May 27, 2024
Canmore, Alberta

“You’ve been traveling how long? So, you both are retired then, right?”

(Can’t read the full email – click here for the online version.)

This will be reminder for some of you, long-time readers but my wife and I rented out our house for the winter and proceeded to undertake 3 distinct trips. Two and a half months before Christmas enjoying Mexico and Honduras, then 4 months, mostly in the western States, divided into skiing and then hiking and exploring all the regions that comprise the “four-corner” states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah.

Naturally, once people find out how long we’ve been away, they assume we are both retired. Then my wife will quip, I’m retired but Hugh will likely never do so.

And yet, I am still able to run my business(es), set-up meetings with clients and prospects, all with 10-15 hours a week. 

How do I do this?

We’ll, you’ve all heard of the 80/20 rule – where 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your clientele. But that only touches upon the surface.

80% of your effectiveness comes from 20% of your efforts. This can be broken down even further. 20% of that 20% efforts – (4% in other words) can be responsible for 64% (80% of 80%) of your endeavours.

The trick is in determining what specific tasks and projects you should and can be focusing your efforts upon so that you can be that effective.

And here is where so many can be so undisciplined. 

A recent Dan Kennedy article explains this better than I:

Hardly anybody is identifying or working THE MOST critical thing in their business. They may even know what IT is, yet they dilute their attention, energy, resources to all sorts of less critical problems and opportunities and outright distractions, often because the one critical thing is hard.  

Running away from difficult but critical tasks as a leader or entrepreneur is like claiming to be a firefighter but running away from fires toward rivers and lakes.

I had a client who was trapped inside a distribution model where they could only establish a direct relationship with their customer after their purchase, but they definitely wanted it and wanted to then market to those customers to drive accessory sales, upsells, repeat buys, and referrals back to the retailers. 

They bemoaned getting contact info from only 10% of these customers by ordinary warranty cards. I asked what they were doing to fix this utterly unacceptable situation. The answer was insufficient and unimaginative, and I prescribed an appropriate fix nearly certain to boost the 10% to 50%+, and I sent them away with a stern mandate to focus on implementing that ONE thing, going sleepless and without food if need be until done, before giving attention to anything else...a mandate you can safely bet won’t be strictly followed. 

In many businesses, there is a thing around which everything else revolves. A single unrelenting problem that, if fixed, would open the floodgates of growth. One evil, stinking, dangerous elephant everyone enters into implicit agreement to ignore and hope it stays placidly in a corner, behind the drapes rather than rampaging about and killing them all.

What is missing most, though, is not awareness or effort. It is urgency. Above I used two words to describe the 10% data collection: utterly unacceptable. Most people do not feel that strongly about many things.  

Now, for most businesses, their main problem is their ability to attract the right customer. For that reason, the Magnetic Marketing Challenge has been reopened, starting on Monday, with Marty Fort. If you would like to register, you can do so below:

>> Register For The Free 5-Day Magnetic Marketing Challenge Here 

Until next week, 

Stay healthy and focus on profit! 

 - Hugh 
The “Profit Accelerator” Expert

P.S. Join Dan Kennedy and guests for his “Magnetic Marketing Challenge” starting today! If you want a flood of customers coming to you, rather than you chasing them down like an annoying pest, then go register for it below.

>> (Starting Today) Register For The Free 5-Day Magnetic Marketing Challenge Here

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