BONUS: The Year Ahead

Transcription

Hey, Yuri Elkaim here. Welcome to this special bonus edition of the Healthpreneur Podcast. We’re literally a day or two away from New Year’s, depending on when you’re listening to this—hopefully you’re listening on December 30th itself, because I want to take you through an exercise today that will bring a lot of value to your business and your life.

Now , we’ve been running a four week master class called The Best Year Blueprints over these past couple weeks. It was a free class, and I decided to offer it for free because it’s extremely valuable. It’s a process that I’ve gone through myself and with my team over the past couple years, when we’re planning for the upcoming year.

I’ve done it this past week in both our Healthpreneur business and my health and fitness business. And what this exercise does is it just gives you super, super clear focus on … What the heck is going on? What is something you’re doing? What do you want to accomplish? And how can we get there?

Yuri’s overview

One of the biggest challenges that I’ve found as an entrepreneur is—how do you stay focused in a world of overwhelm? Where there is a thousand things you can be doing, people are pulling you in all sorts of different directions, new technology is coming out … You’re on one path and all of sudden you’re like, “Oh my god, I should be doing this other thing!”

And then you go off on a tangent and you’re like, “Hold on, maybe I should go down this way.” You go off on another tangent and then you’re so far off that initial path that you’re like, “What just happened?”

Can you relate to that? I know I can.

I tell people I’m very structured and systematized because I’m very disorganized.  Our inspiration comes from desperation, right? We often teach what we need the most help with.

Historically, I would say I’m organized but not unbelievably organized. I like to hire people who are organized. There are some people that are just super organized from birth. Those are the people I love working with, because they get it.

I’m not naturally that type of person, so I’ve been forced to really structure my life and organize my life in ways that I use processes, systems and frameworks to simplify a lot of the scatteredness in my head. And having worked with a lot of entrepreneurs, there really is a similar type of mindset that we all have, which is very creative—high, quick start, but we don’t like to follow through and finish things up.

What I want to walk you through here is a really cool exercise. I call it the One Year Plan and The Focus Four, to help you make 2018 and beyond your best year yet.

Just on a side note, came across a cool recommendation from Tim Ferris that I thought was really powerful for me, which is a supplement called My Host Defense, MyCommunity. It’s the worst possible name as a brand, as a product. My Host Defense is the brand and then the product name is called MyCommunity, I believe.

It’s a mushroom complex. If you don’t know much about mushrooms, they are very closely related to our evolutionary beginnings as an organism. There is a very close relationship between these types of mushrooms—like reishi and so forth—with our gut.

So, it came across my desk as something I may want to consider because I’ve noticed that with kids, they contract all sorts of stuff at school and sometimes when you’re pushing hard, it’s easier to get sick, especially during flu season.

I ordered some of this, I’ve been taking it the last two weeks and it’s been really helpful. For me, I know that if I’m doing live workshops or live events—I’m really going places, traveling—I need to boost my immune system with the right type of support.

Just started using this recently and it’s something I look forward to continuing to use. And we’re going to get our kids on this ASAP—they actually have the capsule forms which I’ve used and we grabbed the tincture as well which we can obviously give to our kids, since they don’t want to swallow capsules and stuff.

That’s the deal. That’s what’s going on, and that’s a nice little talk about tangents. There we go, there’s one of them.

Let’s come back onto planet Earth, and if you want what I’m about to share with you, you can actually grab the worksheets over at healthpreneurgroup.com/byb2018. You can actually purchase these worksheets I don’t give them away for free because they are proprietary technologies that we have developed but honestly they’re less than the cost of going to see Star Wars.

In addition, there’s three other lessons of worksheets that you’re going to get in addition to what I’m talking about here. You’ll get the Year in Review, you’ll get the 90 Day Sprint, you’ll also get my weekly planner. And you can get all that over at healthpreneurgroup.com/byb2018.

Today, we’re going to focus on The One Year Plan and The Focus Four. This will give you some really good momentum moving into 2018. If you don’t have the worksheets that’s cool, you can actually write this stuff out. So you may want to take out a blank sheet of paper.

And if you’re walking your dog or driving your car, what I would suggest is listen to this episode and then listen to it again when you’re sitting down, with a pen and paper handy. You actually want to go through these exercises with me.

