Ep 51: 4 Ways to Inject the Fun Back Into Your Business

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Dawn McGruer:

Welcome to episode 51 of Dawn of a New Era, the podcast where we talk about all things, marketing, motivation and mindset. And in today’s episode, we’re going to focus on putting the fun back into your business. In particular, four ways to do that. And this is something that has been on my mind all the way through the pandemic. We have been so obsessed about doing mindless activities and we’ve forgotten to focus on the most important things. So point number one is we need to start doing what we want, not what we think we need to be doing. And this is about taking out all of these mindless activities of your life and looking at how you’re actually spending your day.

Forgotten to focus on the important things

So stop thinking about the year, stop thinking about the quarter, stop even thinking about months or weeks, but bring it back down to the focus of one day, and think about what your ideal day needs to look like, how you want it to look like, what do you want to be doing that really puts you in the genius zone, energizes you, motivates you and makes your business fun, because if we carry on the way that we have been, whereby we are working to the clock, going through endless to do lists, we’re just burning ourselves out. And if you honestly look at your business and can say that you absolutely love every single day, well, that’s never going to happen. But what we can do is we can make it about 80 to 90% fun, where we’re doing things that really, really inspire us, because we need to get into the deep reasons about why we became entrepreneurs in the first place.

Why do you do your job?

So why do you do your job? Why did you start a business? Is it about freedom? Flexibility? Is it about having security? What are the reasons? And these are specific to each and every one of you. You have to understand what was the root, what was the reason and what is your purpose, because once we get clear on what our purpose is, then we start to what are the things that we want to be doing each and every day? So this brings me on to number two.

Now, you have to get a real handle on what the fundamentals are for your business, that actually pull in and make you a sustainable business. So what actually earns you money? What generates profit? So ultimately, what are the things that actually attract and convert paying clients? And let’s drill back down to the basics and start focusing on the matters in hand. A business is only a sustainable business, a profitable business, if we have the right level of people coming into it. Now, every activity that you need to be focused on, the ones that are super important are the ones that attract and convert clients. Drop everything else, delegate everything else. Start taking the things out of your day that are just fluff, the things that don’t have impact, the things that don’t empower you or your clients, the things that are just plain boring. We all have them on a to-do list.

And what you need to do is have a bit of a cleanse and de-clutter. And this means going through all of your to-do lists, all of your activities and actually thinking for a week, what is it you do each and every day? What is actually driving that business forward and scaling and growing? And this, again, is not about being a 5, 6, 7, 8 figure business. Who cares? At the end of it, you started your business because you had a passion, you had a desire, and this is all about being able to serve your clients.

Bring it back to basics

But number one, to be able to be able to serve them, you have to understand how to attract and convert them. So bring it back down to basics. Look at the core fundamentals of why the business exists. What are the pain points around the clients? What content are you creating that is actually so persuasive that it’s driving new customers into your business each and every day? So start mapping out and start understanding where you have gaps and where you have clutter and start moving those things out. It is the most cathartic process.

I’ve been doing this probably now for the past six weeks, just trying to understand across all of my businesses, where am I spending my time? Because I got to a point that I was just spending all of my time just trying to do lots and lots and lots and lots of things. And what happens there is your efforts become diluted and you don’t perform at your optimal. And we want you to be able to turn up and really kind of understand that your marketing, your mindset, your motivation all have to be in sync. They all have to be aligned so that each and every day, you’re driving towards a goal.

So when you are decluttering, you’re looking at delegating. You also need to understand what your goals are. Now, to do this, you need time. And one of the things that always, even in digital marketing when I look at the academy or the agency, time tactics and training are the three things that we really need to get to grips on. So stop, I suppose, looking at blocks of time, tactics and training, and looking at how you are going to improve those elements. Now, this brings me on to number three now, to put fun back into your business, make time.

Make time

So if you’ve gone through and you’ve basically upscaled, you’ve got the right team members, you’ve got the right strategies in place, you know that you’re doing all the right things to really harness the power of your business, then number three, you have to make time to have fun. So time-blocking is something I’m really passionate about. And I go through my calendar and I break out little sections for carefree. You need to have time that you don’t plan and do anything. There’s always times where you have to go and do personal appointments, do things, or you want to maybe just go and have a spa day, whatever it is you want to go and do, play golf or whatever. But you have to have carefree time, time that you can actually sit back, and this is quite hard for some entrepreneurs, and it was for me, and just think I have no idea what I’m going to be doing in the next two hours. So from three o’clock on a Wednesday, I don’t know what I’m going to be doing.

