🥲 I Have Failed! But Here Is My Plan To Fix It!

We are almost there at the end of 2023!

Cue the thousands of ‘New Year, New You’ messages, the talk of New Year's resolutions, 2024 goals and the like.

I hate the concept of New Year’s resolutions. I just see it as a delaying tactic.

If there is a task you need to carry out, a habit you need to develop, a goal you want to achieve - DO IT NOW!

Don’t wait for an arbitrary date in the future. Procrastinating. Delaying the development of your future self.

TAKE ACTION NOW!

That said, I must confess to joining the ‘New Year, New You’ bandwagon and delaying many of the things I should have already been doing in 2023.

I am always nothing but honest with you, the good, the bad, the ugly.

And truthfully the last few months of this year have contained a lot more bad and ugly than good!

Work has been tough. My personal life has been a mess. I have had a bad bout of some kind of flu with a never ending cough.

And the 3 combined have just left me feeling demotivated and down.

I haven’t been working hard enough. I haven’t been eating right. I haven’t been exercising enough.

Don’t get me wrong, the wheels have still been turning, things have still been moving forwards, but at nothing like the pace they should have, and I have delayed many tasks that should already be well underway.

I knew I would get to them. Maybe I just wanted some extra time off? A bit of a break.

Whatever it was, I used January 1st 2024 as my excuse - that is when things would happen. The fireworks would start.

So thank god we are there, because as much as it has been my fault and I could have dug myself out of it earlier, I can’t wait to get going now.

I tell you all of this for no other reason than to let you know that we are all human, and regardless of how things look from the outside, or from social media, nothing and nobody are without their challenges.

But like with anything, we learn from it, and what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. And as always, I try to do the failing for you so that your journey can be quicker and smoother.

So before we head off into 2024, let’s round off 2023 with some of my key takeaways.

A Successful Business Is Run Like a Sports Team, Not a Family

You hear a lot about businesses being run as a family unit, treating your colleagues like brothers and sisters. 

Now whilst that may help build good morale at times, in isolation it is unlikely to put you top of charts.

In a family people get free passes no matter how many times they fuck up. The wrong people are put in positions, and are left there, just because they are family. Decision making tends to be democratic. 

In a sports team the BEST people are put in each position - period. Individual accountability is high, with poor performers being benched or cut, regardless of the surrounding circumstances. Decisions are led from the top - the manager's decision is final, and then everyone else must fall in line.

I could probably spin this out into a whole newsletter at some point in the future, but for here the message is clear, great results demand top performances all round, and anyone letting the rest of the business down doesn’t belong in their place any longer.

I have carried far too many people over the years in business. There is always an excuse to keep someone if you want to find it. 

Justifying their output is important, even if you know it isn’t anywhere near enough. Thinking they will turn the corner soon. Maybe just because they are a nice guy or girl.

The quicker you can cut them loose then the quicker the average of the team will improve. The more motivated top performers will be because they see you don’t carry dead weight. The more free cashflow you will have to invest in other activities.

I have been far far too slow to fire people up to now. 2024 will be the year of the fast sword! 

But It will be done with respect and transparency, and ultimately everyone will end up in a better place.

An A Player Will Cost You 25% More Than a B Player, But They Will Deliver 10 Times More

Hiring great staff is essential for building a great business. But don’t confuse good with great. 

Good staff meet expectations. Great staff EXCEED expectations.

Good staff follow instructions and complete their tasks. Great staff use their initiative, anticipate needs and act on them, improve processes and take ownership of projects. 

Good staff seek to maintain their skillset with training opportunities. Great staff are hungry to learn new skills that will allow them to constantly grow and develop.

That’s all pretty obvious right? Certainly no real surprise. 

So why do we all have a team full of A players? Whilst I am not saying that finding them is a breeze, one of the biggest blockers is refusing to pay A player wages. 

Don’t be tight! 

An A player is worth their weight in gold and will more than earn their wages, showing great ROI. And the price difference is rarely that great. 

I would say that a 25% differential is the difference between good and great for most roles.

