The Multitasking Myth

Ever been guilty of answering text messages during a meeting? Or checking email while you’re on a video call?

MOST OF US do it.

And if you said yes, who could blame you? Growing and scaling your business comes with a seemingly never ending to-do list.

In our minds, it’s simply smart thinking to make the best use of our time, right?

When your company is growing fast, we’re forced to find ways to “fit it ALL in”.

But here’s something that may shock you…

On average, people who try to multitask take 50% longer to complete a single task and make 50% more errors in their work than people who stay focused.

Suddenly multitasking doesn’t sound like such a great way to get more done, does it?

But, we were brought up believing that in order to be productive we must learn to multitask to reach our goals and get things done…At least I was.

Here’s the problem with that…

When you are moving the needle on multiple projects at one time instead of focusing on making significant headway on one or two, you’re less likely to reach the goals you’ve set in the time frame you’ve set for yourself.

All those little strides you make for each project become shorter and shorter until you are now moving at a snail's pace to reach the END result of each.

Plus, when you only focus on one or two projects at a time, it's amazing how clear priorities become. Your mind is forced to choose which projects are most important and you can stop allowing the small stuff and “noise” derail you.

I know you’re thinking…. “But…I’m really busy!”

Trust me, I get it.  Being as busy as we are, there will always be temptations pulling at our focus…

Emails, text messages, other opportunities, “do you have a minute” meeting requests, etc.

These are called distractions, and we will always have them.

The key is to limit distractions as much as possible.

Think about it this way. There are distractions within our control and there are distractions out of our control.

Here’s a few things I do that help me eliminate the distractions I CAN control:

1. Put yourself in an environment that is distraction free. If I need to focus, I’ll turn my phone off or leave it in another room so I won’t be tempted to answer calls or texts that come in. If you have an iPhone, put it in Privacy Mode as I learned how to do last week. I’ve also been known to close my office door so I’m not distracted by sounds or commotion going on in other rooms in the house.

You know what distracts you. So make a conscious effort to remove them altogether, or remove yourself from their presence.

2. Set 3 main objectives for the day. By limiting the number of daily “goals” to 3, you’ll know exactly what your focus is and you’ll work with greater intention towards achieving those objectives.

TIP: I like to set my goals for the day the evening before, that way I know before I go to bed exactly what I’ll be focusing on the next day (this also allows my subconscious mind to work on those goals while I’m sleeping).  When you wake up, work on the most difficult project first, even before calls or checking your email.

3. Give yourself a shorter time frame to accomplish things. Parkinson’s law states that “work tends to expand to fill the time we have available for its completion.”

What happens is, the more time we give ourselves to complete something, the more likely we are to fill any time remaining with distractions.  Our mind is programmed to conserve energy when possible.

And speaking of mastering your time, one great tip a colleague shared with me a long time ago was a process called the Pomodoro Method.

It’s an exercise that helps train our brains to stay focused by gradually working up our concentration. The goal of this method is to strengthen one’s ability to focus for longer periods of time.

How it works…

Basically you set a timer (start with 30 minutes and gradually work up to 45 minutes). Within that 30 minute time frame, completely focus on the task or project at hand with no interruptions or distractions.

After the 30 minutes is up, allow yourself a 8-10 minute break (In a 45 minute stretch, you allow yourself a 15 minute break afterwards). Challenge yourself to work diligently on your task or project until the timer goes off, then give your mind the break to indulge on whatever distraction you’d like! Continue practicing this until it becomes a habit. Then, gradually increase your focus time from 30 min to 45 minutes.

Avoiding distractions will definitely help you increase your accuracy and ability to complete tasks and projects faster…

When you integrate some of the tips I just mentioned, you’ll be closer to focusing on what you really need to be focusing on to move the needle in your business at an accelerated pace.

Here’s what I know…People aren’t really pulled in a hundred different directions. They allow themselves to be pulled in a hundred different directions.

They know exactly what they need to do.

They just need to TAKE ACTION and change it.

