30 Days To Turn Around A Failing Business (Day 1)

Hmm.. where to start?

“Houston, there is a problem!”

And I have red alerts lighting up everywhere. I’m nervous, palms are sweaty and I’m not sure where to do first or at all.

I’m not sure if you’ve felt this way before in business or in life, but that’s where I am right now.

What’s the current status?

I built a business with over $150,000 of annual residual income and was expecting to grow and hit my goal of $250,000 / year. Then I lost over $100,000 in residual annual income in a two week period. What’s more is that I was under contract on a house, but lost that too.

I feel paralyzed. Paralyzed with fear, Frustrated that the business that I build had a MAJOR setback and I didn’t handle adversity well. Like at all!

It’s been a couple years since this transpired and I haven’t been able to shake this, can’t tell up from down and not sure where to go or if I should even be in business. The personal business assessment that I took the other day says “NO” in big fat red letters, so that’s exciting.

Business & Personal Assessment

A couple weeks ago I did a Peak Performance Assessment through Eric Partaker to see what skills, or lack there of, I have. Here are the results.

Here are some of the key takeaways with this assessment:

1. A low score here indicates that you struggle to operate as your best self. As a result, there is a large gap between who you are and who you are capable of being.
2. Productivity score: 20% – Your productivity score is low. You are unlikely to reach your full potential in life if you have a low score in any area of this assessment.
3. Antifragility score 25% – Your Antifragility score is low, which indicates that you struggle under stress or when things don’t go to plan. Antifragile is the opposite of fragile, whereby the more hardship you experience, the stronger you become – similar to how stressing a muscle is the very thing that causes it to grow.
4. Self-fulfillment score 35% – Your Self-fulfillment score is low, indicating that you generally don’t feel as fulfilled as you should. As a result, you are unlikely to feel you’ve reached your full potential.

To sum it up, I’m failing at basically everything and I have to turn this Business (life) around.

Time to change… Here’s my Plan: BESHLI

They say that a plan is better than no plan at all, so here’ my plan for turn my business and life around.

For me, there is no time to waste. I don’t want to wait another day, and financially, can wait another second. I have to go!

I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 20 years now and have read countless books and here is what I came up with for the fastest business plan ever: BESHLI

• B – Beliefs: the foundation of who I am and the steps that I take, or don’t, comes down to my beliefs.
• E – Experience: Both good and bad shape who I am and my beliefs
• S – Skills: Developed from experience.
• H – Habits: Born out of Beliefs and experiences. And based upon my assessment above, this NEEDS to change.
• L – Leverage: Tools, systems, relationships to exponentially grow income.
• I – Income: Not limited to financial income, but the expected result of the primary goal that you are targeting (financial, relational, physical, spiritual etc).

I wanted to keep it simple.

Basically, I need to change my mindset of beliefs, not a radical reformation, but a couple tweaks to get the trajectory turned around. I need to use my experience and skills to create new habits to leverage the systems, tools and relationships that I have in order to succeed in business, which = income.

I’ll go into each one of these sections in the coming days, but I wanted to create a baseline for:

1. What’s my current status
2. Who I am and my beliefs
3. What is my experience level this year by completed tasks / projects
4. Put a plan together of what I need to do this week and for the next 30 days

Here is version 1 of BESHLI: 

Here is my current years experience / skill tree: 

And yes,  I am incorporating the Diablo into my business plan. More on that in the coming days 🙂

Goals – Nothing happens without a starting point and a destination

Current state: $1,875 MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) with variable one-time project income.

1 month Goal: $4,000 MMR signed

6 Month Goal: $10,000 monthly recurring revenue signed.

I say signed as it takes 4 – 6 weeks for a signed customer to begin monthly payments within my business model.

Strategy – What to do in the next 30 days?

Whelp, here we are. Go time.

Simply put, I need money. And I need money fast!

I also need to stop the bleeding. My goals are to slash all expenses and get back to black from a cash flow perspective immediately.

I need to slash all expenses till it really hurts. Only the absolute minimum business life support costs. Don’t spend money unless that thing makes you significant money!

I also need to put together a 30 day calendar action list.

Key note: no more “Squirrel”! Keep the main thing the main thing. 

Here’s what I will do in the first 7 days:

1. Accounting
   1. go through all income and expenses and create a budget for the next 30 days
   2. Cut All expenses
2. Customer Management
   1. Get in touch with all current clients and talk about status updates
   2. Come up with avenues to go above & beyond services wise to create value.
3. Sales
   1. Immediate Income (Free) – Reach out to old clients for new sales opportunities
      1. Segment clients into each niche (WordPress, Joomla, SEO, Dealers). reach out to each of them individually and talk about new service opportunities.
      2. Joomla (Joomla 3 to J4 updates) – templates and component updates.
      3. WordPress – Create bi-annual update service packages for all of them
      4. SEO – look for new SEO opportunities to help grow their business
   2. Dealer Content Campaign (Free)
      1. Go through the new content list that I already have created and never did, and create the informational content
         1. Create a CTA for scheduling demo for our service
      2. Create a content & social calendar for the next 30 days
      3. Email dealers new content
      4. Share new content on social
   3. Top 100 Dealer campaign ($210)
      1. Go through the dealer list and sort by the top 100. Verify that they are in the same position.
      2. Craft a 4 week snail mail newsletter campaign.
      3. Write out week 1 newsletter and mail by Friday.
      4. Expense: $210 – 300 stamps, 300 envelopes (I have 100 stamps and envelopes already)

Mentor = Wisdom

I don’t want to do this alone and I can’t. While I can’t invest any money into a business coach (like Eric Partaker above), I need to Leverage the relationships that I currently have to see out wisdom as it was the lack of wisdom that got me in to this mess.

I will reach out to a couple people to see if they have time to sit down for coffee (Matt S.) or lunch to go over what I’m going through and to pick their brain.

Wrapping Up

Let me first start off by saying this:

I’m at where I am because of me and not anybody else. I take 1,000% accountability for my past actions & in-actions. There is no-body to blame but me.

Next…

Nothing happens without a first step. Here we go…