Today I set a goal to improve the reach of my business by 10 times. Incremental growth isn’t inspiring but 10X’ing something is exciting.
Hey guys! Ryan here from Instructions Not Included and today I set a goal to basically 10x my business or to improve the reach of my business by 10 times. I have been really inspired by businesses like Google and other businesses and books and audio books and podcasts. They talk about the benefits of having a goal to see a 10x improvement in what you do because when you are trying to get incremental growth, 10%, 20%, 30%, even double your business, you are just kind of doing the same things over and over again. But if you are trying to improve something and make it 10 times better, you really need to change your thinking and approach the problem in a completely new way.
And so as I was thinking about yesterday, filling a bit disoriented with my business, I was sitting down thinking Okay, what do I want for my life? What do I want my life to look like in maybe about 3 years? That is about as far ahead as I can really conceive at the moment. And I am thinking about how much do I want to earn and I kind of earn enough money at the moment and I am pretty happy with what I earn.
I would be pretty happy to still be earning that in 3 years’ time. And that is kind of somewhere around the $60,000 to $100,000 a year mark. Obviously, pushing beyond that and getting over $100,000 a year would be nice but in terms of me really seeking a goal and saying I want to be rich and I want to have this, I do not want that at all. I love tiny house living. If I could I would live in a tiny house which is like miniature houses they build on trailers that are 2 and a half meters wide by 6 or 7 meters. If I could and I did not have 3 kids, I would be living in a tiny house traveling around Australia or something like that right now.
So for me, looking forward, looking at my goal, money is not really the driving force. I make enough money. I can see that as I grow my business making more products, I am going to make more money. So it is not really a goal I need to stretch for there. But what I do when I do is have a bigger impact in people’s lives.
I want to be able to reach people and help people. And so I have decided that rather than focus on money, which I am already happy with, why do I not focus on the actual impact of my business and what I can do there. And so I was thinking maybe I will aim for like 100,000 visitors a month to my website because at the moment for On Property, I thought I was getting around 30,000 visitors. But then I looked at my 4 main websites which are On Property, Public Speaking Power – which is going to change the brand now to Outspoken.co, then we have Podcast Fast, and we have Instructions Not Included.
And I looked at combined how many people are reaching with that in terms of visitors to the website, views of the videos and downloads of the podcast, and overall it was reaching, I think it was about 94,000 people if we tally all that up in July. So my goal of 100,000 was kind of basically already achieved. So alright, let us set a big goal. Let us go ahead and 10x this and let us aim to impact about a million people a month through those 4 main websites.
So that is the goal that I have set for myself and I have started thinking about how can I achieve this goal? What things do I need to be doing differently? And one of the things that I need to be doing differently is offloading more to my virtual assistant. and I think I have talked a little bit about not having enough work for my virtual assistant and so one of the things that I am setting up at the moment, when I created a video and uploaded that video into Dropbox, I would then have to go into a Google spreadsheet and type the word ready into a whole bunch of different columns so that my VA would know what tasks are ready to be done. And so now I am setting it up so that there is integration with Dropbox and a messaging tool I use called Slack.
So every time I put the file into Dropbox, it automatically creates a message in Slack saying there is this new file that needs to be uploaded. So I am basically taking a step out of it. I am automating that step and then the VA is going to take that file from Slack and import the relevant stuff into the spreadsheet and then go ahead and upload those files. So basically I am trying more and more to take myself out of different things. Eventually I want to not do any design myself, so not design the thumbnails for the videos and stuff myself.
I would like to outsource that to someone who can do a really good job. I would also like to outsource the editing of the audio and the editing of the video as well but that is down the track. So basically I would really love to have my life be like James Schramko and what he does or what he used to do was basically he just created a video a day, put that video in Dropbox – just the raw file, and then someone would edit that for him and his whole team would go through the process. And the next time he would see that was when it was on the website. And so I guess that is the point that I am trying to get to, for me to be able to film a video on my iPhone or whatever device it is, put that raw video file into Dropbox and then in a couple of weeks or whatever it is, it spits out in the other end and is finished and published.
And so that is what I am trying to get to and is part of the way that I am thinking about 10x-ing my reach is by taking myself out of this back end processes and so then I can just focus on creating videos and creating content and I guess getting more creative with the content that I create.
And so that is my day. That is kind of my goal. I guess setting a goal for myself has made things more exciting and has made my work more enjoyable because now I have something challenging that I am going to try and reach for. Going from 100,000 visitors to 200,000 is probably pretty easy in a year just working it out or maybe 1 to 2 years. But going from 100,000 to a million, that is going to be tricky. I do not know how I am going to do it but I am excited to try, at the least.
Alright guys, that is it for me for this week. Small week, only working for 2 days this week because of sick kids but I have a little bit done and I have a bit of mental shift going on there. So hopefully we will have a productive week next week, working 5 days a week getting stuff done.
Until next time, if you need instructions go and buy some furniture.
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