Clarity of Vision

The first thing we’re going to do is plan out the year ahead. And in order for us to plan this out, we have to know where we’re going. Everything I do, everything I teach—whether it’s in my workshops or with our mastermind members or anything else—it always starts with clarity of vision.

The number one thing we’re going to start with here is writing down on your page, VISION. That’s it. What’s your vision? What are you working towards, and why is this so important?

Write down what your vision is. I’m going to narrow the vision to one year. We can talk about five, ten, 500 year visions—but for the sake of this exercise, I want you to answer the vision within this context.

If we were having this conversations 12 months from now, looking back over the previous year (2018), what has to happen in your business for you to feel happy with your progress? What we’re doing here is going to the end of next year and then just turning back and looking at the previous year.

What happened? What was great? How was this year just awesome? What is the vision? What are you working towards? What are the things you want to have happen? What are the things you want to do? What are the things you want to experience? Personally, as well as business.

Fill this in. As much as you can possibly get down on paper—the more the merrier. And today is Saturday so it’s a great day for this. You really don’t have any other obligations, I don’t think. Take your time. Really give this gift to yourself. Pause the recording now and really clarify what your vision is for the next year.

Okay, if you’re back with me, I’m assuming you completed that exercise and you’ve now hit the play button and we’re back. What we’re going to do next is move over to your core values. The core values are really the guiding principles of how you make decisions and how you operate your company.

Core values

Core values are something that are not created, they’re literally discovered.

Culture is not something that you can falsely create. It just happens as a byproduct of you as a leader and the people that work with you. Whatever your culture is—that’s your culture, that’s just the way it is. If you want to change it or morph it, you can do that, but your core values are really going to help shape that culture.

Core values for your business are most likely going to be the exact same as they are for you as an individual, because you are the individual who started the business! The core values are literally a reflection of you, because your business is a reflection of you.

And if you can narrow these core values down to a maximum of eight, that’s going to be best. You want to have more than one, for sure. You don’t just want one core value.

Typically, you should think about what matters to you and your business most? What’s really important? These are the things that you will be imparting to your kids. These are the types of core values you live by, that you would die by. And that you really live philosophically through.

Let me give you a couple examples.

Some of our core values with Healthpreneur—which by the way, are very similar to our health and fitness business … Why would that be? Well, because I founded both of those companies so they’re a reflection of me. What I’m sharing with you as core values of our company are pretty much the core values that I hold as an individual.

First and foremost, creating “WOW” is a core value of ours. It’s not that we hit this out of the ballpark all the time, but creating wow is something that’s a really important guiding principle for us. Whether it’s a customer service interaction, or whatever. If I notice one of our team members taking two days to respond to someone, for me that is unacceptable because that’s the complete opposite of creating wow. If creating wow is an important component for us, we have to craft everything we do through that filter.

If you were at Healthpreneur Live, which is our big annual event in September, you’ll have experienced that first hand. We had 110 attendees, and the vast majority of them said, “This was the best event I’ve ever been to.” These are people that have been to a lot of events and very high level events, very curated events.

They said this was the most unbelievable experience they had ever had, because our team looked at—“What is every single touchpoint that we can impact and create a wow experience for each person?” That’s the level of detail that we go into, especially for our live experiences.

If you want to join us at the next Healthpreneur Live events, I would strongly recommend you do so. It’s by application now. You can go over to healthpreneurgroup.com/live and learn more about our 2018 event, which is in Scottsdale, AZ in September.

Creating “WOW” is really important for us.

I’ll give another example: Profits help us prosper.

We strongly believe that being profitable is great. There’s nothing wrong with being excessively profitable. I don’t want you to feel that making money is bad, because it’s not.  Making money is the fuel of your business. If you don’t have money coming in, then you pretty much don’t have a business.

Whether you’re using that money personally, to contribute back to your team in terms of hiring more people or advancing the business or giving to charity … Whatever it is, you have to have retained earnings or profits in your business in order to do that. If you don’t you can’t move forward to impact more people.

The way I look at it, is the more we make—and more specifically, the more money we keep, hence profits—the more we can prosper.

Which basically means, we can grow as a company and our growth is predicated by the number of people that we impact. If we don’t make money, we can’t impact a lot of people. But if we make a lot of money, we can impact a lot of people.

And that’s why for us, everything filters through profit.

Whether we’re using a technology that costs us $100 per month and really investigating, asking ourselves, “Do we really need to be using this? Is this really making our lives better, easier, faster, more efficient?”