To your success,

David

P.S. Recruitment and Hiring is the #1 Entrepreneurial Blind Spot which is why most avoid it like the plague…

Let’s face it, the entire process can be utterly frustrating & time consuming, AND often results in attracting and hiring the WRONG talent for your team and/or business.

But what if ALL the heavy-lifting was done for you, and you were only handed the highest qualified candidates that checked every box you were looking for?

Head to this link to see if Nitrogen Hiring Network™ could be your talent recruitment solution.

P.P.S. Not sure how to find and attract more of your ideal clients? If you have a proven high ticket offer, we know EXACTLY how to fill your pipeline with a constant stream of qualified and highly-motivated leads through our exclusive Leads on Demand™ program.

Simply click this link for more details.

Business Nitrogen

#1 Entrepreneurial Blind Spot

One of the fastest ways to successfully SCALE your business is recruiting and hiring the right talent to get you where you want to grow…

Yet 9 out of 10 Entrepreneurs avoid it like the plague.

Sure, most of us already know we need TOP talent to grow and scale our businesses, BUT the majority of Entrepreneurs really struggle “cracking the code” when it comes to successfully attracting, qualifying, hiring and ultimately RETAINING the right people for their team. 

In all fairness, it’s not like they teach us this in school. And I’ve yet to come across a training program or course that outlines a proven formula and step-by-step process to successfully hiring right-talent for each unique business out there (especially for Entrepreneurial-based businesses). 

It’s our Greatest Entrepreneurial Blind Spot.  

As Entrepreneurs, we eventually come to a pivotal point in our business when our sales and marketing will hit a plateau (or in some cases, take a dive), OR our sales and marketing efforts will far exceed the infrastructure we’ve put in place to support it.  

The quickest, sure-fire way to break through that invisible glass ceiling and SCALE is to add the right talent to your team that possesses the right specialized knowledge and skill set to get you where you want to grow. 

Make no mistake about it. This is truly a defining moment in your business.

You can either help your business: 

• Shift in the RIGHT direction and move in an upwards trajectory (so you can successfully SCALE) 

OR

• Shift in the WRONG direction, and spiral downwards at an accelerated pace. 

Having worked directly with Entrepreneurs over the past 20 plus years (helping them successfully grow and scale their businesses), I know a thing or two about what their mindset is, and what usually happens next. 

Entrepreneurs either avoid hiring, or overlook important steps in the hiring process; resulting in hiring the wrong talent for the right position.  

Does any of this sound familiar?

• You honestly don’t know what or who you really need, therefore you don’t have any idea where to start. 
• You’ve hired in the past and it turned out to be a complete disaster so you’ve resigned to the fact that you’re just a “bad picker” and now you don’t touch it with a ten foot pole. 
• You experience pretty high turnover (more than 10% a year), so you are constantly trying to “plug the leaks” in an effort to keep the boat afloat–making it nearly impossible to focus on the future needs and hires of the business.
• You procrastinate because you know how terribly time consuming hiring is, and you simply don’t have the time to invest in it. 
• You push it off to another team member to “handle” and magically expect this person to know (or learn) the secret formula to hiring the right-fit talent for your unique team and business.
• You’ve never abided by the rule of “Hire slow, fire fast”, so you admit to cutting corners when qualifying, screening and hiring so you could check it off your to-do list and move on to the next thing.
• You decide that you don’t really need a new team member, so you task your current team with new, additional responsibilities and tasks necessary in an effort to push forward. As a result your current team is pulled away from their current responsibilities and they become completely overwhelmed. Now things are falling through the cracks, and you feel like you’re in a worse situation than you were before…so do they. 

Any or all of these can lead to some pretty big mistakes when it comes to building a team.  

I know because a majority of our clients ask us for our guidance in this area, so I’m really going to spend some quality time around hiring, and dedicate the next few newsletters to helping you avoid making these same mistakes. 

Mistake #1: Not hiring the right talent to get you where you really want to be. 

It’s vital to have the right key players in place to help you break through that invisible glass ceiling so you can successfully SCALE.  

