Transcript:

[0:00:00.6] Hey everyone. Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move.

And today, I’m coming to you, driving in the absolute pouring rain, driving to indoor soccer actually. Just finished the office. It’s eight o’clock in the evening.

I’m playing an indoor soccer game in 20 minutes’ time. And I thought I’d come and do a quick one-on-one interview, a monologue, and speak to you guys about marketing and what’s been a really productive day. So hopefully, the quality of this is pretty good.

I’ve tried to record this a few times, and it’s been pretty abysmal quality. So we’ll see how we go.

[0:00:00.6] However, quality aside, today has been a crazy day. Today, I was in the office at 8:30 AM and literally got home about 10 minutes ago.

And then, quickly changed and now I’m off to indoor soccer which is about 15 minutes away, but it’s been nuts. So today was really just a heads-down, bottoms-up, if you’ve never heard of that expression, it might sound a bit weird.

But just putting your head down and working and crushing it. So today, my day was planned out where I just had a whole—I’ve got two blog posts to write today. One, I was putting the finishing touches on and editing.

And editing takes a while. If you guys don’t write blogs, don’t write content, editing takes a while to do good editing, to put your links and to do everything you need to do probably.

But that took a while. And then after that, I had to do a post from scratch as well. And that takes even longer. So they were my two main tasks.

And I got to the office, and I work in a co-working space. So we’ve got a couple of other entrepreneurs and business owners there that are absolutely killing it.

We’ve got—I don’t know if I mentioned this in the past, in other podcast episodes, but we’ve got about five or six business in our space. We’ve all got our own room. So we’re all—like we all have our own businesses.

It’s a really good environment to be. And because we’re all pretty young and we’re all doing some amazing stuff, we’re all hitting some really big numbers, income-wise, profit-wise, business-wise.

And it’s a really good environment to be around. So that was one of the main reasons for me that I wanted to be involved in the space like this. And yeah, it’s just crazy.

[0:02:31.7] So working amongst other entrepreneurs, one thing is just incredible because you can get so much value out of it just by being in the right mindset all the time. And then, the other thing is that you can get feedback really quickly and really effectively too. For example, today, I’m launching a new section on my website.

And it’s going to be a free part of my website, a little navigation part that I’m going to be offering for free. And all the whole lot of free stuff I’m going to be giving away on my website, which I have been meaning to do for a while, but I haven’t been able to get around to.

And you might be listening to this podcast from the website as well. So either way, I’m looking to add a section on the website where I’m going to be giving some incredible value which I’ve been quite lazy on doing.

And I’ve got an idea, and it’s pretty crazy. It’s pretty nuts. And I think it’s going to stand me outside of the competition by a mile.

So I’m looking forward to delivering that too. I don’t want to release the idea just yet, but you’ll see it soon, hopefully in the next two to three weeks.

I’ve been speaking with my team and we’re putting things together. We’re getting things in motion.

[0:03:37.0]So anyway, that’s besides the point, back to what I was talking about. Today, I had two things I wanted to do. One of them was to write a whole new blog post, and the other one was to edit it.

Those two things got done in the first two and a half hours of my day which was incredible. I’ve never been so productive in my life.

And usually, a blog post, and I’m talking about 1,500 words—2,000 word, well-written blog post, they’ll take, for me, they take between about four hours, four to five hours, if not longer. And I’m talking about a well-constructed blog post, not something we just mind dump and it just comes out, well-constructed blog post.

So I put altogether one of those, finished the other one. And then, I was just sort of went on a roll.

Once you get in the groove, and I’m sure you guys have felt the same way, you get in the mood and you just get on a roll. And you smash out work. You don’t want to leave the seat.

So I ran downstairs, got some sushi from the sushi shop, came back upstairs. First thing I did was after that, I went through my financials making sure all my expenses and income are in order.

That’s one thing which I think a lot of entrepreneurs shy away from is your actual financials, your accounting. And I was exactly the same. I absolutely hated my accounting. I hated everything I had to do with it.

I didn’t know where my money was going in, out, left, right, what happened, what was happening with tax, any of that. So I cleaned up my act. What I did with that was I got, number one, I got my assistant to help me out.

So I’ve got a virtual assistant based in the Philippines. She tracks all my food expenditure every day. Every time I eat something, I spend money on something, I just send her a quick message on WhatsApp.

And I tell her, “Hey, Chelly, I’ve just bought a sushi, four sushis. It cost me $10. Add it to the food expenses.” Bang, it gets added to the expenses.

I just like it. It’s super clean, super easy. So I’ve got an expenses spreadsheet.

I’ve got an income spreadsheet. And I break down everything from affiliate earnings, to salaries, to everything. Everything you can dream of.

And it goes pretty in-depth. There’s charges a whole lot. So that’s number one thing. And the reason was I didn’t track that really well was I didn’t know what was happening.

I didn’t know where to start. Everything was just a mess. And that’s the number one reason, I believe, that people don’t know what they’re doing or shy away from tasks or put them at the bottom of your to-do list, is because you don’t know the right path and the right course of action.

That’s usually what it is. It’s not because that task is bad or boring, it’s usually because you don’t know where to start.

There’s just so much havoc and so much chaos going on within that task that it’s just crazy. You don’t know where to start.

You don’t want to start because you know once you get there, it’s going to be a mess, heaps of hours just to clean it all up. So the key is to not let it get that bad.

The key is to leave it and make sure—or not leave it, to actually work on it, but make sure you’ve got a systemized approach and you’re doing this every single week.

[0:06:23.8] It’s like when I was studying for my university exams, and that wasn’t long. But when I was at university or when I was in school in high school, one of the things was just putting off your work, putting off your readings and assignments.

