Are Squirrels Eating Your Profits?

Sales Nuggets

As entrepreneurs there are a lot of what we call “bright shiny objects” out there distracting us.

This time of the year, we have the holidays, pulling our focus away from work…as it should be. But year-round innumerable distractions come into our inboxes every day. There are interesting requests and even trainings that may capture our attention, but won’t further the ultimate goals of our business. We may get caught up in dramas playing out in social media, or spend hours acquiring the latest and greatest piece of technology that we don’t actually need.

In my Sales, Authenticity & Success Mastermind (aka Sassy), we call these distractions “squirrels.” This comes from a scene in the children’s movie “Up,” where a bunch of dogs were right on track, gaining on the bad guy, when, all of a sudden, one of the dogs sees a squirrel, gets distracted, and they all go off in a different direction to chase it.

They lose focus, and their goal slips away. Sound familiar?

Focus is key when you have your own business, yet it’s so easy to be distracted by the squirrels. That’s why I have developed end-to-end systems for myself and my clients that serve the primary focus of any expert or service professional, who is looking to make a deep and lasting difference for their ideal client. These systems have enabled me to stay focused, to make a difference for heart-centered entrepreneurs around the world, to make the Inc. 500/5000 the past two years in a row and to sell millions of dollars of my own products and services.

Sassy Power Hour
It’s a little early for Christmas or Hanukkah, but I wanted to give you a gift. The Sassy Power Hour is a focusing tool that we provide for my Sassy Mastermind members to support them in having three different hour-long blocks during the week, where they are specifically focused on creating the business structure we teach.

While we use a customized online tool to support them with this, I want to share the principles behind it with you, as they are very powerful.

Research shows that we spend most of our day picking off the easy or quick things, but not accomplishing our high-priority tasks. We’re chasing squirrels and not working on the bigger vision that’s really going to move our business forward.

So to stay on track with what matters most, here’s how you can employ the Sassy Power Hour philosophy:

1. Choose your goal. What is the big vision that you’re moving toward? With my Sassies, this would be creating a business structure that supports both client attraction and high-level client conversion, so that they can accomplish their work in the world…without being salesy.

2. Reverse engineer from your goal. Break down the steps toward your goal. What are the pieces you need in place to success? For example, in our Mastermind, we provide what we call a Sassy Path Checklist. It contains all of the elements a heart-centered entrepreneur would want to create so that he or she is ready to turn interested prospects into invested clients in any situation. It includes elements such as getting your Signature Talk and Irresistible Offer ready, having an ezine to provide value year round, and having a super-hot free gift so that if Oprah calls, you’re not only ready to appear and contribute, but to capture hot interested leads as well.

Tweet  Reverse engineer from your goal. Break down the steps toward your goal.

3. Now, break down those steps into tasks and decide how much time each task needs.
We recommend breaking down projects into small enough pieces that can be accomplished in 10-30 minutes, so you can accomplish three tasks per power hour. For example, rather than trying to create a whole project in one hour, such as a free downloadable gift, instead you’d break it down into the first element, which might be to brainstorm three options for a great free gift with a fellow mastermind member or colleague.

Then just turn off your cell phone, shut down your inbox, close your door, set your timer, and start on your first task.

Three hours a week may not sound like a long time, but, trust me, you’d be amazed at how much you can transform your business when you’re out chasing highly profitable activities instead of squirrels.