Small Business Marketing – Apr 14 – Day 24 of 45 Days to Freedom Challenge

Started my day around 9 AM this morning and came to a very sobering realization.

Steve and Andrew were headed off to his parents house to do some repair work from the hours of 8 AM to 10 AM. Now I’m all for helping family. The big problem is today is Thursday and should be a productive workday.

The beautiful thing about having your own business is you can set your own schedule. The bane about having your own business is you can set your own schedule.

Having your own business requires a resolute discipline to certain core income producing activities which must be accomplished each day.

Our project has been lurching forward in fits and starts not really getting any results or anything done. We’ve had some productivity in terms of foundational structures like websites and some lead systems and ads but no results yet.

We did get a laydown listing for one of their neighbors and Barb has another listing appointment at 2 PM today from a lead which was referred to her by another realtor. The other realtor doesn’t work this part of town and knows Barb so sent the lead over.

To get where we’re wanting to go we cannot rely on these type of serendipitous sources. We must get better at implementing the core income producing activities each day in which we know the numbers are going to lead to the result we want.

The biggest thing about knowing your numbers is knowing what parts of the equation you have command over and doing enough activity in that part of the equation to lead you to the results you want. You know the process and what it will lead to so when you implement it the results are guaranteed.

So helping family has to be done after the core income producing activities are accomplished for the day. Or they can be done on the weekend.

The biggest thing successful companies do is tap discipline in their core income producing activities.

This morning I was able to go through the numbers after seeing Ben Kinney presentation yesterday. It really cleared a lot of things up for me.

I have a much better idea of what our numbers are. Now it’s assigning certain activities to each member of the team and monitoring those results. Tracking our daily income activities is paramount.

So I was able to plan out a sheet and we will now put it up on the white board so it’s there for all to see. This accountability is absolutely critical. You must be accountable to the results in your organization and each result one person must be accountable for ultimately.

I was also able to put together some craigslist headlines for ads in various parts of the market like bank owned properties, lakefront properties and luxury properties. We’ll do some brainstorming with the team to come up with some more of those as well.

Now it’s off to shoot some video footage for our homebuyer intro video as well as the “top 3 free homebuyer tips” video series.

Got over to the office HQ to some very dreaded news. I called Time Warner to see what the problem was with the Internet connection and it ended up that we had to get a new cable modem. The modem had timed out over 200 times in the past 48 hours.

So we had to drive a long way into town to get one and then we get it back and the modem is bad. So completely more time wasted doing that.

We didn’t get back to working on business and having Internet access until after 5 PM. One good thing I did get to do was meet with Barb to really get clear on exactly what activity she was doing and what she defines as income producing activities.

The “bold” program is starting next week which will be excellent for Barb. I got clear with both Steve and Barb exactly what activities and our numbers need to be so we can get to our goals.

We want to get five buyers signed up in the month of April which means we will have to get 250 visitors to our website and they will have to make 250 phone calls.

We achieve this level of activity and the results should be pretty guaranteed. Time will tell of course how successful our process is.

I also got to talk one-on-one with Andrew and get clear on exactly how he felt he was progressing. And also where he felt we were as a team.

He had a very honest assessment and promised to commit to a better level of income producing activity going forward. The fact that Ben Kinney said that craigslist was his number one source for both Internet visitors and leads really had a profound effect on him.

He now believes just how valuable his job really is.

We were able to shoot some footage video footage from about 6 PM to 7:30 PM. But then the sunlight and the lighting started to get bad with the angles so we had to shut it down.

Steve did download a free Teleprompter software which is going to vastly improve our videos. So we’re going to lay down the video footage we need to do tomorrow and it should be outstanding.

We are fully fueled and on the launching pad and a countdown from 10 has begun. We should be able to blast off in massive earnest out into the marketplace starting on Monday.

Follow all the progress and updates about 45 days to freedom small business marketing challenge here over on twitter.