If the answer isn’t yes to all of those, then it’s gonzo. That’s $100 per month back into profit.

Now I know this seems like really nitty gritty, but it’s important—at least for us. What I’d like you to do now is identify what the core values are that matter to you and your business. I’ll give you one more example, before I let you work on this yourself.

Another one for us is, Grow or Go.

If you’re not growth oriented—if you’re not willing to grow and learn as a person—you’re not a good fit for our company. That’s just because I believe that personal growth is a mandatory prerequisite for being a great person.

Those are some of the core values that we have, and without boring you anymore about them, I will let you hit pause right now and write some things down. You might already know these. This may take you five minutes, it might take you an hour, I don’t know.

You may want to do a Google search and look for some examples from other companies, of their core values. Your core values don’t have to be a very long statement. It’s just a couple of words.

Create wow. Customer first. Whatever it is you want to do.

But the thing you have to remember is that these really have to mean something to you at a visceral level. Don’t just write stuff down and then be like, “Okay, let’s do our best to make this happen.” Your core values are the way you currently live in your business. Look and discover what you’re currently doing, what your secret sauce is and what kind of filters you run your decisions through, instead of trying to create stuff out of thin air.

Take as long as you need to come up with anywhere from three to eight core values that will serve as the decision making filters for everything you do moving forward.

Okay, awesome. I assume that you’ve finished that and if you haven’t, then hit pause again and get back it. Make sure you finish this off.

I know this tedious stuff, this hurts the brain. It’s not stuff we do on a regular basis and that’s why I’m really forcing you to do this now. Are you really going to have time to do this when you hit the ground running on Monday or Tuesday? Probably not.

Take the time now to get this done. Okay?

This is why my workshops, like our Health Business Accelerator—which we actually have one coming up at the end of February—are so focused on implementation. I don’t really care if you want to do the work or not. It’s two days, me and you. We’re going to get the work done because I know that once you leave the workshop, that stuff is not going to get done. It’s going to take a lot longer, if at all.

It’s important to just block this time off to get stuff done and implement, because we’re always busy with so much other stuff. Give this time to yourself because this is very important stuff.

Brand promise

Okay, next, we’re going to move to Brand Promise.

We’ve talked about the vision—you’ve clarified that, you’ve clarified your core values and now we’re going to really clarify what your brand promise is. Which is basically, “What’s the promise you make to your customers?”

This is something that might take a little bit of thinking because it’s not as simple as, “Well, I help people lose weight.”

It might be, but for instance—with my health and fitness business, my brand promise is essentially making healthy and fit simple and delicious again. That’s our brand promise. We clarify and we simplify all the complexity. We make it very simple for people to understand health, nutrition and fitness. Plus, we also allow them to enjoy delicious food that doesn’t take forever to make and is actually good for them.

That’s our brand promise on the health and fitness business.

For Healthpreneur, our brand promise is the training you need and the personal touch you deserve. We provide the training in terms of, “here’s exactly how to achieve this specific thing,” and the personal touch—which is very important for us. And again, coming back to that ‘high touch in a high attack world’ type of perspective, that’s what we do in our live in-person workshops.

That is not a high volume type of business, it’s a high touch type of business. That’s why we have our Luminaries Mastermind, where I work closely with some amazing entrepreneurs.

Our health and fitness business is very different. It’s high volume, lower touch. Healthpreneur is lower volume, higher touch. For us, it’s the training you need and the personal touch you deserve. That’s our brand promise.

For you, what is your promise? What is the promise you are making your customers? And this is important, because this goes on your website. It can. This should be overtly communicated to the world but it also is the underlying tone through which you do things.

So, let’s just use an example here. Let’s say  your brand promise is fast weight loss without any gimmicks. Let’s just say that is your brand promise.

You help people lose weight very fast, without the gimmicks. And we’ll just say that means no supplements, no fad diets, no stuff like that. So, everything you do—the content you produce, the products you create, all that stuff you do—should fall into that category. Here’s a fast result with no nonsense. No supplements, no gimmicks, nothing.

Not that supplements are gimmicks, but we’re just using an example here. But whatever your brand promise is, that’s what you really want to focus on.

Just as a side note here; your brand promise is very similar to your unique selling proposition or unique value proposition, if you want to think of it that way. These are all synonymous terms in a lot of cases.

