Welcome, everyone. My name is Stephen Halasnik and I am CoFounder and Managing Partner of Financing Solution. Financing Solutions is a leading provider of Lines of Credit to small businesses. Our Line of credit program is fast, easy, inexpensive, and costs nothing to set up making it a great cash backup plan for your business. If you would like to learn more about our line of credit program, please visit us at www.fscreditline.com or give us a call at 862-207-4118.
Guest: Perry Marshall
Today, I am excited to be speaking with Perry Marshall.
Perry Marshall is one of the most sought after business consultants in the world, consulting in over 300 industries. Endorsed in Forbes and Inc Magazine, he’s guided clients like FanDuel and InfusionSoft from startup to hundreds of millions of dollars. Perry is the owner of Perry S. Marshall & Associates, which has helped tens of thousands of small companies become big companies. Perry Marshall, is the author of eight books, including 80/20 Sales and Marketing. His newest book, Detox, Declutter, Dominate: How to Excel by Elimination reveals how readers can grow their business 4X faster by eliminating 80% of wasted effort.
Perry, Welcome to the todays Entrepreneur MBA Podcast
What Is a Complexaholic at the Core? Managing Emails
Perry Marshall points out that a good way of looking at this is analyzing the parts of which an individual is able to look at a situation. A good entrepreneur is able to take something that is complex on the inside and appears simple on the outside. As humans, we often tend to complicate things more than it needs to be, and also we tend to get lost inside the complexity. Oftentimes, 5%-15% of businesses are losing money by overly complicated things on the inside, and fail to recognize that they need to step back and declutter things. When a business is striving for success and domination, it can even be helpful to figure out what you are not going to do, even before you know what you want to do. This will help avoid unnecessary complexity.
Steps to Avoid Becoming a Complexaholic
- Detox
- Declutter
- Dominate
Allow Yourself to Detox
Businesses always have clients that they know they shouldn’t have. Sometimes we have clients that we take on in the beginning that end up losing us money long-term. In the beginning, certain clients may come across as productive work, but in the end they cost more money that we are profiting from them. This is a perfect time to reexamine your clients and business and clean it up for the next year. Recognizing which clients take up more resources (time, energy, money) is key to ensuring your business is reaching maximum effectiveness, and at the end of the day, allowing you to reach your goals.
Once you recognize which clients are stretching your resources, don’t overcomplicate letting go of certain accounts. Simply look at it in terms of that you must write emails and speak to clients who deserve your immediate attention, and unfortunately, you have to leave the ones who are no longer serving you and your business.
This type of business detox is great. Internal detoxing is going to allow your business plan to be met effectively, without all the extra buffer and extraneous work. However, there is an even more important detox that needs to be done, and that is a personal detox. Before work and after work, we reach for our phones and fill our minds with propaganda and an overload of information from email notifications, LinkedIn, Gmail, social media, writing emails, yahoo, waiting for responses, scam calls, and all types of information that distracts our minds. It becomes so easy to lose sight of our priorities through the media and all sorts of third-party plugins that distract us from getting to the core of our businesses.
Being able to do a detox of all unrelated information that is not applicable to your business will allow you to center your attention to the original message and receive fewer emails and notifications from outside irrelevant propaganda and advertising. This detox will open up more time to listen to your customers, listen to employees, and focus on what really matters. Perry Marshall says that in order to speed up our business and improve the quality of our work, it is necessary to slow it down first.
What’s the Best Way to Start a Detox and Declutter?
When you wake up in the morning, the best response is no response. Don’t go into any social media apps, avoid your inbox if you get a lot of emails, and sit down and take time for yourself. Consider setting aside a specific amount of time in the morning to journal your ideas onto paper, think about your goals for the day, and allow yourself time to reflect on what’s going on. Social media can so easily create an information overload, that we get lost in what our priorities are. Even taking time to unsubscribe from the apps that are taking up time and overcomplicating things can help free your mind significantly. Instead of spending time on sites like Facebook in the morning, read a podcast or a blog that will provide insightful information.
This will allow you to get yourself internally sorted out before you respond to anybody in the outside world. Try to create a habit out of this, and push yourself to avoid jumping into the chaos. Even if you feel the urge to email clients and open up your inbox, consider pushing back your response time a few hours to do tasks that will get you to your peak. If this seems too hard at first, simply avoiding emails without an urgent subject line can help reduce the amount of emails you respond to right away. To help you avoid seeing unnecessary emails consider checking out unroll.me to clear out the emails that clutter your inbox and are nrn (no reply needed). This will help move emails to your junk so you don’t spend your time sorting through them.
The first waking hours of the day will transform into being much more productive when the first few hours of the day is spent doing the most important things. In an overall plan, responding to emails shouldn’t be the first priority at the top of your list. If you jump to the irrelevant tasks first thing in the morning it’s going to inhibit your overall productivity. Responding to old emails and writing new emails all hold their own time slot in your day. For example, responding to emails isn’t going to make you a million dollars, so focus on what will. Emails that aren’t going to make you more money, consider responding to the next day.
Dominate Your Business
Thinking about your time and money should go hand in hand. The time that you spend throughout that day should be concentrated on the tasks that are going to create the greatest outcome. Often we fail to recognize that some of the smallest tasks can lead to the greatest amounts of success. You should focus your time on the tasks that will create the largest profits, not tasks that will waste your time.
Emails are a smaller example of focussing on tasks that are of the least significance. When you apply this framework to your business in general, analyze the areas that you are also spending your time unwisely on. For example, Perry Marshall talks about how at one point he had too many projects, employees, programs, products, vendors, etc. Until he was forced to realize that he did not need a certain vendor or person, he wasn’t reaching his full potential. Sometimes it can be hard to let go of people that you took time to train, or worked on something for a while, it can hurt your ego. When your identity is tied to something that is no longer serving your business, it can present a huge learning opportunity for growth as an individual and company.
Once you can target what is no longer serving your business and cut it out, it can allow room for growth. Also, if you realize that your scalability isn’t going to grow significantly, lowering your costs and taking time to declutter your business can be incredibly powerful.
Conclusion:
I would like to thank you so very much Perry Marshall from Perry S. Marshall & Associates for coming onto today’s Podcast. If you like today’s podcast, please feel free to share it with a friend and also subscribe on your favorite podcasting app and of course, if you are looking for a Line of Credit for your business, you can call us at 862-207-4118 or visit our website at www.fscreditline.com. Perry, if anyone wants to get in touch with you how can they reach you at? You can reach Perry by getting a copy on of his book on Amazon and shop his book Detox, Declutter, Dominate.
About Financing Solutions Business Line of Credit
Financing Solutions, an A+ and 5 stars rated BBB company is a direct lender that provides lines of credit to small businesses and nonprofits who have at least $400,000 in yearly income.
Financing Solutions business line of credit costs nothing to set up, nothing until used and when used, is inexpensive. The credit line requires no collateral and no personal guarantees.
Organizations will set up the line of credit in advance so that if there is ever any cash flow issues, you will have a cash back up plan. The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it so that it is ready to be used, just in case.
If you would like to see if your organization would-be approved and for how much, please feel free to fill out the no-obligation, 2-minute line of credit application here.