How To Refocus On The Things That Help Your Business Grow

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED I found it hard to finish things. I don't know whether that's a case of my ADHD, my astrological sign, my Enneagram type, who knows, but for me having the idea and getting started. And almost solving the problem is the most exciting part. I'm in the final home stretch of my MBA in organizational happiness. I have done all the data, gathering all the analysis and even presented the project to my examiners. And all that's left for me to do is to submit that final paper. In fairness to myself, my final paper resembles something like a textbook because it is so detailed with so much data in it. That it's almost understandable. But apparently the universe wanted to give me a nudge in the right direction slash. Kick up the heinie on this one. And today I was reminded of something that. I think Bay's reminding. For everyone, because I think we tend to forget it. And it's one of those things that every time we see it, we go, oh, yes, of course. And then we forget all about it. And what I'm talking about is the 80 20 rule. So, if you haven't heard of the 80 20 rule. Or the Pereda principle or you just need a refresher on it. So Pareto was an Italian economist back in the day, and he noticed that I can't remember what plant it was some plant in his garden, 20% of the plant yielded, 80% of the food item. And he then went on to apply that logic to land distribution, and 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population. And then many years later, a British guy wrote the book, the 80 20 principle. And the idea behind it is that. A minority of things. Inputs. People causes, substitute, whatever word you want here. And minority of ex. Leads to the majority of the results. The 80 20 thing. Isn't like a hard and fast rule in every single situation, but the minority of inputs creating the majority of the outputs is the piece that I want us to focus on. So while for me, I'm using it as this reminder to just keep pushing towards that finish line and write the novel. That is my organizational health plan for a small business. I want you to think about it in terms of your business. Where are we paying too much attention to the 80% that's giving us 20% of the results. I think about your office. Maybe you have this whole diverse office stream. But 20% of your offers are probably creating 80% of your revenue. How is your time split to match that? Right. All you put in your time and your effort and your energy. In the right place. What if we apply this to your customers? R 20% or the vital few of your customers creating most of your revenue, right? Where are those raving fans who come back and buy. Every single thing that you sell. That buy from you again and again, and again. Now let's take a step back and think about where is your time focused? Is your time focused on attracting those new customers that you don't even have, or these customers who are already generating so much of your revenue? We can apply this to your marketing. Mate. Probably 80% of your results are coming from. 20% of your posts or one specific platform. And yet we're still repurposing and spending a whole bunch of time on that. I'm not saying repurposing is bad. But instead, I want you to use this as an opportunity to really refocus yourself. Into what's creating value in your business. Okay. Let's get a bit tougher. What if we talk about decisions. What if 20% of the decisions. Create 80% of the outcomes in your business. Now, what percent. Of the decisions are you making in your business? This is particularly important. If you have a team. Your time and energy and focus needs to be on those big strategic, urgent decisions. While your team handles the other 80%. Yet we cling so tightly to that control to needing, to make every single decision. What if instead we focused on what are those 20% of decisions that are creating 80% of the outcome. And we allowed our team to step up. And to take that space. If you want to see how this highlights in your business, I want to refer us back to one of my favorite tools, which you hear me talk about. All the time, which is the Eisenhower matrix. , if you haven't heard me talk about the Eisenhower matrix before, I'm sure you've seen it. It's where you have the matrix with the two axes and on the Y axis, for example, is urgent at the top, but not urgent at the bottom. And on the X axis is not important on the left and important on the right. And so you get these, these squares that are urgent and important, urgent, not important, important, not urgent. Not urgent, not important. And you can put all of your to-do list. Into this matrix. It's the Pareto principle in practice because only 20% of the things are actually urgent and important. It's the rare things, the tiny, important things. That we need to focus on. That are going to get us 80% of the results. That's why owning that one sector is things you need to do now. The not important, not urgent gets deleted completely. The important, but not urgent gets shoveled for like, do this at some point. And urgent and not important gets delegated to somebody else. It's the 80%. So I want you to take a moment today. Maybe you draw the Eisenhower matrix and you dump everything that's floating around in your head. That's taking up so much space. And you find out what is that 20% that you can focus on? Maybe you take a step back the next time. You're about to make a decision. And asked yourself if that decision should be made by you. We're a month in. So maybe when you look at your financials, You pay attention to where's the money coming from? Maybe when you're reviewing your KPIs, you look at your marketing, wherever the results coming from. The idea as far as to really focus where we need to focus. The 20% that only we as the business owner and the face of the business can do. And look at how we can delegate. Or eliminate. The rest of the 80%. This is how we get that growth. That we desperately want without burning on our team without burning out ourselves without needing to give up our entire lives. We need to focus on finishing the 20% of the stuff that's really important. And not be distracted by the 80% that isn't.