Let’s use Realdose Nutrition as another example. They are a great company—really, really, big supplement company—and the CEO is a good friend of mine. Their brand promise is “Real results at the right dose.” Something like that.

They’re producing real results, they use tons of case studies and testimonials—real people’s success stories—and they offer their supplements at the right dose. They’re using the science-based real dose type of formulation. That’s their brand promise. And I apologize if I didn’t get that bang on with that one.

Anyway, I want you to hit pause and think about what your brand promise is. What is the promise you’re making your customers? Again, this is something that is an umbrella under which all of your content and all of your products will fall. Hit pause, think of what this is.

This is literally a one sentence statement, or a couple words. Do that now and then press play when you’re ready to keep on going.

Alright. You are back. You’ve got your brand promise. You’re good to go.

So, these are the overarching guiding principles—vision, core values, brand promise. One of the things that I didn’t really touch upon here—and you may want to include this under brand promise—is, who do you serve? Who’s your niche? Who’s your target market?

That is really important too. That might fall under brand promise. Brand promise might be, “We help menopausal women lose weight without the gimmicks,” or something like that.

Metrics that matter

Anyway, we’re going to move onto metrics that matter. This is the final piece of our first page.  This is all on one page. If you want the worksheet, again, you go to healtpreneurgroup.com/byb2018.

At the bottom of the page we’re going to write down three metrics. We’re going to identify the three numbers that matter most to your business and the targets for each one. Every business is different. What you deem is important in your business might be different from what someone else deems important in their business.

This might change. You might identify one metric and you might think that’s the thing … And then a couple months in you’re like, “You know what? That’s actually not a meaningful metric, so let me change that up.”

That’s totally fine. That’s the process of learning as an entrepreneur, right? We tried this, wasn’t that meaningful, we’re going to move on to something else.

Before we identify these, let’s just talk about metrics for a second. Metrics are really important—and we’ve talked about this with a couple people on the show already—because what gets measured gets managed.  And it’s very tough to improve upon something you’re not really measuring.

Creating a simple dashboard. Even using a Google sheet, which is what we do. We track these metrics on a weekly basis. On our Monday meetings as a team, we look at the scorecard, we look at where we are on these metrics. I’ll give you my metrics, or a few of mine, and maybe that will get the wheels turning for you.

First and foremost, we look at revenue—but not just revenue. We look at money deposited into the bank account, that’s one of our metrics. If revenue’s a thing, that doesn’t account for merchant fees and stuff like that. If $100,000 came in, once we take off the merchant fees, let’s call that another $2,500 – $5,000, the deposit into the bank account is $95,000.

All that matters to us is cash, because revenue is a fictitious number.  What’s in the bank is what matters most. We look at what is in the bank on a weekly basis. What was deposited into the bank the previous week?

Another metric we look at is, how many members do we have in our Luminaries Mastermind? Because we know that’s the main driver of our recurring revenue, but it’s also the way that we impact businesses most deeply.

By using that number we can predictably forecast what next month’s revenue is going to be, because we know if we have X number of people in the mastermind, they’re paying X number of dollars, it’s a recurring thing—that just gives us more predictable revenue and forecasting for the future.

So, we look at how many members are in the mastermind. Obviously, one of our intentions is to continue growing that while keeping it small and intimate and familial.

Another metric we look at—and this is kind of like a test metric, if you will—is podcast downloads. We want to look at, does the number of podcast downloads impact other markers in our business? Whether it’s the number of Health Profit Secrets books that were sold or revenue or anything else.

It’s tough to make a cause and effect relationship with a lot of this stuff because there are other moving parts to the business, but if we can start to see some cool trends that’s always good. At the very minimum, we just want to see that our podcast is growing in popularity. On a weekly basis we look at how many downloads occurred in the previous week.

And the reason we do this weekly is because if we notice a spike in downloads on any given week, we can look back at those dates and say, “Okay, what were the podcast episodes that were released in that week?”

Because if there was a certain guest that shared it or there was a certain episode that really resonated with people, that’s good to know. That’s good intel to know for us. That gives us more of a narrow focus on that stuff.

So, you want to identify three metrics. And I’m going to challenge you to just focus on three. Maybe it’s how many people are on your email list. How much traffic you get to your website. Whatever is most meaningful to you.

