January 2023
In last month’s newsletter, I told you if you want to succeed, you need to get up every day and work on the top 1–3 things that will push your company forward. I still stand by that advice, but there’s one caveat: It only works if you know the right three things to work on. So, how the heck do you figure that out? The Goal-Setting Method Every CEO Should Try Unlock 5 Years of Business Success — Starting Today
5 Steps to a Killer 5-Year Business Plan 1. Write down what you want your life to look like five years from now. You can accomplish almost anything in a five-year period: You can start out broke and become a millionaire or even a billionaire if you’re lucky. So, think about your wildest dreams for 2028 and brain dump all over the page. Don’t filter what you want: not for your ego, spouse, or anything else. Just imagine the most amazing life you can dream of and write down all the milestones you would have hit to get there. 2. Assess your current position. Before you make specific goals for tomorrow, next month, and next year, you have to be clear on where you stand now. If you want to be married with two kids in 2028, the trajectory to achieve that will be a lot steeper if you’re single than if you’re already married with one baby on the way. The same thing is true for your business. Be realistic about your
Today, I’m going to spill my strategy.
Why share this secret now? With the new year upon us, this is the perfect time to talk about goal setting. CEOs, business leaders, and regular people everywhere are hyping themselves up for 2023 right now. I’m doing it, too! Every December, I think to myself, “Okay, I’m going to get going, change my life, and change my fate.” Fortunately, I have a strategy to make that happen. I found it through trial and error and have used it to grow Newsletter Pro to new heights. If you want to engineer your life to achieve more than you’ve ever even dreamed of over the next five years, here are the steps you need to take.
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Determine Where You Want to Go Next
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That’s it! Every December, I camp out in front of my computer and pull up my current five-year plan (I’m in year two right now) to tally up the number of goals I hit and missed in the previous 11 months. When I find a miss, I’m brutally honest with myself about why I didn’t achieve the milestone. It’s tempting, but I don’t blame anyone else — I just ask, “What did I do to hold myself back from achieving this? What could I have done better, and what should I have done differently?” If you actually follow the five steps I laid out — if you set your broad goals, find your why, break your goals into two-week sprints and daily tasks, and push forward relentlessly all year — your five-year goals will move closer and closer. You’ll ramp up your success, and your dreams will start to come true. One More Important Note There’s nothing magical about the date Jan. 1. You’re probably reading this newsletter in December, and if you feel hyped up and ready to start these steps today, don’t wait! It doesn’t matter when you set your goals. It only matters what those goals are and how hard you work to achieve them. With enough time, effort, and focus, we can achieve anything we put our minds to. The secret is figuring out exactly what you want, knowing why you want it, and making a plan to get there. If I can do it, so can you. –Shaun
current position so you can make an accurate plan for the future. 3. Find your ‘why.’ This is another critical step before you set your goals. Look at your “ideal life” and ask yourself, “Why do I want this so badly?” This is an important question because pushing toward those goals will be crazy hard. You’ll have days when you feel unmotivated and want to give up! But you can get through them if you know exactly what’s getting you out of bed in the morning. Try to really dig deep here. Yes, your family is important to you, but does their quality of life really change if you go from $10 million in profit to $100 million? Probably not! Something else is pushing you. Maybe it’s fame, leaving a legacy, or the money itself. Be honest about what drives you, then write it down. You don’t have to show it to anybody. You just need to know so you can go back to your why when you’re stuck. 4. Organize your ‘broad strokes’ goals. Once you’ve scribbled down your five-year milestones, break them into more manageable, bite-size chunks. I call these “broad strokes” goals. Then, split up all the broad strokes goals that make up your five-year plan by year. If you want to be a millionaire in 2028, how much revenue do you need to make this year, next year, and the year after? Remember that success compounds: Don’t go crazy with your year-one goal, but make sure your target revenue gains jump significantly every year. 5. Reverse-engineer your ‘broad strokes’ goals to find daily tasks. Look at the broad strokes goals you’ve set for next year. What do you need to accomplish between today and the end of 2023 to hit those goals? Create five milestones for each goal, then break those into smaller tasks. How many two-week periods (I call these “sprints”) will it take to accomplish each milestone? Schedule those sprints throughout the year, then distill them even further into daily activities. Aim to take at least three steps toward your goals every day, seven days a week.