And when you find great staff, do whatever it takes to keep them. Hire the best and pay them so much they can’t even contemplate looking for another role elsewhere.

Discipline Is More Important Than Motivation

A lot is spoken about motivation, bouncing out of bed in a morning excited to take over the world. And how that motivation is what makes dreams become reality.

But what if you just aren’t motivated? What if you are ill? In a bad mood? Just don’t have the drive for whatever reason?

Creating a set of rules or tasks that must be done and carried out at all costs, and developing the discipline to do so is your key to success.

Motivation is periodic and temporary. Discipline is a muscle you can develop for life.

An area this works well for me is with my nutrition. 

If there is chocolate in the fridge then I am going to eat it! I simply don’t have the motivation to say no and fight it. But if I don’t allow that chocolate to be in the house in the first place, through DISCIPLINE, then I never miss it and I never eat it.

Discipline beats motivation every day of the week. Have systems. Have routines. Have rules. And follow them religiously.

Delegate Your Way To Success

As an entrepreneur your mission should be to find ways to constantly buy back your time so that you do nothing but the highest value activities.

Therefore you should be passing off everything that someone else can do cheaper. Everything that you don’t like doing (unless you are so much better at it than everyone else and it is an activity that is responsible for driving serious revenue to your business).

Performing tasks that can be delegated is not a smart way of saving money. 

If there really isn’t a task that you could be doing more profitably then maybe you need to be spending that time learning, growing your skills, finding ways to make your business more profitable.

Cleaners, gardeners, nanny, chefs, assistants shouldn’t be luxuries. They should be smart hires that give you the time back to make 10 times what you are paying out to hire them. 

What are some of my goals for 2024? 

These are personal to me, and not something that you can specifically learn from. But I like the concept of making public declarations of goals and intent as it puts more pressure to perform.

• Develop a finance brokerage within Funding Guru to sit alongside our principal lending offering.

• Grow this newsletter to 100k subscribers whilst maintaining or growing the current open rate (currently at 12k subscribers with a 40%+ open rate)

• Build an internal fund-raising team that generates a consistent minimum of £2m per month of new investor funds

• Create a minimum of 1 educational product to sell to my audience

• Open a minimum of 3 new Bierkeller venues in my leisure group

• Raise a minimum of £10m growth funding for my Luxury Retail Group

• Launch a concierge and networking business to monetise my incredible network

• Enter a live poker tournament (it’s not all work related!)

I am also planning on increasing my reading, improving my nutrition and fitness, and building in the regular learning of new skills into my schedule too.

(If you think you can help me with any of the above then feel free to reach out. I am always looking for great staff, partners and opportunities.)

How am I going to achieve my goals?

I am still putting the finishing touches to my 2024 action plan but I can tell you now that it will include some of the following:

• A big focus on sleep. I am not a great sleeper, but when I do sleep well I notice the difference so much. Better mood. Better productivity. Better fitness. I will be putting a big focus on earlier nights and less messing around in bed to distract me from sleep.

• Firing any under performing staff or people who don’t fit the future plan. This ties in with what I was talking about earlier on in this email. I am going to try and focus ruthlessly on A players only, and improve my ability to have candid conversations with B players.

• Hire a personal assistant. I have had PA over the years and never have I been able to find a relationship that works. Usually as much my fault as theirs but in line with the importance of delegation, filling this role is essential to my overall improved success.

• Build a 6 person sales floor in Dubai, to take greater control of our investor acquisition.

• Plan my weekly calendar in 15 and 30 minute blocks to include every activity that is important to me, ensuring nothing is ever missed.

• Hire an incredible Head of Digital Marketing.

• Protect my time ruthlessly by not taking on any business activities, relationships or invitations that don’t move me closer to my goals. Learn the power of ‘NO’!

There will be plenty more added to this which I will tell you all about in each weekly edition on this newsletter in 2024. So make sure you stay subscribed, tell your friends, and follow my social media.

Enjoy these last couple of days of 2023, and join me on a journey together of improvement, growth, and making shit loads of money!

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