And then you want to identify what your targets are for the end of 2018. Let’s say revenue is your number one metric and your target is $1 million in revenue by the end of 2018—you would put down revenue as your metric, with a target of $1 million in revenue by the end of 2018. If list size is another metric for you, you would put down email list size, with a target of, let’s say, 100,000 people by 2018.

Now, do those metrics really matter? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. It’s really up to you. You could look at how many Facebook page likes you have, how many Instagram followers, how many YouTube subscribers. Stuff like that.

But what you’ll find is that after doing this on a week to week basis (because you want to keep track of these numbers in a scorecard that you’ll set up in Google sheets) is that you’re simply looking at, “Okay, do these metrics really matter for us? Does it really matter how many YouTube subscribers I have?”

I’ll tell you, it doesn’t. I have 183,000 as of this recording and I can tell you from a revenue perspective, it hasn’t made a difference from when we were at 170,000.

If, initially, subscribers on YouTube was our big metric—well, maybe that doesn’t move the needle as much as I thought it would, so we’re going to shift that metric to video views or something a little more meaningful. Because we know that if more people view the videos, they’re going to go down a specific funnel into a specific offer, and that’s going to yield specific revenue for our business.

Three metrics, identify what those targets are for the end of 2018. Pause the recording now, fill those in and we’ll keep going.

The Focus Four

Alight, you are back and I am back with you. Now we’re going to shift to The Focus Four. The Focus Four is the most challenging part of this. Not because there’s a lot of thinking to do, it’s challenging because it’s all about trimming away the fat.

The Focus Four is essentially this. You’re going to take out a new sheet of paper and you’re just going to chop it into a grid—four quadrants. At the top you can call it Focus Four.

We’re going to identify the four most important outcomes you want to achieve in the coming year. These are the projects or goals that will allow you to hit your key metrics. So, those metrics that we identified previously are the outcomes here. They are not directly controllable.

If you want to hit a million dollars in revenue, you have no control over that. You don’t actually control how much money you make. What you do control are the actions you take to get you there. You see the difference?

Think of it as scaling a mountain. If we assume the top of the mountain is the outcome—the metric—what are the projects or goals we need to make happen in order to accomplish that? What are the milestones we need to hit along the way to make that a reality? The summit of the mountain is that outcome goal, that metric you want to hit.

Let’s say you want to hit 100,000 people on your email list. Let’s just use that as one of our metrics—the top of the mountain. You’d have three different mountains if you will, three different metrics.

If we want to hit 100,000 people on our email list, what are the projects or things that we can do to help make that happen? If we think about, we’re at the base of the mountain. If we get to base camp number one, which is at 10,000 feet, it’s going to move us closer to the summit. Let’s say base camp number one is our first project—so if we make that project happen we are now closer to the summit. If we get to base camp number two, which is another project or goal, we’re going to move closer to the summit as well.

You might be saying, “Okay, Yuri, I’ve got three metrics. Does that mean I have to have four things for each metric?” No, because there’s going to be some overlap.

Here’s where it gets challenging. The challenge is identifying, if you have three major metrics, what are the four things that are collectively going to move all three of those needles? As you build the email list, the email list should spill over into increasing revenue (if revenue was another outcome metric for you).

You want to think about, what are the big things here? Maybe it’s a big product launch. Maybe it’s releasing a new book. Maybe it’s releasing a new supplement line or optimizing a Facebook ad funnel so you actually have positive ROI on that. Maybe it’s launching a YouTube channel and getting X number of views or subscribers that will lead into a specific path.

I’ve given you the whole page, you’ll see these quadrants are pretty big. I would suggest that you write down as many ideas as you possibly can. “Okay, well we could do this. We could do this. We could do this. We could do this. I want to do this. I want to do this. I want to do this.”

Just brainstorm. Get all the stuff out. You can put them in whatever quadrants you want, it doesn’t really matter.

This might take you half a day, this might take you an hour, this might take you a whole day, I don’t know. Once you’ve identified all the things that you could do, the challenge now is to focus.

You are only going to focus on four of them.

I’ll give you an example from my health and fitness business. We’re focused on primarily two things. One is to continue focusing on optimizing our YouTube channel and going after keyword phrases that can be big wins for us—because we know when people watch our videos, they’re going to go to a specific landing page and opt-in; and after that we’re going to make them a specific offer.