By Developing a Strong Business Strategy
Opportunities Opportunities are external factors in your business environment that likely contribute to your success. Since there are multiple ways to come up with opportunities, consider these questions before getting started: • What resources can we use to improve weaknesses? • Are there market gaps in our services? • What are our business goals for the year? • What do our competitors offer? Spotting and exploiting opportunities can make a massive difference to your business’s ability to compete and take the lead in your market. Threats These are the areas with the potential to cause problems and external factors you don’t have much control over. They can include anything from a global pandemic to a change in the competitive landscape. Here are a few questions to ask yourself to identify external threats: • What changes in the industry are cause for concern? • What are new market trends on the horizon? • Where are our competitors outperforming us? It’s vital to anticipate threats and take action against them so your growth continues. A SWOT analysis is only sometimes necessary but is most beneficial when you implement significant changes, launch new company initiatives, or identify opportunities for growth and improvement. It is also helpful if you need an overview of your business performance or to identify performances from different perspectives. While a SWOT analysis is similar to a competitive analysis, it differs because it evaluates both internal and external factors. If you use it carefully and collaboratively, it can deliver new insights into where your business is and help you develop the right strategy for any situation!
Have you been searching for a way to separate your business from the competition? A SWOT analysis may be just what you need! SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and they are used to develop a strategic plan for your business. This technique is widely used by small businesses, nonprofits, and large enterprises and can even be used for personal purposes! It is a powerful tool to help identify competitive opportunities for improvement for your team and business while staying ahead of market trends. Strengths Strengths are the internal, positive attributes of your business. These things are within your control and can be used in other areas that need additional support. When looking into the strengths of your organization, ask yourself the following questions: • What do we do well? Even better: What do we do best? • What makes our business stand out against the rest? • What does our target audience like about our business? • What advantages do we have over our competition? When you understand what areas are helping your business, you can see what is already working! Weaknesses Weaknesses refer to underperforming internal initiatives, such as competitors, prices of raw materials, and customer shopping trends. To create the baseline of success and failure, consider evaluating the strengths before the weaknesses! The starting point of where to improve any projects will be more obvious.
You can identify the business weaknesses by asking:
• Which initiatives are underperforming and why? • What business processes need improvement? • What resources could improve our performance? • How do we rank against our competitors?
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” –ISAIAH 43:18-19
You should examine these things to help improve your position in the competition.
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Doing the Math ‘Making Numbers Count’ Helps Us Communicate Stakes If you’re the kind of person who loves statistics, we have bad news: You’re probably boring most people around you. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way. “Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers” by Chip Heath and Karla Starr is a practical and unique book that helps those who enjoy numbers communicate better with those who don’t. Numbers are confusing, as anyone who struggled with fractions, algebra, or calculus in school can attest. And the bigger and more abstract the numbers are, the less we understand them. Humans can solve complex equations but are much less adept at genuinely comprehending what they mean. Our brains are much more comfortable counting the number of bananas in a bunch than processing the U.S. government’s annual budget worth trillions of dollars. “Making Numbers Count” explains that even when we think we understand the meaning behind numbers, we have trouble emotionally connecting with them. We know that $1 trillion is a lot of money, but it’s so far removed from our daily lives that we struggle to comprehend exactly how much. The number is effectively meaningless. Heath and Starr explain this process is called “psychological numbing.” When we become overwhelmed by information, we tend to shut down. For example, most realize that the difference between 10 and 20 babies at a daycare is significant, and we can imagine the additional time, care, and expense those 10 babies would create. Meanwhile, the difference between 700 babies and 710 doesn’t tend to phase us because we can hardly imagine caring for 700 babies at all. Still, entrepreneurship and large numbers go hand-in-hand. Business leaders generally understand math and statistics more than most, but effectively presenting that information to employees and other stakeholders requires careful thought. How can you get them to care? “Making Numbers Count” has a wealth of suggestions. The authors argue that we should think of numbers as a foreign language that most people will need to be translated. While we tend to believe that big numbers are more impactful than small ones, the opposite is often true. Properly communicating numbers to ordinary people means breaking them down into terms they understand.
