/would you find them?

  9. What 1 thing would prevent a potential customer from buying from you?

  10. How could you fix it?

  11. What’s your current offer?

  12. What problem does the business solve?

  13. What’s your current sales process?

  14. How do you measure it?

  15. What’s your current marketing process?

  16. How do you measure it?

  17. What competitors do you have? Can you name them?

  18. How are you better?

  19. What do you spend the majority of your time doing?

  20. How do you measure it?

  21. What would this look like if it was easy?

  22. What 1 thing could you do this week to get more revenue?

  23. What 1 thing could you do this week to solve the bottleneck?

  24. If you needed to get X sales by the end of the week, how would you do it?

  25. Based on the above answers what are you going to do NOW to improve?