Are You Really Getting Ahead In Business Or Falling Behind?

I’m a little baby business man. I’ve always ever worked in a corporate environment and only in the last couple of years have I ventured off into – I guess it’s almost, 3 or 4 years, at the time of this video, 2014, February – and all of my experience is online, other than working at a startup with my dad in the early 2000’s.

I have to say that from the advice I’ve heard from all the other online entrepreneurs, podcasts, books, websites, blogs, videos, whatever, and my own personal experience is 1) Track the important stuff, the money coming in, the money coming out, and once you do that you can start to see where things are growing.

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At that point, it’s going to take some time, it’s going to take some data. Focus on that 20% that’s bringing you 80% of your results, you know, the Pareto Principle, and keep diving deep down into that.

It’s basically a matter of finding out what works, boosting that up and just reiterating on it. A little deeper dive into that is the Google approach to it where 70% of the effort is focused on the stuff that does work and just keeping it working.

The maintenance, so to speak, of the job. 20% is going up a level on it, the level 2 product or service is basically a re-imagining of what you already have that’s working, and then 10% on the new ideas, the innovations and the super-duper growth.

That kind of approach to keeping your focus on keeping things running, focusing on what’s working but leaving a little bit of room for that innovative path for future success seems to work. You’ll see the opinions vary but it pretty much revolves around tracking your data, because if you don’t track it you won’t be able to see it, and what you track does grow because you’re watching it.

It’s the old “What you observe, grows,” aspect of things. But unless you’re willing to do things that either increase the amount of people you’re in front of, the amount of money you’re bring in per person or the amount of lifetime value of each one of those people, those are pretty much the only three ways that you can grow a business and this is a short take on Jay Abraham’s understanding of how to grow a business, the three main ways and I think he’s 9.8 billion in business, so he knows what he’s talking about. He’s relatively rich, I might say.

There you go. This is very high-level stuff but it should be used as a template to focus your efforts and if you haven’t started tracking stuff, start tracking it now.

I’m doing a monthly stab at my finances in and out and it’s been quite telling. Looking back on 2013, there’s a lot of stuff I focused on that was great, it’ll be a great foundation for the future, but it was clearly the 10% innovation stuff and not the 20% what really works for me Pareto stuff.

In other words, the main stuff that’s bringing in the dough. So it’s helped me, guided me to where I need to go this year, at least for the first section of it.

Keep tabs on it, keep going, don’t let the numbers just slide by.