We know that if we get more views on certain videos, that leads to nice revenue for us. Not only that, but each of those first sale offers are tied in with our continuity or membership programs.

So, because we’ve got great congruence between the video and the offer, we know that if more people watch the videos, more people will click on the link, they’re go to the landing page, they’ll opt in. More people will buy.

If we know we’re going to get more views on those videos, we can predictably forecast more recurring revenue. So, one of our big goals is to just continue going after great keyword content topics for YouTube because we know that all of our funnels are now ready to go and they’re just waiting for more traffic to come to them. That’s one of our Focus Four for 2018.

Another goal is to focus on our green. We’ve got an amazing green supplement called Energy Greens. We are hellbent on making that a big, big win for our business because for years—we’ve actually had it for about four or five years now—it’s always been a backend profit maximizer for us. It’s never really been a front-facing product that we’ve run cold traffic to, or really opened up to joint venture partners.

That’s going to change this year. We’re really going to open this up and make it a big thing for us. I don’t need to share specific numbers, but those are the two big things we’re focusing on as a company.

Last year, our big focus was turning our blog into a well-oiled machine. We created this amazing asset of awesome content on a regular basis and now—full disclosure—we haven’t actually produced a new piece of content on our blog for five months. And our traffic has increased two and a half times, just based on what we’re doing SEO wise.

The cool thing is that we know that that traffic converts to leads and customers. Again, very much like what we’re doing with YouTube—the more traffic we get to our blog, the better. And now we’ve built that machine, it’s doing its thing and we’ve shifted our focus to YouTube, just because for us it’s a lot easier to produce YouTube content without having to have a whole editorial team to clean it up into blog content. And that’s just a little bit of a shift that we made for 2018.

So, we’re actually just focusing on two big things. It’s not even four things. And the reason I’ve created this is because there’s some really good resources out there book wise. Rockefeller Habits, Scaling Up and Traction are three of the best books you could read on this type of stuff.

The dilemma is that each of those presents planning tools that are similar to this, but very complicated for small businesses. They’ll typically recommend that you focus on three to five rocks, big projects in any given quarter.

And I’ve done that—at the height, we had a team of 14 people, and trying to do three to five big projects per quarter is very tough. It’s very, very tough.

What I recognized is, what if we just did one thing? What if we just focused on one thing per quarter? One big project that we’re working on and everyone was focused on the same thing.

Now, obviously there’s different people in different departments doing different things. But if all roads lead back to those Focus Four projects, you’re going to have a lot more power. It’s like taking the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass and focusing on that one little ant who’s about to get fried. … I don’t know why kids do that. It’s crazy.

But the power of that is much more focused and you can see the energy and power that comes out of that focused sunbeam, as opposed to if we just scattered the sun’s rays all over the place. It’s the same thing in businesses.

Write down all the things you can be working on, the big goals you have for this year, the projects you want to see come to fruition … And then, choose four of them. 

Choose. Four. Of. Them.

I know it’s going to be tough. It’s almost like, “Which kid do I save? I’ve got a family of 12 and I’ve got to let a couple of them drown, which ones do I save?”

Okay, maybe it’s not that devastating, let’s be honest. But it’s kind of like that. You want to do all these things, but you have to focus on just a few.

We always overestimate what we can do in one year and greatly underestimate what we can do in ten.

Yes, there’s always going to be time to do stuff in the future. Yes, stuff changes very rapidly and maybe that becomes obsolete next year. But if you could only do four things that are going to make the biggest difference in your business this year, what are they going to be? Identify those and they become the focus four.

I’m going to say something on this before we finish off. If you have four projects or four big goals—let’s say a product launch, a live workshop, etc.—each one of those doesn’t have to be one quarter. Because sometimes there’s overlap.

One of our Focus Four projects is Healthpreneur Live 2018, which is in September—that’s Q3. I can’t just start working on that in Q3, though. It takes a lot of buildup in terms of the marketing, the planning.

We start that right away—we’ve already started it. But we know that’s one of the major focus projects for us for this year. We just know it’s going to creep from one quarter to the next.

Other things like a specific promotion or a specific launch, that doesn’t have to take nine months. That might just be a three month endeavor in terms of the buildup to it, a one or two week launch, and then it’s done. Then, it’s obviously fulfilling on the backend for your customers and clients.