The Pros and Cons of Each — and How to Get the Most out of Both Which Is a Better Strategy, SEO or PPC? For large and small businesses alike, every marketing dollar counts, and in today’s digital marketing landscape, knowing where to get the biggest “bang for your buck” has become increasingly challenging. This is especially true when it comes to traffic-driven marketing strategies like SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click).
The Secret to a More Cooperative Team?
Personality Tests
Many businesses have put a renewed focus on improving the relationships between employees. Business leaders play a huge role in this process as they hire new employees, maintain morale, and encourage cooperation. When you hire someone to your business that’s not a strong fit with your culture or current team, it can create turnover and decrease productivity. But how do you know if someone will be the right fit for your business when you’ve only talked to them a handful of times? Some companies have started to utilize personality tests during the hiring process to ensure they hire the right candidate. When you give potential staff members a personality test, you figure out who they are and what drives them. Often, it’s on a deeper level than what you’d receive by directly asking them. After you receive the results and you’re deciding who to hire, don’t choose the person who is the perfect culture fit. Find someone who will mesh well with your team while also adding a little more depth. Personality tests aren’t exclusively used to find new hires. They’re often used with current employees to improve cooperation within the business. By giving your employees personality tests, you can determine who’s compatible and partner them up. This can be especially useful when bringing on a new team member. You can compare their test results with the rest of your team and find a suitable mentor to teach and get along with them. Another great benefit of personality tests is that they give insight into what truly drives your employees, which can be significantly leveraged during employee reviews. Your employees will even learn more about themselves through these tests, allowing them to create better goals and plans to accomplish each goal. And if you’re struggling to figure out how to incentivize your employees, their personality test results will give you some ideas. Keep in mind that personality tests are not a proven science. Some people cannot judge themselves accurately, and others will lie to appear more appealing, especially if you use the tests during the hiring process. If you’re looking for a great way to understand your team and how they work, try giving them a personality test. If nothing else, you’ll provide an excellent bonding experience for your employees.
Often, many businesses choose to employ one strategy or the other, so the nagging question is this: Which is better?
Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with one definitive answer, and your chosen strategy depends greatly on your company’s goals. But, we can tell you the benefits and drawbacks of each and why you should consider using them together . Let’s get started. What are the pros of SEO? It’s cheap. The great thing about SEO is that pretty much everyone can afford to use it. Writing itself is free, and you don’t have to use SEO software to find keywords if you don’t want to. The only cost incursion here is if your business invests in an SEO software or agency to find keywords and test how your content ranks. It’s a long-term strategy. Once you post something to your website, it stays there for as long as you want it to. So, if you use SEO correctly, your content will generate traffic to your website for years. The other nice thing about SEO is that more sites will likely link to your content once you rank highly on a search page. This is called backlinking, and search engines like Google view these links favorably. What are the cons of SEO? It can take some time. For SEO to begin driving traffic to your site, it can sometimes take up to a year to see its full results. This isn’t to say you won’t see results sooner than that, but if you’re looking for quick clicks, SEO probably isn’t the best option on its own. The barrier to entry is high. Using SEO successfully takes a lot of time and skill. While anyone can throw a few keywords into an article, not many people understand the ins and outs of Google’s algorithm. This is why many businesses outsource their content to an SEO agency instead of learning how to use it themselves.