“Oftentimes the people who got you to where you are, aren’t necessarily the ones that will take you to where you want to grow.” David Asarnow

This is not to say you have the wrong people on your team in place… It simply means you need unique talent that possesses the specialized knowledge in said area to get you to the next level in your business. 

Many Entrepreneurs will take the talent they already have and simply give them more responsibilities in an effort to avoid hiring new people. 

Here’s where this backfires…

When you overwhelm your team with other jobs and responsibilities that may not even be in their wheelhouse, you distract them and pull them away from what they are supposed to be doing (and then those tasks and responsibilities are overlooked or not done to the superior level they should be). 

Not only that, but overwhelm, stress and burn out can result within your existing team structure and that’s when businesses start seeing high-turnover within the organization. Which then leads to another set of challenges and problems (I’ll get more into this in the preceding newsletters).  

Keeping your existing team “in their own lane” focused completely on what they do best is where you’ll really gain traction to scale your business. 

Each team member working within their unique talents and coming together to collaborate is the difference between a high-performing team and a mediocre team.  

High-performing teams take you to the next level.  

Here’s how I suggest you start questioning the hiring of key players for your team going forward. 

By asking yourself this:  

Will there be a significant negative impact on the business, your team or on you if you don’t hire for this position? In other words…

What is the COST to you to NOT hire someone for this specialized position within your organization? 

Sometimes the INACTION of not filling a key role can be just as detrimental as hiring the wrong person for the role.  

Hiring the wrong team members comes with a plethora of challenges which we will dive more into next week. Stay tuned!

To your success, 

David 

P.S. Recruitment and Hiring is the #1 Entrepreneurial Blind Spot which is why most avoid it like the plague… 

Let’s face it, the entire process can be utterly frustrating & time consuming, AND often results in attracting and hiring the WRONG talent for your team and/or business. 

But what if ALL the heavy-lifting was done for you, and you were only handed the highest qualified candidates that checked every box you were looking for? 

Head to this link to see if Nitrogen Hiring Network™ could be your talent recruitment solution. 

P.P.S. Not sure how to find and attract more of your ideal clients? If you have a proven high ticket offer, we know EXACTLY how to fill your pipeline with a constant stream of qualified and highly-motivated leads through our exclusive Leads on Demand™ program.

ActiveCampaign Certified

Do you have a MUSTA marketing team?

MUSTA. Fancy acronym? 

Maybe the hot new thing? 

Not quite. It’s actually the opposite of that. 

When an Entrepreneur hires my team to help them scale their marketing and sales, the first thing we do is ask a lot of in depth questions about the product or service, the target avatar, current clients, and which marketing initiatives have worked for the company thus far. 

Sometimes clients actually know and can point us to data and dashboards to prove it.

A lot of times, though, the Entrepreneur says “My team said this worked well!” 

Then my team looks at the data.

Turns out, what they thought worked well, didn’t work at all. 

A MUSTA marketing team is a team that assumes when the sales were higher, the marketing MUSTA worked…

MUSTA marketing can create some short-term success, but ultimately they’re throwing marketing mud at the wall, hoping something (anything) sticks. Here’s where the challenge lies…

It’s not long-term or sustainable.

At some point, sales will reach a threshold, and the efforts on the marketing side won’t be able to sustain because you really do not know what worked.  

An invisible ceiling surfaces, and people scramble. Chaos begins, and sales and marketing teams point fingers at each other. Previous plans are questioned. Future plans are undoubtedly questioned. A few key people start looking for opportunities elsewhere.

This is the long-term side effect of MUSTA marketing. It just doesn’t work beyond a few good quarters and it certainly is not duplicable. 

Fun Fact: Did you know that human beings have created 90% of the world’s data in just the last decade? We’re almost making up new words now to describe how much data is stored on the planet. 

Data is everywhere. Some call it “the new oil” for its economic impact.

It is consistently surprising to me and my team, though, that a lot of mid-stage marketing teams and Entrepreneurs claim to embrace data, but don’t really review it or follow through. 

All the best processes now in sales and marketing start with data. Data is the core of everything: past client behavior, trends, actions, clicks, engagement with an email, etc. 