So, it really depends on the type of project you’ve decided upon, whether it’s going to be a short term one quarter deal or a longer term project. And that’s something you may want to write down beside them—is this something that’s going to trickle from one quarter to the next? Or is this going to be done by the end of a specific quarter?

You want to identify the rough time frame for those projects so that you guys know that well in advance.

There we go. I want you hit pause right now and take as much time as you need to figure out your Focus Four. Write down all the projects you want to do. Identify four of them and that’s it. Hit pause, do that and I’ll see you on the flip side.

Final thoughts from Yuri

Alright, welcome back. You should have completed all the goodies.

So, we’ve done The One Year Plan and The Focus Four. The One Year Plan, again, is the vision and purpose, the thing you’re working towards. Your core values, your brand promise.

Then we identified three metrics—these are three things that you want to achieve, outcome-wise. They’re very often numerical, but they’re not things that we can control 100%, they’re indirect.

What we can control are the Focus Four projects. Those are the four projects that we have control over, and if we accomplish these, they will move us closer to that outcome goal.

What I’m not going to go into here are the 90 day sprints, which take the Focus Four projects and break them down into, “What are we going to do in the next two weeks to move this thing forward?” Again, we’re skipping that just for the sake of time, but that is something you can go through on your own if you’d like. If you want to grab the worksheets that will walk you through all that, you get them at healthpreneurgroup.com/byb2018. Along with that you’ll also get the weekly planner.

The whole idea here is to take the year plan and break it down into Focus Four projects. Get a very clear plan on how we’re going to accomplish these projects in the next 90 days/two weeks, and then work backwards to the weekly planner.

We literally sit down and say, “Okay, what am I going to start doing tomorrow to move this thing forward?” We start at the top and work our way all the back to today. We take this ethereal, indirect outcome that we can’t really control to the next possible action. Something we can take action on today or tomorrow to move us closer to that.

There we go, I hope you’ve enjoyed this bonus session. This is something that I’ve found to be extremely valuable, and if you’ve done this properly—you’ve hit pause and done the exercises—great job.

If you haven’t, well, you should probably go through this again, hit pause and do the exercises. Because I’m telling you, this is stuff that we don’t do in the regular run of play. We need to take the time out to do this stuff. That’s why I wanted to release this on a Saturday, when you don’t really have much going on. You’re not working, typically.

Take the time to do this today, if you haven’t already. Go through it again, give yourself a couple hours to really dial this stuff in because I’m telling you, if you put the time in now, you’ll save yourself hundreds—I’m serious—of hours in 2018.

You’ll be focused instead of scattered. You’ll be clear instead of overwhelmed. You’ll get results instead of a lack of results.

Once again, thank you so much for joining me this past year. Actually, it hasn’t even been a year since we launched the podcast. It’s only been about three and half months. I want to thank you for being a subscriber.

And if you are just tuning in for the first time today, well, welcome! And be sure to subscribe to the Healthpreneur podcast on iTunes. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, remember to give it a rating and review on iTunes, because that means a lot in terms of helping more people find the podcast.

I want to take a moment to wish you the most amazing 2018, but I also want you to reflect on this past year and think about all the amazing things that you did, created, experienced over this past twelve months.

As we talked about in the business G-spot episode last week, it’s very easy to just move forward. Just like, “Okay, move forward, let’s focus on the next year.” Without really recapping all the wins from the previous year.

What worked? What didn’t? What are you happy about? What are you stoked about? Just take an inventory of the awesomeness that was 2017 and focus on all the wins. Obviously, focus on the things that didn’t work out as well as we had wanted.

But if you can move forward with that type of momentum and really move into 2018 to make it better, that’s awesome. I want to wish you the most amazing year ahead.

I will be with you three times per week, right here on this podcast. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Monday we do the solo rounds, Wednesday and Friday we’ve got amazing interviews. And we’re in this for the long haul. I’ve got a lot of amazing stuff to bring you over the coming months and years.

I’m not going anywhere, I’m in this for life. This is what I love to do.

I love helping entrepreneurs like yourself take their business to the next level, because I believe that if I can help you in your business then you can help more people and collectively we can help a lot more people.

Our mission is to help a billion people on the planet by 2040, and the only way I can do that is by helping influencers like yourself.

I want to thank you so much for doing what you do. For being who you are and for tuning into the podcast. It means a lot to me, I enjoy bringing this to you on a weekly basis.

Happy New Year and I will see you in 2018.