In one notable example, the authors point out that $1 billion is 1,000 times greater than $1 million. Those numbers are big and impressive, but they don’t effectively convey the difference between the two amounts. A better way to look at the matter is to consider that 1 million seconds last 12 days — while 1 billion seconds last 32 years. It’s clear which explanation will leave more people in awe. Heath and Starr provide many more examples to help you start thinking differently about the numbers you use to impact people. “Making Numbers Count” is essential reading for anyone who must report on quarterly earnings, sales increases, and other critical business metrics. After all, clear communication is always a sound investment.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” –2 CORINTHIANS 5:17
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Be Inspired
Try ZOE’s Blue Muffin Challenge! How Viral Marketing Gets the Word Out
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transit time — the time it takes for food to travel through the gut — can tell a lot about their gut microbiome!
What are the pros of PPC? The results are instant. When you pay to rank highly, your spot at the top is guaranteed immediately. This means people will see and trust your link far faster than implementing keywords over time. You can possibly see a return on investment in as little as a week. The people who click are more likely to buy. PPC only targets more commercial keywords, meaning they target people who fall at the end of a sales funnel. Because of this, the people who click on these links are far more likely to spend money on their sites because they are ready to buy. You’ll receive reliable data. By implementing a PPC campaign, the search engine hosting your ad will provide valuable data. You’ll see which ads were clicked more than others and which of your landing pages resulted in more conversions. This data will allow you to make changes to improve your business and profits. What are the cons of PPC? It’s expensive. To utilize PPC marketing, you must be prepared to pay. There’s no way to anticipate how many people will click on your link, and with highly niche markets, the clicks on PPC ads can become outrageous. Because of this, you might spend hundreds or thousands of dollars each month. You have to keep paying. Since you’ve entered into terms with the search engine, your link will disappear from the top results as soon as you stop paying. So, if you want to keep receiving clicks, you may pay those hundreds or thousands of dollars for months. Get the most out of both SEO and PPC. The best way to use these two strategies is together! By combining them, you can create the perfect marketing campaign that mitigates most of the cons you might experience from each. Start by matching your PPC ads to SEO results. So, instead of just creating a PPC ad targeted at your specific product, create an ad that targets precisely what consumers are searching for. Then, create content to target that search as well. This way, you’re covering all sides of what consumers are looking for, and when they click on your site through your PPC ad or SEO-driven content, grab their contact information through a lead magnet. You can nurture the relationship along your sales funnel until they eventually convert. While PPC and SEO each have benefits and drawbacks, both are great sources to drive traffic to your website, depending on your goals. And as we said, the best way to choose between them is not to choose at all and use them together instead. Doing so will cover your bases and push your site higher and higher on those search engine results pages.
ZOE sells diagnostic tests that give people a specific breakdown of how their bodies process food, but you can also do it at home! If you have some blue food dye and the patience to monitor your bathroom activity for a few days, you can gain insight into what’s happening inside your gut!
“Stay away from those people who
To take part in the #BluePoopChallenge, all you need to do is:
Many wouldn’t expect what happens in the privacy of the bathroom to be a hot topic. But recently, you may have seen the
• Eat two blue muffins for breakfast (note the date and time). • Look out for blue-green poop when you use the toilet (note the date and time you spot it). • Enter your time, answer a few questions on their website, JoinZoe.com/BluePoop, and discover interesting things about your gut! Not only is ZOE helping people learn more about their gut health, but this marketing tactic has helped bring awareness to their brand, too! Creating engaging content that people cannot help but share with friends sets a viral marketing campaign in motion. Try and make your campaigns as share-worthy as possible! People always gravitate to trending topics, and when brands make it a fun challenge, everyone wants to talk about it and be a part of it!
try to disparage your ambitions. Small minds will always do that, but great minds will give you a feeling that you can become great too.” –Mark Twain
#BluePoopChallenge pop up on your social media platforms! A health science company called ZOE started the viral trend as a fun and affordable way for people to measure their bowel transit time!
