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In many contexts, we hear that less is more.

You say it in health and fitness all the times. Focusing on small daily habits that stack up rather than trying to do it all at once. In my experience I’m juggling college, internships, working full-time, and life in general to growing my business, focusing on less and choosing seasons tends to allow for the most productivity and progress. This is the basis of one of my favorite books, and some thing I require or encourage my foot screws to read. That is the book, Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

The book and the concept of the lessons more is fairly meaningless without practice and application. It requires you to define what is a priority, or essential and also, equally as important, to define what is not. You’re giving yourself permission to not do certain things, to do less. And those things might be very good, and things that you do indeed want to accomplish, but we can’t accomplish everything at one time.

In that same breath, you absolutely can accomplish more than maybe you think in one year by focusing on less in a given season. That is what today’s episode is about – how you will hopefully be able to get more of what you want done in 2023 by doing less.

This is going to be especially applicable to entrepreneurs. It’s not just for those early in business, or more mature in business. And nearly any season I have experienced so far, our endless possibilities and what we can focus on. And a never ending to do list if we aren’t careful.

We talked about goal setting for this year in a previous episode. You will hear some overlap in this episode. But we are going to start by identifying one to three goals, and work backwards from there. This is not rocket science. And this is not new. But it’s needed nonetheless. We will consciously and subconsciously always come up with more that can be done. We are very good at filling white space or a lack of clarity with busywork. Having a clear focus to refer back to you again and again can mitigate that.

So what are your one to three goals. I am going to focus on business. Feel free to apply the concepts to whatever makes sense for you.

Is it getting to a certain amount of clients? Making a certain amount of money? Focusing on the email list growth. Each of these seems simple enough, but are massive tasks in your business if you want to make significant growth in these areas. And they require strategy, and refinement as you go.

Once you determine your one to three goals, it’s important to look at if these three goals affect one another are completely separate from one another. I could see email list growth and sales or client roster growth going hand-in-hand. Essentially you are focusing in on optimizing email marketing as a nurturing and sales tactic to help you reach the goal of getting more clients or higher revenue. Maybe your approach to gaining more revenue is creating more income streams. That’s the next task that I want you to complete. Determining goals or mile markers that you would need to achieve in order to reach these 1 to 3 year long goals.

If you want to have a certain number of clients by the end of the year, you first need to recognize that this means you will achieve the goal by the end of the year, not in month one. How many points do you need to attain on a monthly or quarterly basis, whatever makes most sense for you? And what is the plan and marketing strategy for that to happen. We can’t just wish for these things to happen, or say that they are going to happen and expect them to without any strategy in place.

Same with growth on your email list. Where are the email subscribers coming from? How many do you need to gain per week or per month? And how do you plan on doing that? We want to make sure the goals in the numbers that you are choosing or feasible with the audience that you currently have to work with.

I hope you can see where if you are really going all in on these one to three goals, while also maintaining everything else that needs to be maintained in life, in business, you will be plenty occupied.

At this point, we are already a month or two into the year. How are your current goals going? What strategies and systems are being put in place in order to achieve these goals? We need to actively be pursuing these goals, as well as reviewing and refining them as needed. All of your decisions that you make in your business should be filtered through these goals.

If your goal is email list growth, and the opportunity to expand your platform onto Pinterest comes up, that’s not necessarily a distraction from your goal, it’s another opportunity to explore a way to drive traffic to your email list. That’s just one example. Sticking with the email list growth, I let go of opportunities or other projects that might distract you and think about how you can use what you already do to grow your email list. How can you create content that better educates your audience and get them to join your mailing list?

Really go all in on these goals. And I encourage you to be OK with saying this is something else I really want to do, create, or achieve but that’s a 2024 project. Or that project is contingent on me reaching one of these specific goals.

You will undoubtedly spread yourself too thin, very quickly if we are trying to grow the email list, expand onto multiple platforms, increase revenue, create new products, and do everything at one time. Now, all of those things can, and likely will improve if you focus on less. So more revenue might come as a byproduct of you reaching these other goals, or honing in on your contact creation and email list building. So all the results might actually be growth in a bunch of different areas of your business, that grows in multiple areas is more likely to come from you focusing on less areas of your business, ironically enough.

So in regards to your goals, what is most pressing, time wise? Or what is the lowest hanging fruit in your business? Maybe you’ve looked at where 80% of your income comes from, and you realize that is one of your offers. How can you optimize that offer and let go of other things? Or, maybe you determine that you would like to expand your offer suite beyond service or product that makes you your 80%. Either is right or wrong in my opinion, different business models work for different people. But you having clarity on your business model what direction you want to take your business is extremely important. So once you determine your one to three goals and some benchmarks that you need to hit along the way, then we need to strategize which is kind of what I’ve been talking about.  

What approaches are you going to tackle? That could be on a quarterly basis, that could mean that you are hiring help. This will be a lot of trial and error likely. That’s not a bad thing. And I would argue it’s required if you are really focusing in on your 1 to 3 goals in optimizing those areas.

Do you need to do market research? Do you need to hire someone? Do you need to purchase a course? Do you need to invest in your business? Do you need to map out possible strategies to try throughout the year? And what will those be?

Then you’re going to review and refine on a weekly basis. And a monthly basis.

Are we hitting those benchmarks? What’s working? What’s not working? And adjust goal expectations, or strategy as you go. This is how you’ll get more done by focusing on less in 2023.

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