And that freedom and that whole space in your calendar starts to invigorate the whole reason that maybe you started your business. You didn’t want to be in a nine to five. Who says you have to work set hours? You can choose whatever for hours you want. You can put in your calendar whatever time you want. The more I squish my time together, the more productive I am. I have my three things that I have to do. So on a Monday, I always try to have the same three things on a Monday morning. Wednesday afternoons and Friday afternoons, I have time off for either carefree or to do things that I want to do. Wednesday’s normally carefree, Friday’s more functional. And then I actually block in exercise, I block in lunch, I block in breaks for going walking, all these different things. And once that time’s blocked in, you start to get in to regular schedule.

So I think on a Monday, what are the things I have to do? So Mondays, I might do podcast interviews, and then I might appear on other people’s podcasts on a Thursday afternoon. And the way that I time-block is that for each of these activities that involve other people, I either have a repeating calendar invite that just runs until we stop it, because then you don’t have to mess around setting up calls, doing all the admin around it. And the other is, if anyone needs to book with me or they want to be on my podcast, I just send them a link and they book it.

So once you have all this set up, and we use a tool called Calendly, for each activity, you just send the link, the person books it. Far better than five, six emails back and forth to that person asking them, “Are you free this time? What’s the best time?” Let them choose. Let them take care and control their schedule that aligns to yours.

Now, number four, this is the last one all about putting fun back into your business and probably the most important. You make your own choices. This is number four. You make the choice. So I have, for probably the past year, kind of worked solidly doing things. But in my mind, I know that I’ve had a purpose and reason for doing it because I’ve been decluttering. I’ve been moving all my things out so that I can start to create these freedom times, carefree times, flexibility time, so that I’m actually creating and designing my day.

Design your ideal day

So number four is about design your ideal day. Think about what does it look like in terms of your own choices? This is about forgetting everything else. What do you want to be doing in a day? What are the things you love doing? So my day. Something I started doing I think six weeks ago, I started getting up at seven, going on my treadmill and I knew I was never going to run every day. It was something that it’s a task too big. I don’t like running. I know that if I put it in my diary, I’m just not going to do it. But what do I love doing? I love walking. So I do fast-paced power walking, maybe on an incline, every day at seven o’clock. When I get up, I do 45 minutes or whatever.

Then, and this sounds a little bit exotic, but one of the things that we invested in during lockdown was a hot tub. And we broke, well, I say we, my partner broke the hot tub and it was a Lay-Z-Spa. It did us well. It’s served us amazingly during lockdown and was a great mindset asset just going into the hot tub and chilling out. But when it got broken and we realized actually it was a big part of our lives. So we invested in a grownup tub, a hard one, a massive one with lights, bells, and whistles, and all this, but we’re using every day. So that investment for me is big in terms of mindset because as soon as I’ve done my gym session in the morning, the next thing I do is I get in the hot tub. Just for like 20 minutes, 15, 20 minutes, and then I go and make time for breakfast. I have never had breakfast in my life before, apart from the past six weeks. And the difference I feel, just being able to spend that time, obviously with my partner, having breakfast, is huge.

Then I go and do my work now because I’ve now got my time blocking, I know what I’m going to be doing each day. I know when I recorded my podcast. I know when I’m appearing on podcasts. I know when I’ve got podcast guests who are appearing on my podcast. I know when I’m doing training. I know when I’m doing lives, everything is in there, and I have got lots of clear space. So this is why it’s important not to just constantly be going, “Right, okay, Friday afternoon, I’m going to do this, this and this. I’m going to go and catch up with this person. Do that, that and that.” The Wednesday carefree bit is important because you need time where you have nothing.

Create ad hoc spaces in your calendar

I also block into my calendar ad hoc moments, which are basically things I don’t know that are going to come up. So let’s say a client suddenly decides that they’re moving the project forward, and I can’t have a fully blocked calendar to be able to serve my clients well. So I have three ad hoc times on my calendar, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, because it’s normally Friday afternoon when something disastrous happens, you have to get some action in place to pick up a project, to do something, get to a deadline, wherever it’s going to be. Obviously still things go wrong. I’m not saying that we’re going to have a perfect life, but we’re going to put the fun back in. It mitigates all of this kind of stress and this constant sort of feeling like you’re in a carousel because this is what I felt.

I wanted to do something revolutionary, something that just changed everything. I was a bit bored. I was a bit stuck. I was just a bit fed up. I’ve had my businesses for many years. I’ve been doing this since I was 21. I’m 42 now. It may not sound old, but it’s a long time to be hard at it, pushing, growing, facing challenges, pitfalls, all of these things that you have to change momentum. And one of the things that I’ve started to do was creating a program, a program that was different. And how did I do this? Well, do you know what? I took completely different tact. It’s a bit similar to how I design courses and things for the academy, but it was drilling deeper down into the actual marketing motivation and mindset, the principles around being a good and successful entrepreneur. And what is that? What is success? And success is relative to everyone.