World-leading scientists working with the ZOE team gave thousands of people blue muffins to better understand
gut health. They discovered a person’s gut
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Improve Your Business’s Marketing Approach
With Help From Tailwind Firefox, and Safari, Tailwind will help your business stand out from the crowd on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. The most impressive feature of Tailwind is the advanced customization abilities you can utilize when scheduling social media posts. When you log in to your Tailwind account to upload a post, you simply select the platform you want to use, and Tailwind gets to work. It will automatically crop a picture to fit the dimensions of the platform you were using and will even offer hashtag suggestions while writing your caption. Tailwind will let you know which hashtags are more competitive and could bring added attention to your post. When you schedule your post, you can have Tailwind publish it automatically or send you a reminder to publish it manually. You’ll even have the option to cross-post to other platforms and write separate descriptions.
Marketing is essential to running a successful business, especially in today’s digital climate. Successful marketing campaigns often require businesses to make daily posts on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms, but this is impractical for many business owners. They’re usually too busy to make the posts themselves or cannot afford a marketing team. If you’ve found yourself in this situation, Tailwind can help redefine your business’s social media approach. Tailwind is a social media scheduling and graphic design tool designed to help businesses improve their social media presence. With apps across the web, Android, and iOS as well as extensions for Chrome,
The graphic design tool also provides excellent customization options. You can upload your own brand images, fonts, and colors to add to each post. You can upload your photos or pick from the thousands of high- quality pictures within Tailwind’s stock library. You can also choose between various filters, shapes, and other effects to make your image stand out. If that’s not enough, Tailwind even has its own link in bio tool that allows you to add personalized links to your other social media pages or websites. It’s easy to use and will help drive traffic to your other platforms and pages. If you’re interested in improving your business’ social media presence, give Tailwind a try. They’ll start you on a forever- free plan so you can see if Tailwind can benefit you and your business before you invest in some of their pay-to-use features. For more information, head to TailwindApp.com.
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Cereal Killer Magic Spoon Disrupts the Breakfast Food Market
Who doesn’t have a soft spot for their favorite childhood cereal? A simple box of Froot Loops can be enough to send you back to Saturday mornings, eating breakfast while watching cartoons. Cereal has also gained additional cachet among adults since Jerry Seinfeld first revealed himself to be an enormous fan decades ago, and cereal bars keep popping up around cities. There’s only one problem: Most cereals aren’t very good for you. Magic Spoon aims to change all of that. Until recently, consumers were forced to choose between healthy but bland grown-up cereals and the tasty bowls full of sugar we enjoyed as kids. But Magic Spoon offers high protein, low carb, and grain-free cereal while tasting much like your childhood favorites. Gabi Lewis and Greg Sewitz started Magic Spoon in 2019, but it wasn’t their first entrepreneurial venture. After graduating from Brown University in 2013, they launched Exo Protein, a company that creates protein bars using insects. While it sounds less palatable than their current offering, the two entrepreneurs sold Exo Protein in 2018, and the brand lives on today. Lewis, now CEO of Magic Spoon, told “Inc.” that the two learned important lessons through their time at Exo Protein, most notably the impact that direct-to- consumer marketing can have. While stores were unlikely to carry snacks made of crickets on their shelves, the company found its client base online. Magic Spoon has also flourished with online and social media marketing, helping the business find like-minded consumers. Magic Spoon’s marketing has relied on nostalgia to convince consumers to give their cereal a chance. With at least 13 grams of protein in every bowl and no sugar added, Magic Spoon comes
in brightly colored boxes with playful designs to evoke the same feelings traditional cereal inspires. The company also found success by reaching younger consumers through podcasts. The most crucial ingredient was finding hosts who actually liked the product — not those who were simply being paid to promote it. Rave reviews have run in “The New York Times,” “Forbes,” and “Insider,” and in 2022, the company got a big boost. Magic Spoon received $85 million in Series B fundraising from private investment firms and celebrity investors. With names like Shakira, Halsey, Nas, and Amy Schumer attached, the cereal has become more popular than ever. Crucially, the brand also found a home on the shelves at Target, the first time it has been available in-store. Though the company has stepped away from its roots as a direct-to-consumer product, it still has a lively online presence and offers eight varieties through its website, compared to three in stores. It also continues to branch out into new products. Magic Spoon is working on developing even more flavors, and a limited-run cereal bar was so popular that it became a permanent product line.
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