DATA DRIVES DECISIONS 

Or at least it should. 

Data can subsequently drive automated processes like…

• Lead capture
• Lead nurturing 
• Lead scoring
• Lead management
• Drips
• Workflows

The goal of an effective automated sales and marketing process is to read clients’ online body language, and figure out who should be contacted immediately, who should be phoned, who should be accelerated within automations, etc. 

Think of this like lead scoring with a heat index.

If you set up your lead scoring properly (more on that in a second), you achieve two main goals:

1. You do MORE with less, and frankly you create a lot of sales and marketing productivity without even thinking about it.

2. You have Higher-Qualified Leads, leading to more conversions (and quicker sales). 

Years ago, I met a guy at an event who sold online widgets. Pens. Cupholders. Mouse Pads. That type of stuff. He was making $2M/quarter. It was just him and his wife. I asked him how he did it, and he showed me a completely intricate web of marketing automation. If someone clicked this, they got this email. If they clicked that instead, they got a different email. 

It was visually overwhelming to look at, but it was working, and the company is still growing to this day. 

A lot of marketing teams don’t know how to set something like this up. It’s too complicated. It takes too much time. Other fires to put out take priority. Other meetings take precedence.

When you ignore the power of data and automation, you leave growth and revenue on the table. Automation done right also saves you money, but most importantly it saves your people time – they can be freed up to build relationships, and research the people they need to be in front of, while the processes hum along behind them.

As you know, an Entrepreneur’s biggest challenge AND biggest asset is TIME. If you can maximize time, you can maximize business returns. 

Some of us get in the weeds on projects, meetings, product design, launch, events, etc. 

All those things matter, for sure. But if you want be successful, you need to find time in other places – so that you can give time to new areas. 

The easiest way to find the time you need, and not get burnt out or completely inundated with tasks. Embrace thought out and proven sales and marketing automation.

Think of it as a well-oiled machine. The machine works along in the background, with periodic tweaks.

The machine delivers you the right, highly-qualified leads. 

Your team can really focus on relationship-building because they’ve had time to learn about these leads. As they start talking with the leads, more leads are coming through the pipeline. 

The “machine” continues to do what it’s supposed to do. 

This is a huge part of what my team does.

We help businesses attract more qualified leads, nurture them, then integrate proven and effective methods and systems to help convert these leads into paying clients.

That’s the biggest long-term advantage there is in business: Qualified leads, delivered consistently, with time freed up to focus on other areas that need focus. 

Time Savior + Revenue Generator

Automation done right has really helped so many Entrepreneurs over the years. 

I realize that sometimes automation gets a bum rap, and people will say to me, “Tech still comes off as a robot. It turns prospects OFF”.

Another one I hear, “It bombards my prospects with emails and push notifications, and they get annoyed. I’ll pass.”

That’s because they’ve experienced sales and marketing automation done wrong.

Everything is rooted in data and behavior patterns, and it flows from there. Every moving part of automation needs to be precisely set up and monitored. Testing is key. Continually improving is key. Evaluating every moving part will maximize efforts and optimize results. 

Turn your MUSTA marketing team into a high-performing team that gets you the results you know are attainable using data the right way.

We can help you get there if you want to dominate your industry. Simply reply back to this newsletter and we’ll set up a time to chat. 

To your success, 

David 

P.S. Recruitment and Hiring is the #1 Entrepreneurial Blind Spot which is why most avoid it like the plague… 

Let’s face it, the entire process can be utterly frustrating & time consuming, AND often results in attracting and hiring the WRONG talent for your team and/or business. 

But what if ALL the heavy-lifting was done for you, and you were only handed the highest qualified candidates that checked every box you were looking for? 

Head to this link to see if Nitrogen Hiring Network™ could be your talent recruitment solution. 

P.P.S. Not sure how to find and attract more of your ideal clients? If you have a proven high ticket offer, we know EXACTLY how to fill your pipeline with a constant stream of qualified and highly-motivated leads through our exclusive Leads on Demand™ program.

Simply click this link for more details.

Business Nitrogen