The POWERCIRCLE

So I started charting out all of the key moments, the moments that made massive changes in my business, the things that have worked really well, the things that still work really well, the things that invigorate me, things I love. And I started to do research over the past year to develop a program that was quite different, The Power Circle, that really ignites that whole passion again, because I’ve just done this journey, so I know that I have built this bridge. I know how to reinvigorate and how to put the fun back into business, but it was about deeper level satisfaction, about how to create real enrichment. So not just having fun, but having a real in enriched life experience.

And this came from my book, Dynamic Digital Marketing. I started off with the success planner, which has eight key areas of your life that you work your way through, and you set a goal each and every month. And I thought, well, there’s so many principles in this book that I talked about. And as much as it’s about digital marketing, it contains so much of my own personal tips for things like time management, focus, blocking, et cetera, that I thought, well, actually I can drill deeper. I can create a whole program about this because people don’t just want to know about marketing. People want to know what your daily routine is. What are the things that really have driven success in your life? The things that have created a balance that have created this enrichment, this true feeling of having goals.

But more than that, drilling down and having aspirational goals that feel truly achievable. And how do you do that? I didn’t want people in my program just to kind of come on a program, say six, eight weeks, and at the end of it have some change. I want monumental change. I want absolute, dynamic change that is powerful. Hence, the name Power Circle. So how do we do this? Well, we start looking at what the core routines, what do people want nowadays? What did I want as an entrepreneur? Well, it’s all about 10X-ing your wealth and success. And this is the most important thing, putting that feeling of having truly aspirational goals, pushing past the norm.

And not just thinking about, right, okay, we need to generate leads. We need to earn this. We need to do this, but what are the bigger pictures? What are the things that you don’t just want to get to a target, but what is the absolute pinnacle that you want to hit, and really pushing outside that box to kind of think, well, we could set pretty. Maybe we’re doing quite well and I’m in that same box. How do we move things forward? At the end of the day, we’ve got this life, we need to be living it. And it’s not just about hitting a goal. It’s about enjoying the experience of reaching that goal. And how can we add in different things that will make big shifts and also dramatically affect our wealth and success because wealth is two-fold. It is money, but it’s also experience. And it’s about understanding what the six core principles are.

Now, The Power Circle is a model that I’ve built. It’s something I’m super excited about. I’m sure you can tell, but it covers the bits that I feel are the gaps, the things that I didn’t always have. I didn’t just want to know the surface of, well, here’s a funnel, here’s an ad, this is what you do. I wanted to know what the whole running a business and having a solid strategy was. What were the reasons behind something? What was the deeper level behind it? And if we look at it, I wanted to reach as much influence as possible, and I wanted to have ascendance. I wanted to have real impact. And having this sort of affluence and this influence and ascendancy were basically the three outcomes that I want to achieve with this program.

I want to leave a legacy

So I do want to leave a legacy. I do want to show up in the biggest, most prominent way that I can. And I am actually an introvert. Many people think to be powerfully present, you have to be really out there. You do not. There’s so many different things that The Power Circle is about. But really for me, it’s bringing it right back down to what is success for you? What is wealth and success for you? And how can we 10X it? How can we turbocharge it? And how can we create these aspirational goals that feel truly achievable?

So if you are someone who really wants to push yourself as far as you possibly can, and you want to come on an exciting journey, then come and join the wait list. If you go to dawnmcgruer.com, you click on work with me, you will find a wait list. And this is something that it’s a game-changer. I’m very excited about it, but it’s something different because as soon as I start talking about this from August onwards, you are going to see why it’s different. You’re going to see a different way of working, a different way of putting fun back into your business. So if you’re feeling a little bit socially fatigued, you’re a bit sick of just the humdrum, the boringness of your days, and you want to shake it up and you want to challenge the status quo, then you want to come and join the list.

So I shall hopefully see you are in our group, obviously, Marketing, Motivation and Mindset on Facebook. Again, each and every week, I am with you every Thursday with a new podcast, so make sure you’ve subscribed. If you go to dawnmcgruer.com, if you’ve enjoyed any of these tips, let me know, comment on the blog, but also you can find all the previous episodes. So this is a big milestone for me. I’ve just passed 50 episodes and I rank in the top 5% of global ranking shows, which is an amazing effort and something that I’m very proud of. But I wouldn’t be here without you guys. And having listeners that have been so loyal has made a massive difference. So thank you very much, and I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I shall see you next week. And don’t forget, go and join the wait list at dawnmcgruer.com.

Thank you for listening to Dawn of a New Era Podcast. And for your free checklist, to find out how to boost your business for growth, profit and success, and join our community, go to dawnmcgruer.com.