I did it all the time. Putting it all off until the exam period, and then wandering and looking back and you’re seeing like, catching up on all this work. You didn’t know where to start.

It was the worst thing ever. You put on the bottom of all your list to procrastinate. That’s the number one reason for procrastination, it’s not knowing where to start, not seeing the right course of action, not having a systemized approach.

And it’s just crazy because you don’t know what you’re doing. So you add it to the bottom of your list. And that happened to me all the time with studying.

So that’s what happened with my accounting as well, because I had no idea where my money was going, what I was doing with it. So I did get my ass into the gear. I sorted it all out.

I put it into an excel spreadsheet, soon put it in Zero as well, which you can find in my resources if you’re not familiar what Zero is just an accounting software. And yeah, so I can see exactly now the money that I need to pay the taxes and the invoices, where my money is going to the date, to the client, to whatever.

So I can see exactly where all my money is coming from and where it’s going out, which is super powerful because I can budget. I can budget my personal expenses and my business expenses, all of the above. So I think that was one of the most powerful things I’ve ever done.

[0:07:46.3] And then, today, what I did was my accounting.

So I did that. After that, what do we do?

After that, I was speaking with a few—I spent the day with my designer about this cool package that I’m going to be putting together for you guys on my website. Got some feedback from some of the other guys in the office.

And yeah, actually, one cool resource which I found today. I can’t even remember the name of it because I just got it. But I’ll definitely put it in the podcast show notes.

I think it’s called “Byword” or something like that, something weird. I found this new blog actually. That was fantastic. I’m kind of just mind dumping here.

But I found this new blog. I think it’s called “SorryForMarketing.com.” It’s a content marketer who’s just fantastically worked for Google, HubSpot, a whole lot of different marketing companies.

And he actually suggested this resource. I went out and bought what was like $15 Mac program. Went out and bought it. It makes blogging a lot easier.

It’s just for Mac and iPhone, by the way. So if you’re on Windows, you might struggle. But it’s just a super clean, minimalist word document thing which you just put together and then you can export it straight into WordPress. It’s fantastic.

I hate writing in WordPress. It’s the scariest thing ever. So you just put it together and just document. And you can export it, copy in HTML, and PDF, whatever you want. So I’ll make sure that’s in the show notes. So jump on that.

[0:09:04.4] But yeah, end of the day, the point of the story is, after me babbling on for the last five-ten minutes is when you’re on a roll, don’t stop, because when you’re in that motion, don’t let anything get in the way of that motion. Just keep cranking at work. That’s the best time to really put yourself in that position, to just get as much done as possible, because you get in a groove.

Like another thing I did today was I set up a plan for my auto-responder that was in active campaign. There were a whole bunch of things which I was doing.

So when you get into that groove, as entrepreneurs, we tend to go up and down the groove the whole time. We go up the ladder, down the ladder, up the ladder, we feel really motivated at some point, and now, we just can’t be bothered getting out of bed.

We all go through it. But when you’re in that zone, when you’re in and feel like you’re crushing it and you just want to get stuff done, just stick in there. That’s my advice. Don’t get away from it.

If your friends want to ask you to go out, if you want to go home, have an early dinner, just stay in that groove as much as possible, because you’re the most productive. You feel on top of the world, and you get as much done as you can.

It just makes your life so much easier. And when you go through it, you look back at the day and you can just say, “Wow, I’ve actually done so much work today. I’m so impressed with myself.”

And just to top off this podcast, it’s starting to rain, so I don’t know if you can hear me. Hopefully, the quality doesn’t go down. But it actually started pouring now.

[0:10:23.5] One thing is I was watching a video with Ryan Levesque. And he was interviewing someone and he was talking about what he does with his goals each day.

And one of the things that he wrote about was at the end of each day, he puts together—it was actually with Jeff Walker, Founder of Product Launch Formula. And he was talking about at the end of each day, he writes together three wins that he’s had today – I think it was three wins.

– Three wins, any type of win at any scale. So at the end of the day, every single day, what are three wins you’ve had today?

They can be as little as just breathing and being alive all the way up to closing a six-seven figure dollar deal, and crushing it in your business. It could be anything with your personal life as well.

So having a moment with your partner or your fiancée or your girlfriend or whatever you’ve got, anything.

Just writing down three wins that you’ve had in your life. And I found that really interesting. So I’ve added that now to my routine.

And what I’ve also added back into my routine is rewriting my goals at the beginning of every single day, so not all my goals, but my one main goal.

If I could hit one goal out of all of them, what would it be?

And for me, it’s a financially-motivated goal. For you, it might be different. But writing that out every single day, because I did that for about three or four months at the start of the year, I got slacked.

I forgot to do it. And when you forget to do it for about two days in a row, you start forgetting to do it full stop. And that’s what happened to me. So I’m getting back into the habit of doing that.

And it’s phenomenal how that changes. And I love looking back at the actual piece of paper, writing down every morning, and just going back through the pages, and seeing the same thing written out, knowing every single day that’s what was at the top of my mind at the beginning of the day.

It’s crazy, and goal-setting absolutely works. So that’s one thing which I am putting back into my routine.

[0:12:17.6] So between those two, I’m going to leave you with this, that your goal-setting needs to be consistent and it actually needs to mean something to you. It doesn’t need to mean something to anyone else.

Just by putting goals together, it needs to be something that’s important to you, number one. And it needs to be consistent. So what I highly recommend is find something that works for you.

Find something which is consistent. Find something which really motivates you and go from there, because it doesn’t have to be a complicated goal. It doesn’t have to be difficult.

Just do something and do it consistently. So I’m going to leave you with that, guys. And hopefully, you guys can learn something from this short podcast today.

I’m heading indoor soccer. And I’ll speak to you guys soon.