How To Find Where To Focus In Your Business

hey there. So I am jumping in with an extra solo episode this week because I have something really exciting coming up over the next few weeks for you. You are going to get a lot of ideas, tactics and strategies for 2021 from that. So before I. Unleash all of that on you. I wanted to make sure that it doesn't create overwhelm for you. It doesn't feel. Stressful. It doesn't feel like there are too many things and you don't know which one to do. I don't want to get you stuck into, Oh, I could do all of these things. And so I do nothing. So today I wanted to jump in and walk you through the framework that I teach to my clients this is going to highlight for you, which area of your business needs attention. And then you can grab all those tactics ideas tips coming in the next couple of weeks for that particular area. To make this even easier for you. If you go to Diane mayer.com forward slash 24, you can jump into my scoring tool and get your flow and focus score, which will tell you exactly where you need to be paying attention. So let's dive into the framework. I want you to think of your lifestyle business as a journey, and I want you to flick on Google maps for your business. When you open the map tool, the first thing you see is where you are right now. These are your foundations and what's critically important. Here is. There's no point aiming for some future destination. If you'll foundations are crumbling around you. So if you were gonna go on vacation or on a road trip and you walked out of your front door and the roof flew off your house, you are not still going to just merely hop in the call and off you go. You want to come back and be, Oh, well I need to need to put like a top at there or something. So it's critically important that you are. Working from a solid base. And there are three main areas in the foundation space. Do you have enough sales? Do you make enough profit and is your business optimized? And they go in that order because sales is pretty much oxygen for your business. So if you don't have that, you should just basically stop right now. And that's what you need to focus on. If you don't have enough profit, you can't stay in business. Right. So if you've got enough sales, but not enough profit. That's your next focus area. And then the optimization is your operations and your team. I always see people getting really excited about it, or I need to hire this person or streamline the system. if you're not making enough sales or profits, then that's kind of irrelevant. It doesn't matter how pretty the back end is if you're not making money. So that's the first piece of the framework foundation. Now, if you're headed off on a journey, then we're talking about your future. Where are you trying to get to? So that's when you pop in your destination into Google maps and it shows you where that is in relation to where you are right now. The reason we care about this future element is it gives you a North star, which is going to really guide your decisions going forward. And this is a longer term future. We are not talking about your one-year revenue goal. It's a much more detailed look at where your business is going and what success would look like and feel like for you. if you haven't already listened to episode 23, I highly recommend going back and grabbing that off. Do you finish gap? the next thing that happens when you've put it in your destination and you know, where you are is the map tool starts to draw that line for you. I think as part of road safety as a kid, I learned like the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You know, when they were teaching us, like don't cross the road at a diagonal. I dunno why that memory from being like age six has stuck with me so intensely, but it did. And. That is what a lot of marketing relies on. people are selling you that the shortest distance between where you are right now, and the goal that you want to get you, that future destination is their straight line. I did this, you can copy it and everything will be great. What that misses out is the landscape of you, your lifestyle and your business. What looked like a straight line for them could actually be taking you up a huge Hill and then down the other side it's not that you can't climb that Hill. It's not that you can't learn whatever new skill it is. It's just how much energy is that going to have taken from you by the time you get there? somebody else's straight line unless your lifestyle, you and your business are identical to them is not necessarily going to be that easy straight line for you, and, you know, you looked at Google maps before and gone. I'm not walking up that Hill. I'm going to take this way, which is 10 minutes longer, but it goes around that Hill so that I don't arrive a hot sweaty mess. This is the same thing. It's not that you can't do what someone else has done. It's just, that might not be the best way for you to. Finish this entire journey you want to burn out or arrive a hot sweaty mess in a way that feels just uncomfortable. So the third element is flow. We want to find your path of least resistance, which will be unique to you going from where you are right now to your future in the most energizing, exciting, and efficient way. Possible once you know where you are, where you're going and your possibly least resistance, the next decision that you you need to make in a journey is how am I going to get there? Am I going to walk? Am I going to drive? Am I going to get a bus? Am I going to call a taxi? This is the frame or business model for your journey. What is going to drive you along that path of least resistance in the most efficient way to get you to your destination? in a lifestyle business, this frame should be around both time and money. So it should be factoring in just like when you look at a journey, you think about what does this look like in terms of time and money, you should be thinking about that in terms of your business model. It is not simply copy so-and-so's business model because that made them X amount of money. if that made them work 20 hour days for six months, are you prepared for that time sacrifice? And very often that is the piece that people don't talk about when they are selling you the straight line. Point a to point B dream. They're not telling you the six years of work that led up to them. Being able to do straight line from point a to point B. They're not telling you, Hey, I had to work 15 hour days to get the started, and then it was four hours a day. So be very aware that when you're thinking about your business model, you want that to work for you for time and money. Now, we all know that when we're on our journey, once we've started, we're always looking at a couple of things we're looking at usually how far do we still have to go? When are we likely to get there? Am I still on track? You know, you want to make sure you have an accident and he veered off like the dotted blue line. And now suddenly you're actually going in the opposite direction. This is the figures element of the framework. These are the metrics that are going to tell you how you're doing. things like, do you have enough gas left in the tank? Do you have enough cash reserves? Things like how far have you come? how close are you to your goal? How much progress have you made? are you actually still on track with where you thought you'd be? Do you need to change course? Do you need to speed up? Can you slow down? These are the things that you should be looking at on a regular basis from weekly to monthly, as you continue on your lifestyle business journey. Now I don't know about you, but when I start a journey I just want to know a couple of things. is there some way I can stop to get caffeine and snacks, the longer the trip, but the more I want to know where I'm getting caffeine and snacks from and. Once I've had caffeine, I'm going to need to know where there's a different kind of pit stop along the way. This is the sixth element of the framework, which I call flex up the business against risk. And this is really contingency planning for good things like snacks. Like what happens if, I need a day off or where am I going to take vacations, but also things that are maybe not so fun. Like what happens if I get an awful stomach bug and I can't work for a day. It's important in order for you to stick to that journey and to those mapped out time horizons that these things are prepared for. So they just become little speed bumps rather than big roadblocks that you have to detour around. And the reason we use this framework, we use all six of these elements is to create the seventh element. When you have all of these things prepared and you are on your road trip, the only thing you're doing is really paying attention to the road. You're paying attention to exactly what you're doing right now until you're ready for the next to turn left at the end of the road. You can focus on exactly what you're doing in that moment. And it's the same for your business. When all of these elements are set up and working together in your business, you simply get to focus on what to do next. That means no overwhelm, no decision fatigue, no panicking, no feeling stuck or procrastinating, you know exactly what to focus on and you can just get on with it. So in the coming episodes where you're going to get a lot of tips and ideas and strategies, I want you to think about which element of the framework you need to be paying attention, to grab all of those tips and ideas that work for you for that element, go and implement them. Then you can think about the next element and come back and grab all of those tips and ideas and implement them. This is going to be far more effective for you than getting excited by all the things and implementing none of the things. And remember, you can go to diane.com forward slash 24. So the numbers two, four, and grab your flow and focus score, which will tell you exactly where your business needs. Attention first.